Workshopping Canadian Civil-Military Relations

We were able to use the
patio on roof of the Richcraft
building for our lunches.
Here we have Maya Eichler,
Lynne Gouliquer, Vincent Rigby,
Michael Fejes,* and Peter Kasurak

This week, in a joint CDSN-CDAI effort, we held an edited volume workshop on Canadian Civil-Military Relations.  Our aim is to provide a better understanding of the mess that is Canadian civil-military relations.  There really has not been that much work done on the topic although there are plenty of academics studying Canadian defence.  Given that the Canadian military is the largest consumer of discretionary money in the Canadian federal budget, that it is a huge employer, that it consistently makes the news for operations at home (domestic emergencies) and abroad (mostly NATO these days), that the 2% stuff dominates discussions of Canada's foreign policy, and given, yes, that the military has largely been autonomous, perhaps the closest to the model defined by Huntington (yuck) more than 60 years ago, there should be more work in this area.  

Why not?  There is the Canadian penalty: academic work that has Canada as its primary case won't get cited that much.  One could argue that Canadian civil-military relations is not that interesting because Canada's military is at no risk of overthrowing the government and is essentially a strategy consumer when it is sent abroad, always as part of a larger effort run by someone else.  Yet, it is really interesting because of something that came up during our conversations: can we title the volume "Crisis in Canadian Civil-Military Relations" when the crisis is enduring, unending, permanent? 

Melissa Jennings, the CDSN COO,
and Charlotte Duval-Lantoine

One of the classic problems in this field of civ-mil relations is: what counts as a crisis?  Since we are talking stable democracies, it is not whether a coup is possible or imminent.  It is more about the severity of the civilians not doing their job of overseeing the military and/or the military not doing what the civilians want.  In the Canadian case, as our volume will eventually argue (it takes a while for academic publishing...), both sides of the civilian-military relationship in Canada are falling short.  

Some evidence of that:

• A former head of the military [Chief of Defence Staff or CDS] pled to obstruction of justice--and the justice he was obstructing involved a multi-decade affair with a subordinate at a time where he was supposed to be reducing sexual misconduct in the CAF.
• His replacement was suspending due to a credible accusation of sexual assault.  The military investigation (many reviews of military justice found the system to be quite flawed) did not go anywhere since the investigators claimed too many potential witnesses were to drunk at the time to testify later about it.  So, in the big, big, BIG, violation of civil-military relations, that aforementioned officer wrote a letter to all of the generals and admirals in the CAF saying he was exonerated (he wasn't) and he was coming back.  Nope, that was not his call to make. So, that letter did more to get him fired quickly than his original alleged offense.
• The Minister of Defence at this time said it was not just job to track what was going on with the CDS because that would be politicizing things.  So, yeah, the Minister had one job really and then said it was not his job.
• The Prime Minister kept around this Minister of Defense despite him having lost all credibility and despite the PM claiming to be a feminist because the minister was good at raising money for the party.  
• Oh, and that aforementioned effort to address sexual misconduct was after multiple reviews which produced many, many recommendations and precious little implementation.  The Arbour report nicely documents how little tracking there had been of the recommendations.

The volume will show that none of this is really that new.  One of my pet peeves in the conversations was the references to civilian control as "interventions" suggesting that they were episodic at best, rather than a continuous management of the armed forces.  In between "interventions" the military was left to its own devices, which often thwarted civilian intent.  So, yeah, I am comfy with the notion of permanent crisis.  

The idea of the workshop was to have a group of sharp folks present their draft chapters and then get a heap of feedback from the group.  The aim was both to improve each paper and draw connections among them.  It was a great group including both senior and junior academics, former and active military officers, former government officials from DND and other government agencies, historians and political scientists.  Our goal is to complete the volume this summer and submit it to a press so that it gets out hopefully in 2025.

 Some of the things I learned or are starting to think about:

• How much of the expertise outside of the military is still ... military? That is, how many defence historians, for instance, had significant military careers?  One of the few consistent scholars of Canadian civil-military relations, Doug Bland, served for many years inside the CAF.  His work tends to take more seriously the challenges of civilian control of the armed forces, so I wouldn't put him into the protector category. 
  
• That I had wildly overestimated the accountability that the Somalia Affair had produced.  My stance had been that Canada had far more accountability as multiple senior folks (Ministers, CDS's) did not last long during the crisis and the relevant unit was disbanded, while Abu Ghraib didn't make much of a difference to the top of the chain of command in the US. That the officer who had led been in charge of the unit that ultimately got disbanded was promoted on his last day in service to brigadier general, which meant not just a higher pension but a lot of back pay.  Quite a signal of impunity that sent.  Quite a middle finger aimed at the civilians.  I suddenly realized the "Decade of Darkness" was not really the shame that the Somalia affair brought on the CAF, but the brief effort by civilians to actually oversee the CAF. 
  
• That there is a Foreign Affairs and Defence Adviser in addition to a National Security and Intelligence Adviser. I knew about the latter but not the former.  Says a bit about my ignorance but it also says something about how there is a person in the privy council office whose job it is to coordinate defence stuff and that position has not made much of a dent in any coverage of Canadian defence stuff over the past dozen years or so.  
• That my least favorite retired general is apparently spending much time cozying up to the leader of the Conservative Party.  While I have been critical of Trudeau and his replacement of Anita Anand with a former police chief, I am guessing that a new government would be far worse for civilian control of the military. 
   

Anyhow, two days of "I love my job" as I really enjoyed learning from these folks even when or especially when they tell me I am wrong.  I love learning and that often means learning that my previous assumptions or understandings or inferences are off target.  The hard part is ahead of us: giving comments to each contributor, revising our own chapters, getting the revisions back, writing a proposal for the press, and hopefully getting this thing done.  I do think this volume will make an important contribution, as Canadian civil-military relations is, indeed, in crisis, and we need to think more about what has gone wrong for so many decades.  Whether the politicians will follow through on our recommendations is a big question and is very much a part of the problem.

 

 

* Mike completed his dissertation under my supervision, so in a few days, I get to hood him.  Hopefully, I will not mess it up, as last year, my student was far, far taller than me, and that presented a wee bit of a challenge.