This is the best summary I could come up with:
Retired Lt. Gen. Andrew Leslie, who commanded Canada’s army until 2011, told CBC News the lack of a national rapid response force to help with wildfires, floods, evacuations and other emergencies is putting citizens’ lives at risk.
A federal emergencies ministry spokesperson told CBC News there are multiple ways Ottawa is preparing for future natural disasters, including $700 million spent on wildfire management, where the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre �— which co-ordinates mutual aid between provinces and territories — is key.
He sees several options for what authority might oversee such an agency, but the armed forces have an obvious appeal — especially if they can gain specialized training, and respond to multiple types of climate disasters quickly.
Already, experts say, the country’s military is severely underfunded, and struggling to maintain operational readiness — let alone coming close to Canada’s NATO obligation to invest two per cent of its Gross Domestic Product into its armed forces.
He said Canada’s overseas commitments — including thousands of troops in Russian neighbour Latvia, and training and supplying Ukraine — combined with multiple domestic deployments this year alone have pushed the CAF to the “breaking point.”
But, he asked, is soldiers filling sandbags during floods, felling trees to create wildfire breaks, and going door-to-door during ice storms going to actually mitigate the worst to come with climate change?
The original article contains 1,005 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
When I entered the CF, it was understood that Canada’s forces perform the vast majority of their roles without firing a rifle; that most of our work after peacekeeping is logistical support like the distribution of food and emergency supplies, searches for fugitive or lost people, marshalling and moving people to safe areas, etc. The idea that we’d be filling sandbags and chopping trees and shoveling snow was ingrained into our ideas of soldiers on down-time.
Apparently that’s changed, then?
I was arguing with a soldier that was complaining about being deployed to help during floods in the Ottawa region, they were saying that they had better things to do including training…
So yeah, I think the mentality has changed or maybe it was a right wing nut job that was there to learn to handle a rifle and that’s it…
From my point of view the army in Canada is the federal “labor force” much more than a defense force and those who insist on wanting to be grunts with rifles should be assigned to the UN peacekeepers for a bit to see how they love getting deployed on the ground in zones where shit hit the fan for real…
Yeah, that’s the deal. We were taught that ‘armed’ is just an adjective on ‘forces’, and that we were a force that happened to be armed: a force first and armed second.
Training is neat. I’d bet after a while, though, saving lives can be done more directly and effectively with a shovel and a radio than synchronized walking to a range and back home to polish a bayonet.
I’m sorry that solder represented Canada so poorly, even to ourselves. We can become better again.
I mentioned the peacekeepers and that’s something that made me proud of our army back when I was a kid, seeing them trying to help in Bosnia I felt like our army was doing something great for the world… Not so much today and sadly the peacekeepers aren’t what they used to be either…
NATO posturing means we can’t do that now
Define posturing in this context. Most of the beefs I hear about Canada and NATO are just hypocritical slams on Hair Guy from the War Room, so try to filter that junk out.
There’s this obsession in Washington that has propagated throughout the West that somehow, magically, China will decide to invade Taiwan and that the West ought to build up military support to defend against such an attack.
Nevermind that Taiwan is literally one of the most unassailable places in the world: a mountainous jungle island that would require a naval assault larger than D-Day. Nevermind that Taiwan has had almost a century to build up core defenses. Nevermind that Taiwan has mandatory military service and thus has a massive swath of citizens trained in combat. Nevermind that Taiwan is basically unassailable in a direct conflict because of the aforementioned…
Taiwanese culture is strong in China. Taiwan-China trade is massive. Tourism between the two countries is very sizable. Bloodshed would be incredibly unpopular politically because Taiwan is simply not seen as an enemy. A blockade is possible, but impractical given that the goal is still the de facto unification of Taiwan and Mainland China in economy and culture if not in government. Prior to the rise of the DPP and the close alignment of Taiwan (and thus TSMC) to the US, Taiwan and China had maintained a rather amicable relationship and it seemed that a diplomatic solution was on the horizon: with neither side acknowledging the independence of the other, independence was implicitly allowed so long as the economies and cultures remained coupled.
Today? The economic coupling of China and Taiwan is still rather strong. The cultural coupling is even stronger… But diplomatic relations have completely broken down and economic relations have deteriorated. Sanctions on imports of semiconductors have been met by bans of imports of Taiwanese products. Imports of Western weapons have been met by provocative tests of Taiwan’s response times.
Relations between the US (and thus the West) and China have deteriorated precipitously. This context provides the backdrop for the fall of globalization and the rise of multipolarity. As a result, Canada can no longer sit on the sidelines and offer humanitarian aid. Canada cannot afford to focus on a military that orients itself towards peacekeeping and humanitarian aid and engineering because the countries that Canada could help the most are increasingly becoming aligned against the West.
By our own political posturing, we are being tied into a conflict that frankly is silly to even contemplate. We are losing our core and unique military capabilities to become a simple complement to the US while bleeding our top engineers (e.g. those that designed the Bombardier C-Series) to foreign firms. If war does erupt, we have little domestic R&D capacity to exploit, but if war does not happen we lack the resources to project soft power because of how tightly coupled we are with NATO.
One aspect of this, though only one factor, is that a career in the CF is not nearly as attractive as it once was, and they’ve been having a hell of a time getting new recruits. So you don’t have nearly as many bodies to support both international commitments and domestic operations. Even if they did suddenly have an influx of new troops, I’m told there’s limited capacity for training, so it takes longer than it used to to get from the recruiting centre to BMQ to completing your trade-specific courses to do the job you signed on for.
I think having the military oversee domestic operations related to large scale emergencies is a good idea in theory - but they need the people and resources to do this while still being able to do the primary job, which is combat operations (admittedly, there’s different schools of thoughts on that, but they strike me as silly. Standing armies, while useful for other activities, are primarily there to fight).
