This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary debates and issues in Canadian defence policy studies. The contributors examine topics including the development of Canadian defence policy and strategic culture, North American defence cooperation, gender and diversity in the Canadian military, and defence procurement and the defence industrial base. Emphasizing the process of defence policy-making, rather than just the outcomes of that process, the book focuses on how political and organizational interests impact planning, as well as the standard operating procedures that shape Canadian defence policy and practices.
The Canadian Armed Forces has not always embraced diversity and inclusion, but its future depends on it. As the country’s demographic makeup changes, its military must adapt to a new multicultural reality and diminishing pools of people from which it can recruit. Canada’s population is increasingly urbanized, immigrant, and not necessarily Christian, white, or bilingual. To attract and retain CAF personnel, the military will have to embrace and champion diversity while demonstrating that it is inclusive. Using a number of cases to highlight both challenges and opportunities, Strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces through Diversity and Inclusion provides a timely look at an established Canadian institution in a rapidly changing world. The editors explore how Canadian Muslim youth, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, racialized minorities, Indigenous communities, and people of non-Christian faiths see their experiences in the CAF. While diversity is a reality, inclusion is still a work in progress for the Canadian Armed Forces, as it is for society at large.
Defence procurement in Canada is a mess, with hundreds of millions of dollars being routinely wasted, despite which the Canadian Armed Forces is woefully underequipped and lacking crucial capacity. Charlie Foxtrot shows why past governments failed so spectacularly to efficiently equip and manage the CAF, and how to change that.
Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson's Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 was first published by the Department of National Defence in 1962 as the official history of the Canadian Army’s involvement in the First World War. Immediately after the war ended Colonel A. Fortescue Duguid made a first attempt to write an official history of the war, but the ill-fated project produced only the first of an anticipated eight volumes. Decades later, G.W.L. Nicholson - already the author of an official history of the Second World War - was commissioned to write a new official history of the First. Illustrated with numerous photographs and full-colour maps, Nicholson’s text offers an authoritative account of the war effort, while also discussing politics on the home front, including debates around conscription in 1917. With a new critical introduction by Mark Osborne Humphries that traces the development of Nicholson’s text and analyzes its legacy, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 is an essential resource for both professional historians and military history enthusiasts.
National security in the interest of preserving the well-being of a country is arguably the first and most important responsibility of any democratic government. Motivated by some of the pressing questions and concerns of citizens, Top Secret Canada is the first book to offer a comprehensive study of the Canadian intelligence community, its different parts, and how it functions as a whole. In taking up this important task, contributors aim to identify the key players, explain their mandates and functions, and assess their interactions. Top Secret Canada features essays by the country’s foremost experts on law, foreign policy, intelligence, and national security, and will become the go-to resource for those seeking to understand Canada’s intelligence community and the challenges it faces now and in the future.
"Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed the Canadian Military? is more than a history of the decline and rustout of a military that as late as 1966 boasted 3,826 aircraft (including cutting-edge Sea King helicopters) as opposed to today’s 328 aircraft-including those same Sea Kings and CF-18 fighters whose avionics are a generation out of date; the same can be said of the army and navy. Granatstein’s book is a convincing analysis of Canada’s embrace of a delusional foreign policy that equates knee jerk anti-Americanism with sovereignty and forgets that in a Hobbesian world of international relations, “power still comes primarily from the barrel of a gun” and not from Steven Lewis’s speeches about Canadian goodwill, tolerance or humanitarianism."--from amazon.com product desc.
The 1940 Ogdensburg Agreement entrenched a formal defence relationship between Canada and the United States. But was Canadian sovereignty upheld? Drawing on untapped archival material, Sovereignty and Command in Canada–US Continental Air Defence, 1940–57 documents the close and sometimes fractious relationship between the two countries. Richard Goette challenges prevailing perceptions that Canada’s defence relationship with the United States eroded Canadian sovereignty. He argues instead that a functional military transition from an air defence system based on cooperation to one based on integrated and centralized command and control under NORAD allowed Canada to retain command of its forces and thus protect Canadian sovereignty. Goette combines historical narrative with conceptual analysis of sovereignty, command and control systems, military professionalism, and civil-military relations. In the process, he provides essential insights into the Royal Canadian Air Force’s paradigm shift away from its Royal Air Force roots toward closer ties with the United States Air Force and the role of the nation’s armed forces in safeguarding its sovereignty.
Since the mid-1950s, successive Canadian governments have grappled with the issue of Canada’s participation in US ballistic missile defence programs. Until Paul Martin’s Liberal government finally said no, policy-makers responded to US initiatives with fear and uncertainty as they endlessly debated the implications - at home and abroad - of participation. However, whether this is the end of the story remains to be seen. Drawing on previously classified government documents and interviews with senior officials, James Fergusson assesses Canada’s policy deliberations and rationales for avoiding a definitive commitment in response to five major US initiatives. He reveals that a combination of factors resulted in indecision: weak leadership, wrangling between the Departments of External Affairs and National Defence, a belief that the United States would defend Canada without much Canadian participation, and a tendency to place uncertain and ill-defined notions of international security before national defence. Successive Canadian governments have failed to transform the debate over ballistic missile defence into an opportunity to define Canada’s strategic interests at home and on the world stage. Balanced and engaging, Canada and Ballistic Missile Defense offers the first full account of Canada’s uncertain response to US ballistic missile defence initiatives and an exploration of the implications of this indecision. It is essential reading for policy-makers, students, and scholars of Canadian foreign and defence policy as well as anyone who wants a fuller understanding of Canadian-American relations. Published in association with the Canadian War Museum.
This inspiring, compelling debut memoir chronicles the experiences of a female captain serving in the Canadian Armed Forces, and her journey to make space for herself in a traditionally masculine world. At eighteen years old, Kelly Thompson enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. Despite growing up in a military family—she would, in fact, be a fourth-generation soldier—she couldn't shake the feeling that she didn't belong. From the moment she arrives for basic training at a Quebec military base, a young woman more interested in writing than weaponry, she quickly realizes that her conception of what being a soldier means, forged from a desire to serve her country after the 9/11 attacks, isn't entirely accurate. A career as a female officer will involve navigating a masculinized culture and coming to grips with her burgeoning feminism. In this compulsively readable memoir, Thompson writes with wit and honesty about her own development as a woman and a soldier, unsparingly highlighting truths about her time in the military. In sharply crafted prose, she chronicles the frequent sexism and misogyny she encounters both in training and later in the workplace, and explores her own feelings of pride and loyalty to the Forces, and a family legacy of PTSD, all while searching for an artistic identity in a career that demands conformity. When she sustains a career-altering injury, Thompson fearlessly re-examines her identity as a soldier. Girls Need Not Apply is a refreshingly honest story of conviction, determination, and empowerment, and a bit of a love story, too.
What do you do when a nuclear weapon detonates nearby? During the early Cold War years of 1945-63, Civil Defence Canada and the Emergency Measures Organization planned for just such a disaster and encouraged citizens to prepare their families and their cities for nuclear war. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil defence program was widely mocked, and the public was vastly unprepared for nuclear war. Canada’s civil defence program was born in the early Cold War, when fears of conflict between the superpowers ran high. Give Me Shelter features previously unreleased documents detailing Canada’s nuclear survival plans. Andrew Burtch reveals how the organization publicly appealed to citizens to prepare for disaster themselves -- from volunteering as air-raid wardens to building fallout shelters. This tactic ultimately failed, however, due to a skeptical populace, chronic underfunding, and repeated bureaucratic fumbling. Give Me Shelter exposes the challenges of educating the public in the face of the looming threat of nuclear annihilation. Give Me Shelter explains how governments and the public prepared for the unexpected. It is essential reading for historians, policymakers, and anybody interested in Canada’s Cold War home front.
