The Mackenzie Institute

Canada's Strategic Outlook for the 21st Century: a Memo to Our Citizens

By John Thompson

Introduction

The great French president Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) is credited with the observation “La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.” It is indeed true that war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men; it is also equally true that peace is too important to leave to the politicians and diplomats. National strategy is too important to leave in the hands of either party.

Western politicians tend to be focused on their next election while their civil servants tend to be focused on the day after the next election. While strategic concerns are the province of the military these are usually pursued in vain because the uncertainties and variables imposed by both politicians and civil servants often make long-term planning an exercise in futility.

Thus, the real responsibility for strategy and its implementation rests, by default, in the hands of the citizenry. If we Canadians do not look after the long-range interests of ourselves and our nation, who will?

To be strategic-minded, a Canadian citizen must learn to think strategically and not to concentrate on one issue at the expense of the rest. In dealings with politicians and officials, the first thoughts must not always be on the present but on where we want to be in several decades. The short-sighted thinking of the 20th Century was damaging enough and our children will be paying our expenses and dealing with the consequences of much of what we did for decades to come.

The challenges lurking in front of us in this Century will be for even higher stakes than any that confronted us in the 20th. So we must be very clear-headed.

First and foremost, if Canada is to survive, we must be Canadians. Therefore, we must protect and maintain the environment, the institutions and the freedoms that define, sustain and shape us.

Second, we must be able to protect our people, our sovereignty and our integrity from all threats – foreign or domestic. We cannot take physical security for granted but we also can certainly not use physical security as our first and only response to any threat.

Third, we must be able to afford our defence and so need governments that are fiscally healthy and robust and an economy that has the same characteristics.

But most of all, we need to keep these elements in mind and test every policy and initiative against them. This, by default, is the duty of our citizens themselves… so get to work.

 

The Overview

We are already in the second decade of the 21st Century and we have no guarantees that this one will be as peaceful and ordered as the previous ones were. In fact, there is very good reason to be apprehensive which is why we need to be level-headed and clear in our outlook.

The superior economic position enjoyed by the Western World (largely being Western Europe, Japan and North America) for the last few centuries is under serious strain. A combination of hubris and typical post-modernist short-sightedness in many financial institutions and severely indebted governments has stripped off trillions of dollars in wealth, left China as the world’s major credit holder, and threatens to tumble the pillars of the financial system that we put in place after the Second World War. For many governments, the choice now is decades of careful austerity or acute economic crisis on a par with the Great Depression.

Thanks to Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and the reflexive Presbyterian prudence of many of our bankers, the danger to Canada’s finances is not quite so severe. However, our ship of economic state is not as sound as it should be and the next surge of the global financial storm may be exceptionally tempestuous. Our provinces and municipalities must get their finances under control and those bodies of opinion demanding largesse from public coffers for social policies must be dismissed as idiots.

Since the end of the Second World War the world has largely remained stable – a point of view that might surprise many people. However, that war claimed an estimated 76,820,000 lives when the World’s total population in 1940 was around 2.3 billion people. A war today that killed 3.34 percent of all humanity would result in 233,800,000 deaths, but no war begun since 1945 has claimed even 10 million lives. The world has been peaceful and the main credit must go to the military, industrial and technological supremacy of the United States. Alas, that supremacy is fast weakening and may vanish altogether. If so, the way is open once more for War to ride forth with Famine, Pestilence and Death in his train as usual.

Predictions about the future of warfare are the riskiest of all to make except that there will be wars and we have no reason whatsoever to believe we would be uninvolved no matter what our intentions or positions. Yet we are incapable of defending our landmass and population alone. Our future security will require very careful thought.

Humanity is continuing to grow in numbers and more stress is being placed on our resources. By the middle of this century (a mere 39 years from now) the median estimates from the UN and the US Census bureau see something like 9.3 billion human beings on this planet. While population growth is slowly tapering off, the UN population projections vary widely:

The planet is getting crowded, will probably get more crowded and everybody feels a pressing need for food, water, energy and living space. Canada is one of the few places where these are likely to remain abundant which will present an enormous challenge to our nation especially in trade and immigration.

Climate change has been a fashionable subject in recent years, often for questionable reasons and with many questionable assumptions. However, there are verities that must be considered and possibilities that should not be ignored. Even dismissing much of the recent brouhaha about man-induced climate change, the variations in global temperatures caused by solar mechanics are profound. The 1984-2006 Solar Cycles warmed the planet up, the current one promises to cool the planet down. Further variability comes from volcanism (which has had enormous impact in the fossil record on many occasions). Finally, just because the recent Global Warming Debate was often driven by activists with shoddy science and sundry grand plans to impose on humanity, there is no good reason to ignore all of their findings especially with respect to CO2 buildup.

Canada, being a northern temperate zone, is extremely susceptible to small changes in climate and is extremely vulnerable to large ones. The arability of marginal lands on the edge of the Boreal Forest, water supplies in Western Canada, the navigability of the High Arctic and the Great Lakes are all important issues. Beyond that, prudence alone demands close attention to many environmental concerns.

Our planet can throw other curves at us. Southern British Columbia normally experiences an exceptionally severe earthquake every couple of centuries or so – the next one is already due. Any decade now, a major volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands may trigger a tsunami in the North Atlantic that will be an order of magnitude far greater than that which occurred in the Bay of Bengal in 2006. Like an insurance company compiling risk, we should be considering what happens if the Yellowstone Caldera cooks off and buries the Prairies under a few metres of ash and pumice. Actuarially speaking, the current Interglacial period has continued for some 12,000 years – the next bout of glaciation is due any century now (unless global warming occurs and holds it in check).

In any event, prudence demands that we generate and maintain a reserve of resources for massive rescue, relief and recovery for a substantial portion of our population.

 

What Canada to Defend?

If we are to defend ourselves, then the first question must be ‘Who are we?’ This is a question that can lead down any number of rabbit holes that are often best to avoid given the sturm and angst that issues of Canadian identity have provoked before.

Also, a primer on strategy does not seem like the place to ask and propose an answer to these questions, but if not here then where?

Accordingly, the Canadian identity – as this author understands it – rests on a number of elements. These include:

We live in a vast country and few of us are far away from the wilderness. Even Torontonians are only a couple of hours drive from close encounters with moose and bear and an errant deer disrupted rush hour traffic in the heart of the financial district in 2009. One cannot imagine the same thing occurring in New York, London, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Beijing, Tokyo or other financial capitals.

The wilderness hangs over us with rocky hills, dense boreal forests, mazes of muskeg swamp, rivers and lakes. Except in occasional places – usually around mineral deposits – it cannot be settled. Between the cold and messieurs Mosquito and Black Fly, life there is not always attractive. Without getting too metaphysical, it is always there as a beautiful and dangerous emptiness we can visit and measure ourselves against.

Every year our climate tries to kill most of us. Freezing rain, blizzards, and intense cold easily carry major hazards for those who are caught off-guard, and winter doesn’t need much more than a few minutes to kill someone. Live in Canada long enough and one has probably helped to rescue somebody – or needed rescue – from such threats as being stranded in -40 weather, being immobilized outside during a night of freezing rain, being lost at night in the woods or in danger of being sunk out on a lake.

The net effects of these are real but subtle. Historically, the First Nations of Canada did not always presume a stranger out of the wilderness was an enemy; and our history is marked with fewer murderous clashes between settlers and aboriginals than mark those of America, Argentina, Australia, Brazil or Russia. The Aboriginal peoples of Canada were not conquered by cavalry or Cossacks; they were wooed (in all ways) by sales clerks and largely happy to be so treated at the time.

It is an impression that Canadians are still more likely to be open and friendly towards a stranger than many other peoples. We are also well noted for being polite. One could suspect that somewhere in this behaviour is the unconscious calculation that you never know whose help you might need if something goes wrong when confronting savage conditions.

The secondary effect of our wilderness and climate is that we remain a frontier society in many ways. This perhaps explains our egalitarian instinct as Canadians usually place a greater value on someone’s reliability and effectiveness than on their ancestry or wealth. It might also explain our tradition of adaptability and improvisation. These traditions are even more evident to anyone who studies our industrial, military or technological records.

Beyond the landscape and climate are our history and experiences. Beyond the two (or three) founding people’s myths, Canadian settlement has often been very diverse and many 19th Century visitors remarked on the thriving cosmopolitan aspects of our cities. Again, it didn’t really matter who you were but whether or not you could handle the climate and landscape and work effectively. There are episodes of racism in our past -- modest as these were by standards elsewhere -- but it was also no accident that Canada was the first entity in the British Empire to ban slavery or that the second oldest (by one year) synagogue in North America is in Montreal.

We are a Western people and thus heir to the traditions of Judeo-Christian morality, Greek rationalism and Roman practicality. This has meant that concepts such as political pluralism, individual rights, legalism and freedom of inquiry are woven into the very fibre of our society. They have shaped us and define us and must not be merely protected but must also be taken for granted as inalienable and undeniable characteristics of our society. Threats to them cannot be tolerated.

We are British in politics and in law, being among the fruits of the Age of Enlightenment and the Mother of Parliaments. Many of our Aboriginal peoples still refer to special links to the Crown (the Six Nations certainly do) and, in 1775 and 1813, the Quebecois let their muskets vote for continued affiliation with the British. Being a Parliamentary Monarchy has made Canada very different from the Republic to the South and the more casual interplay of custom, tradition and negotiation suits us better than the legalism that frames US political life.

We are a free people and have always been so under the rule of law. Although generally law-abiding, Canadians also tend to ignore nonsensical laws (as witness the failure of sin-taxes on cigarette smokers) and bitterly resent those laws which infringe on their personal freedoms (hence the loathing for the Long Gun Registry). We are also zealous about our privacy. The postmodernist tendency towards the ‘Nanny-State’ where more and more regulation enters our lives runs counter to our inclinations. It will have to be corrected sooner or later.

We also have our history and our myths which are essentially our interpretations of that history. A generation of post-modernist educators and intelligentsia (using the term lightly in this respect) have been determined to bury or soil these, but they survive and remain a part of our identity.

Outside observers have discerned a fundamental decency in Canadians even if – as a frontier society is apt to be – we are a bit foulmouthed at times. Those who travel widely may have noticed that Canadian women tend to be more self-confident then most women everywhere else, which again seems to be an indirect result of our landscape, climate and political institutions.

The Canadian identity is honed by exposure to the wilderness and even committed Canadian urbanites who have never strapped on a pair of snowshoes or grasped a canoe paddle (let alone ever gone hunting) feel reassured to know that it is still there. Careful conservation will continue to be necessary but it may also be more important than ever to ensure that young Canadians are still encouraged to go camping in all seasons. Programs that encourage both may have a strategic importance in continuing to hone and strengthen our common identity.

Note that conservation programs will also often require partnership with the United States, particularly for migratory birds, marine mammals, and in the protection of shared ecosystems.

Our legal and political history naturally shaped our present and future. In a world crowded with republics of various kinds, our parliamentary monarchic political system, the basic decency of English Common Law, and our historic ties to the British Monarchy add enormously to our distinctiveness and national character. Only the inanity of post-modernist thinking believes symbols and traditions are unimportant and attempts to dispense with these historic institutions should be firmly quelled.

 

Military Realities

Physics are physics and distance and time do not change much. Canada is still a long narrow stretch of settlement, over 6,000 km long and often less than 200 km wide, mostly lightly inhabited between a few clusters of cities. Some 90% of our 34 million inhabitants are in that band. The simple reality of Canada is that we can do nothing easily without incurring major costs in time, money and effort and that we have never been fully able to guard our own nation by ourselves.

Yet our vast territory means we have always been rich in natural resources, a fact that has been salient since the days of salt cod and beaver pelts. This fact has only become more important with every passing century. In a world that may be short of accessible oil, minerals, and arable land and freshwater, Canada will look more and more attractive to many nations.

The costs of defending lower Canada was not proportional to its importance to the French Crown, which is why Paris thought the recovery of some sugar plantations in the Caribbean was more important than getting Quebec back when the Seven Years War ended in 1763. The British had to defend Canada twice from the Americans and also found it an expensive proposition after the end of the War of 1812. Instead, they established two fleet anchorages at both ends of the settlement band, (Halifax and Victoria) and generally avoided antagonizing the United States throughout most of the 19th Century.

Notwithstanding our historic ties to the UK, the 1940 Ogdensburg Agreement between Canada and the United States has brought us into the American orbit for over 70 years. It also means that the Americans respect our sovereignty (much more than they have for many other states in the Americas). In return for strategic space and ensuring that ‘Fortress America’ has a sound-enough neighbour overhead, we have basked in a very useful defence arrangement.

We have profited from our alliance with the United States and have usually invested ‘just enough’ in our defence expenditures to keep our sovereignty credible. However, as the United States enters into a period of tight finances and grows weaker, it may expect more from its long-time ally.

In the naked, raw self-interest of strategic calculation the United States was the major threat to the Canadian Colonies from 1775 until 1815. Adventurers from the United States such as the Hunters Lodges of the 1830s, the Fenians and the Whiskey Traders were also a threat to our sovereignty into the 1870s, as were the Sioux who fled to Canada in 1876 with the US cavalry in close pursuit. Stability and order in the United States is therefore a vital Canadian interest.

Even in the current economic environment, the United States is our principal trading partner and our economies remain closely tied in many ways. Their prosperity is not necessarily dependent on our well-being, but ours is dependent on theirs. Regardless of other markets that may open up, proximity to the US will always be a vital factor. Prosperity in the US is a vital Canadian interest.

A United States that is unsettled, restless and resource-starved would be like having a hungry wolf in the room when we are more used to a friendly dog. It is far better to be engaged in America’s security as a partner than to be seen as something else.

More prosaically than issues of naked self-calculation, the US is another child of the Age of Enlightenment. It speaks the same language as most of us, is largely drawn from the same influences and same ancestral nations. It is tied to us by hundreds of treaties, Memorandums of Understanding and agreements, and is bound to us by millions of individual ties of kinship and friendship.

Since the end of the Second World War, as nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction slowly appeared and spread, it became a calculation in Ottawa that Canada’s security lay with keeping the world as stable as possible. This – not pure altruism – was the fact that under laid Pearson’s concept of peacekeeping and has kept the Armed Forces deployed abroad ever since the 1940s. For the same reasons, Canada has invested in relationships such as NATO that fostered collective security.

In the coming years, the price tag attached to maintaining defence relationships that have worked for us for many decades will increase… in fact this process has already begun with the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan and the equipment costs that went with it. The next few decades will also be fraught with uncertainty and – quite probably – continuing rapid changes to military technology. Naked self-interest, usually masked by more benign rationalizations, will force us to keep up with and stay partnered with the United States. However, the light defence bills of the 1970s to 1990s will be a thing of the past.

If the past is anything to go by, the world does not change without occasional major conflicts and it is still very much in Canada’s interests to attempt to keep these limited in size and far from our own doorstep. Accordingly, a mobile professional military backstopped by healthy capable reserves will continue to be necessary – as will the capacity for a quick and rapid expansion when some major war inevitably requires our participation.

The long dampening effect on conventional conflict imposed by the Cold War and the long military superiority of the United States have produced a number of conflict forms that involve non-state actors who use methods that fall short of formal warfare. Canadians have been prey to these so before (the Air India Bombing and the depredations of al Qaeda being cases in point). Therefore, national security also requires a robust set of policing, intelligence and judicial organizations and responses.

 

Immigration Issues

In order to protect Canada, we have to remain Canadian. As Canadians, we need Canada to remain familiar to us. This should be self-evident but when it comes to immigration issues, Canada is locked in to some self-destructive behaviours and has created an immigration industry that seems largely run for the benefit of immigration lawyers and real-estate developers. Certainly many of the immigrants themselves are having a far harder time getting beyond low-level service sector employment than was the case earlier.

Canada is built on immigration and it seems natural enough that we continue to attract newcomers from around the world. However, as the Ottawa lawyer and security commentator, David Harris, once pointed out at a Fraser Institute conference in 2006, “We need digestible people in digestible numbers.” Right now, our major urban centres are choking on new arrivals and not all of them are digestible.

While humanity’s numbers are growing, the same slow-down in fertility (and the corresponding increasing average in age) is occurring in almost all societies, last of all in the Islamic Middle East but not yet among the desperately poor of sub-Saharan Africa. Citing immigration as a way to keep our numbers up and sponsor economic growth is no longer accurate. Moreover, we seem to be introducing the same age-demographics that already exist here and many of the people who come to Canada remain a net liability to the public purse.

Without comprehensive and real plans for our resource and manufacturing industries, we are not giving immigrants the same opportunities for real careers that we once did.

Canada will be an increasingly attractive destination to many people in coming years. We have ample supplies of food, fresh water, fuel and living space. We also remain a decent, law-abiding and quiet society and can be seen as a safe destination for many people who fear persecution and violence. We could be swamped with very little effort.

Moreover, in a rapidly growing world, there are elements that see emigration from their homelands as a form of colonization. Fundamentalist Muslims see their coreligionists in Europe and the Americas this way. The Chinese – who are utterly pragmatic in their own interests – are quietly changing the ethnic balance in regions close to the traditional Chinese heartland but some elements in China also see settlement abroad as a form of neo-colonialism to be pursued for future advantage.

Immigration is a key strategic issue for the 21st century, but more than ever Canada must adopt tighter controls on our immigration and refugee systems. We cannot afford to be lax, particularly for a few votes for an incumbent political party or to the benefit of the immigration lobby and real-estate developers.

Let us set a careful ceiling on immigration targets every year and accept ‘digestible’ people in digestible numbers. Digestible in no way implies a preference for particular racial origins. By now, we should have a clear idea of who can assimilate easily enough into wider Canadian society and who cannot do so. Anybody can become Canadian regardless of such cosmetic matters as skin complexion provided that they are prepared to embrace becoming Canadian in habit and manner.

In the past, Canada has done very well by accepting refugees as immigrants – from the Empire Loyalists and the Six Nations, through to Ugandan Ismaili Muslims in the early 1970s and Iranians fleeing the 1979 Revolution. We should continue this tradition at least, perhaps reverting to the best practices of the 1950s that helped ease Europe’s Post-War refugee problems. Those, of course, were bona fide refugees not the clients of professional people smugglers.

Abuses of the refugee system must end or we will be overwhelmed and this may mean tough legislation such as we have seen in Australia and Ireland. We should also refuse to allow anyone to take advantage of us. There must be a streamlined, automatic and instant rejection of undocumented persons arriving by air (when they were documented to board the aircraft in the first place) or of those arriving on tramp ships. People smuggling will remain profitable if we accept people who placed themselves in the hands of smugglers and the only way to curtail those business practices is to make it unprofitable by automatically rejecting all their clients without appeal. The 1984 Regina vs. Singh Supreme Court Decision must be supplanted by new legislation.

Remember, the Charter was not meant to be a suicide pact. If it obstructs necessary reform to control immigration then it is clear what has to go. The Charter does not define Canada, we got along quite well for 115 years without it.

However, diversity should be our watchword – being careful not to concentrate too much on a few sources (as we have increasingly done in recent years) and also being careful to encourage new Canadians to settle outside of major urban areas.

Budget trimming at our embassies and consulates and the use of local employees to facilitate immigration to Canada have not served us well either. Foreign Affairs Canada needs to re-open a number of its old posts and immigration desks manned by Canadian citizens and this might be a more reliable way of screening applications. It will be an expense, but for us it will be cheaper in the long run.

 

Food, Fuel and Fresh Water

The world is already on the edge of a food crisis and humanity will probably see a series of gradually worsening episodes in coming years. Canada is a major exporter, yet our agricultural sector is a deeply troubled one. The last few years have seen exports fall off, tougher competition with imports in our markets and too many farms that are uncompetitive.

Special attention – but not blank check subsidies – needs to be paid to our agricultural sector. We need to find ways to invest that will make them more competitive, even if the world’s tariff barriers go back in place.

Food security is the primary element of all other forms of security, and we need to do everything we can to guarantee it.

In a strategic sense, our greatest foolishness might be the unchecked spread of suburbs over some of our best farmland. Hundreds of acres of prime Canadian farmland, orchard and pasture get plowed up for suburbs every year. In a world where the challenge of feeding larger numbers of people is becoming a paramount issue again, this is heedless, cruel and irresponsible.

Suburban sprawl is also – from a strategic perspective – an irresponsible use of land and energy. Crises and disasters occur and cities need to be rebuilt occasionally (just ask the Europeans); but cities also have to be concentrations of human capital. A sprawling suburb in the aftermath of some disaster will not recover as quickly, if at all. We may also rue the day that we pushed our nearest farmland well beyond the inner bounds of our greatest population centres.

A number of observers who specialize in agricultural issues have been pointing out that the increasing specialization of agriculture is resulting in a loss of genetic diversity. As a case in point, in 2007 over 90% of North America’s honey bees were of a single variety that had been selected for optimum efficiency. Then, thanks to the unanticipated effect of globalization, an accidently introduced African fungus wiped most of them out to the detriment of many food crops that depend on bees for pollination. Measures that encourage genetic diversity and which preserve traditional practices are a sound investment.

The fisheries have also been neglected for too long, and humanity’s over-use of fish stocks and the abuse of littoral ecosystems is courting a devastating global ecological catastrophe. We must pay very close attention to conservation and protection of our own maritime ecosystems; which will include severe repercussions for any intrusion.

We will be envied for cheap and plentiful water, but water is not easily shipped anywhere in useful quantities. The Southern United States is thirsty and plans have been drawn up before now (particularly in the 1970’s) for mass diversion of water from Canada to California. Canadians of a conservationist frame of mind would do well to give great thought to desalinating seawater as a practical and inexpensive means of providing water to other nations that need it.

Much of the world’s easily identified and retrieved sources of crude oil are already tapped, and proven reserves will be rapidly dwindling in a few decades (to the great detriment of the Middle East). There is, however, over a century and half’s worth of oil (at 2007 global consumption rates) in Canada’s tar sands and the oil shales of Western North America. Until we find the key to nuclear fusion for power production, oil is going to remain the driving force of our civilization. Kindly remember that wind power etc, are only appetizers in our hunger for energy. We have plenty of oil and the rest of the world is running out.

The usual Luddites are fiercely campaigning against the Tar Sands – with their usual and deliberate talent for exaggeration about environmental consequences. Quite simply, Canada and the United States need this oil for our energy security. We also need the income that exports will give us, not least to pay for all the other programs we will need to provide for our strategic security.

 

Maturing Regionalism

We do not like to think that Canada has regional problems of any great severity but this belies some recent aspects of our history. Since the 1960s, Quebecois nationalism has been a threat, with particular dangers coming in the 1980 Referendum and the chicanery that almost ‘won’ a second attempt at a Referendum in 1995. Ottawa’s response has been mostly carrot, some stick and the occasional booby-trapped carrot.

Ironically, our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, cogently argued in the mid-1990s, when he was outside of politics, that as Canada matured as a nation, its regional identities would take on stronger form. Quebec is not that unique to anybody who understands British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario or the Maritimes. However, what Quebec has demonstrated is just how much in the way of extra worms the loudest nestling can win for itself.

The danger of Quebec separatism is largely over, particularly as Canadian immigration policies have largely counter-trumped the ethnic cleansing encouraged by the Péquistes in the late 1970s. The Quebec nationalists might have chased much of the old Anglo Ascendency to Toronto (where it has now largely disappeared), but Francophone immigration policies have backfired as most of the new arrivals prefer living in a united Canada and the nationalists never won the allegiance of enough traditional Quebecois anyway.

The new problem is that Alberta, British Columbia and the Maritime Provinces (particularly Newfoundland) all have strengthening regional identities too and are getting more confident, particularly as they get richer. Nor are they willing to take a backseat in politics with the seeming end of the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Liberal Party Triangle’s domination of Federal Politics.

Stephen Harper argued that stronger regional identities would mean an end to the myth of a national party – longest carried by the Federal Liberals – and that government by regional coalition would be the order of the future. The reality of politics however, means playing regions off against each other (an old Canadian custom, this) but in future the stakes will be higher and the regions will be more sensitive to grievance.

Beyond this, Canada’s Aboriginal peoples are getting more assertive and angrier. The combination of economic reality in remote corners of the country, bureaucratic inflexibility in the administration of Aboriginal policy and corruption in many band councils, have combined together to produce Third World conditions inside our own nation. Stagnation, poverty, frustration and expectation can bubble together to make a brew that can easily be exploited.

Even in the 1960s, the Soviets identified North America’s aboriginal peoples as a weakness to be used in dealing with the US and Canada. The Marxist Left does the same thing and so now do the Islamists. Rumour has the Chinese seeking leverage for various projects that would cede control of Canada’s natural resources through encouragement of Aboriginal issues.

In the coming decades, Aboriginal issues will be a sore point that can and will be exploited by outside parties against the Canadian whole, as may also happen with regional issues. These are vulnerabilities that must be redressed.

 

Conclusions

The business of establishing and maintaining a strategic vision of what Canada is, where we should be going and how we get there is the business of every citizen. Strategy is not a ‘special interest’; it is everyone’s concern… particularly if they have any love of country and anybody in particular they would like to see inherit it

Canadians are defined by our physical environment, particularly by a wilderness we cannot tame, and our political and social heritage of freedom, common law and democracy in a parliamentary monarchic framework. These all need to be safeguarded, not least from those who would discard them.

In a complex and crowded world, the physical threat to our citizens and our sovereignty is likely to increase. Physical security is not just concerned with having robust armed forces, but also through our embassies and consulates, our police and courts, and emergency preparedness (particularly for major catastrophes). Food, freshwater and fuel will be in great demand in coming decades and we cannot take our supplies for granted.

One of the greatest threats to us lies with an immigration system that does not meet our needs and may swamp us with numbers. We will continue to welcome newcomers to Canada, but we must exercise far more control over who is allowed to come. We cannot take national unity for granted either.

Our defences will cost money and governments must be reminded – probably constantly – about what their real priorities must entail.

December 2011

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John Thompson is Editorial Director of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: institute@mackenzieinstitute.com