Could Canada Be The First To Experience 'Military Bankruptcy?'

"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But Roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right." - Hilaire Belloc

Inside the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, among books bearing the names of more than 115,000 Canadians killed overseas on military service, a solemn epitaph declares:"War has not spared our people."

The words are a testament not to a bellicose nation, but to Canada's record of courage and fortitude in the face of foreign peril. Like Hilaire Belloc, the English poet and philosopher, Canadians have understood through most of our history that military power is the price of inhabiting a world with real enemies and real evil, where peace can sometimes only be purchased through the harsh rigours of realpolitik.

Lt.-Col. Lockhart Fulton, a retired Canadian army officer, knew dozens of the men whose names are inscribed in the memorial books at the Peace Tower. Fulton was one of the first Canadians ashore at Juno Beach on D-Day, leading soldiers of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles through months of bloody combat in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany during the Second World War.

He says he volunteered for battle not simply to defeat the Nazis, but to make Canada a stronger nation - powerful enough to influence world affairs and help preserve the hard-won peace.

"I thought at the end of the war, after all our sacrifices, that Canada was set to be one of the great countries in the world. But I don't think this country has lived up to that role," says Fulton today, at 87.

"After World War II, we had one of the best-equipped, best-trained, most powerful armies in the world. Today, we don't seem to have an army at all. I find it a great shame."

Fulton isn't the only Canadian distressed by the decline of Canada's Armed Forces. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the country has been awash in warnings about the fragile state of its military, its international influence and its domestic security.

"No developed nation in post-modern times has experienced military bankruptcy," declared the Conference of Defence Associations, an Ottawa-based think-tank, in 2002.

"Canada, however, is embarking on a course that would demonstrate military bankruptcy."

"Why is it," asked Royal Military College of Canada professor Sean Maloney, writing last May for the Institute for Research on Public Policy,"that Canada, a G8 power, can sustain only one or two battle groups of fewer than a thousand personnel each overseas, while other NATO nations such as France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom are able to deploy self-contained brigades, and even divisions, to stabilize critical areas?

"Why is it," he asked,"that Bangladesh and Nigeria deploy larger forces than Canada, for all of its peacekeeping rhetoric, to UN operations?"