Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

T
HE LAST THING THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS ANOTHER HUNDRED
or five hundred histories of the First World War or some locally relevant aspect of it. But 2014 is the centenary of the war’s outbreak, and that cataclysmic event is still seen as the turning point where the old world ended and the modern world began, so the avalanche of books is inevitable. And here’s another one.

It is not only a history of the First World War, although I am shamelessly using the anniversary as a peg to hang the story on (and the book does actually deal with that war at some length). It is an attempt to make sense of our country’s century of involvement in big and little wars, all of them far from home and none of them threatening what strategists like to call our “vital interests.” Not just to recount the wars, but to account for them.

Tina Viljoen and I first tried to do this in a book and a television series called
The Defence of Canada
about twenty-five years ago. We argued that the alliances and overseas commitments that Canada had made in the course of the twentieth century were unnecessary for our security and often directly contrary to our interests, even if the politics of the time had probably made them inevitable. And we extended that criticism to include Canada’s then-current alliances and overseas military commitments.

It was an interesting experience but, with the Cold War still raging at the time, challenges to the prevailing mythology about why we keep sending troops overseas were most unwelcome to the authorities. The project did not end well.

The television series got very good numbers on its first airing, but for reasons that nobody wanted to talk about it never got its scheduled second run, even though the CBC had already paid for it. The publisher was enthusiastic about the book—so much so that when it came in much longer than we had planned, he decided to publish it in two volumes rather than cut the manuscript down. But when the first volume came out there was a concerted howl of rage from the Canadian military history establishment, who condemned it down to the last man. (They were all men at that time, of course.)

The first volume sold well, but the publication of the second volume was cancelled anyway. (Some of the later chapters of the first volume are having a second life in the earlier part of this book.) We didn’t know why, but since Tina and I had already been paid, we just moved on to other things. Only many years later was some of the mystery cleared up.

Allan Bonner is a former CBC journalist turned media adviser whom I had never heard of until the chance meeting in Calgary airport. He told me that he had been approached in 1987 by a film
producer with a question. The Department of National Defence was determined to counter the strong perceptions that Dyer and Viljoen had created, so they wanted to do their own film. How could they get their own viewpoint on television?

Bonner had gone to Ottawa to meet Dent, who turned out to be the director general of information at the Department of National Defence. A team of retired admirals and generals had been assembled at E.A.C. Amy & Sons Management Support Services in Ottawa (founded by retired Brigadier General Edward “Ned” Amy). The rot had apparently spread right into Canada’s armed forces, and this group would have the task of convincing serving officers of the value of Canada’s
NATO
commitments. But, as Bonner pointed out, they could also be put to work convincing the general public.

Tina and I never realized the ideas in our film would frighten military officialdom so much, but the upper echelons’ determination to set things right does suggest that they found a ready audience in the public. The extreme official reaction also suggests how the second broadcast of the television series and the second volume of the book (the one dealing with everything after 1939, including the formation of Canada’s current alliances) might have come to be cancelled.

Now we’re well into the twenty-first century, and all that bad old history has gone away—or so most people think: the centenary of the First World War has no lessons for us, so we’ll just do a national commemoration of Our Glorious Dead and move on to more relevant things. There are two things wrong with that approach. One is that being dead isn’t glorious. The other is that the system that produced those old wars and consumed all those lives isn’t dead at all. It has been under serious pressure for a long time now and it is in retreat, but it is still capable of tumbling us all into horror. It is right to remember the dead, even if the anguish of the time has dwindled to a distant regret, but it is also necessary to remember what really killed them.

The truth is that this country, a century ago, sent hundreds of thousands of its young citizens to another continent to kill and be killed by strangers who had no designs on Canada, in a war that posed no threat to this country. The reasons that our forebears gave themselves for doing this sound hollow now, but we did it again in 1939, and the reasons for doing that still sound plausible to most of us. And it has got to be a habit: there have been Canadian troops abroad in military (that is,
not
peacekeeping) roles for all but twenty years of the past century.

Because it has actually happened, it seems normal and natural that it should have happened, but in fact
no
other country in the Americas has done this, not even the United States. Since 1945 the Americans, as the world’s greatest power, have always had troops
overseas, but before that they were much more reluctant to fight in other continents than we were. Canada was involved in both world wars from the start, a total of more than ten years; the United States was at war for only five of those years. In the First World War, the United States lost 116,000 dead; Canada lost 60,000, out of a population that was less than one-twelfth the size.

Faced with these bizarre statistics, the temptation is to lurch to one of two extreme positions. Either you can argue (and lots of people do) that this glorious sacrifice was necessary to preserve our freedom and that the disparity in numbers simply proves that our sacrifice was more glorious than that of the Americans. Or you can denounce Canada’s entire military history in modern times as a shamefully stupid blunder into which the naive Canadians were lured by cunning British and American imperialists and/or wicked capitalists. The defect in the former position is that the freedom of Canadians was never at risk, and the fault in the latter position is that it assumes that the people running Canada were as dumb as bricks.

They weren’t. They were intelligent, reasonably well-informed people who had to operate, as most politicians always do, within economic, political and legal constraints that they could bend a bit, perhaps, but could not ignore. They were far more reluctant to spend the lives of Canadian soldiers than posterity has admitted. As time passed, they also learned a great deal about the way the great-power game worked, which enabled them to be more effectively reluctant: only two-thirds as many Canadians were killed in the six years of the Second World War as in the four years of the First. And in the end, they acquired the experience and the insight to challenge the very basis of the great-power game, and to take a leading role in the attempt, still underway, to change the way the entire system works. In the course of a century we have been up and down the learning curve a couple of times—at the moment we’re a bit down—but it’s not a shameful record at all. We’re doing the best we can.

Two last things. There are a great many quotes in this book from named people, but with no further source given. In almost all cases, these are taken from one of the hundred-plus interviews that were conducted in the course of making the films and writing the book. And although Tina Viljoen’s name is not on this book for contractual reasons, a tremendous amount of the work that went into it is hers. Actually, we originally agreed to do it as an excuse to stay together.