Canada needs to ditch the complacency and get serious about national security, experts say

Sometimes, when the subjects of national security and defence get raised in parts of Ottawa, you can almost see a look of pained contempt in the eyes of some politicos — as though they're looking at an old man yelling at a cloud.

The temptation to treat warnings about geopolitical barbarians as trivial, out-of-touch or part of the peculiar grievances of vested interests is strong and cuts across party lines, regardless of what you might think.

That's why the online meme popularized by the long-running American television series The Simpsons is so appropriate — and so potent.

But something unexpected happened last week when the Business Council of Canada issued an urgent call for the federal government to develop a national security strategy with economic security as one of its pillars.

For want of better expression, national security and defence went mainstream.

It left the realm of the retired generals, former government advisers, researchers and academics who have been ringing this bell for years and entered the corporate world — businesses beyond the defence manufacturing sector.

The political power of apathy

It might be tempting to think that when the people who worry about the bottom line enter the discussion, they'll be taken more seriously.

But the problem doesn't start with politicians or CEOs, said Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and former deputy minister of defence. The problem starts, he said, with a complacent electorate that doesn't take national security seriously enough to make it a political priority.

"I don't see Canadians being particularly interested in national security," said Elcock, who ran the country's spy agency for a decade in the 1990s and early 2000s before moving to the Department of National Defence during the Afghan war. "We don't have a national security culture, like there is in the United States."

The belief that "everything that happens happens somewhere else" is strong in this country, he said. "[And] nobody sits around worrying about it. And because there's nobody in the country worrying about it, the reality is politicians don't sit around worrying about it either."

Foreign policy issues have been absent from the last two federal elections. Elcock said none of the parties seem particularly strong on national security.

"You have an NDP party led by a guy who can't deal with the extremists in his own community, telling us that he cares about national security," said Elcock, referring to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh's reluctant acceptance in 2018 of the Air India inquiry's conclusion that Talwinder Singh Parmar was the mastermind behind the deadly 1985 mid-air bombing that killed hundreds of Canadians.

"You have the Conservatives, who clearly don't care about national security but see it as a political whip to beat the Liberals with at this point in time. And the [Liberal] government's not ever been particularly positive about national security issues. It does what it has to do."

An ad-hoc approach

Along with political indifference, the business council's report pointed to institutional malaise, saying that while Canada has responded to the dangers of this new geopolitical climate, its actions have been slow, modest and piecemeal.

"This approach stems largely from a mode of governance that responds to immediate and pressing issues that arise without sufficient long-term planning for dealing with strategic threat actors which think well beyond the length of an average Canadian political cycle," said the business council report.

Separately, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians has complained that the response to foreign interference in this country remains "ad hoc and case-specific" and "rarely" puts national security issues "in their broader context."

In other words, federal governments tend to treat national security as an issue to be managed politically along with other demands on government — not as a core responsibility.

There was a hint of that in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's response last spring to an open letter — signed by more than 60 former top national security officials and military commanders — which called on the government to devote more time and attention to the issue.

"It's really important for people in these industries to advocate," Trudeau said last April. "Governments are challenged with a whole bunch of priorities that we have to invest in and get the balance right on."

Later in April, while in New York for an event with the Council on Foreign Relations, the prime minister acknowledged that the lens of security needs to be expanded "with a wider understanding that economic policy is security policy is climate policy is social policy." 

In the same speech, Trudeau called for more "consequential decision-making."

Vincent Rigby, who served as Trudeau's national security and intelligence adviser, said that can only happen when governments make the tough decisions, set out clear strategies and put resources behind them.

"Operating in such a complicated and challenging world requires an integrated, strategic vision but Canada has not provided one," said Rigby. 

"Instead, we continue to be purely transactional, announcing scattered initiatives in response to specific events or public pressure with no strategic goals and no coherence."

Rudderless in a dangerous world

The Liberal government released an Indo-Pacific Strategy last fall after years of consultation and consideration. An urgent rewrite of the country's defence policy, ordered almost 18 months ago in the aftermath of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, was recently sent back to the Department of National Defence for further revision — no release date has been announced.

Rigby said Canada "desperately needs strategic direction and clarity in its national security and international policies." He noted, as the business council did, that there hasn't been a national security strategy since 2004.

Elcock, however, argued that strategy was "cobbled together" by the Liberal government of the day to appease Washington in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

While that plan contained "a number of useful things to do" it was, in his view, not the sort of deeply thought-out strategy the country needs today.

The document released almost two decades ago "was really just a bunch of things that were put together to demonstrate to them that we were paying attention and that was important to our friends to the south," Elcock said.