The world is on the brink. Canada is not ready

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Perrin Beatty was Canada’s defence minister at a key moment, and later served briefly as foreign minister. He understands better than most what Canada’s lack of military readiness means, and says politicians of all stripes should shake any comfortable assumptions about the world.

“We’re living at the most dangerous time in the world, in my lifetime,” says Beatty, who notes Canadians don’t live in a “fire-proof house.”

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The Trudeau government’s great failure is not recognizing how the world changed the day Russia invaded Ukraine, says Beatty, a progressive conservative Jean Chrétien later appointed as CBC head.

“What we’re dealing with,” he asserts, “is an expansionist regime in Russia that has no regard at all for international law.”  And, he adds, “Russia doesn’t play well with its contiguous neighbours, and we happen to be one.”

Perrin was a member of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s cabinet during the Cold War, serving as minister of national defence for a couple years in the mid-80s. In that bipolar world, everyone understood the rules.

“The Soviets were armed to the teeth; they were targeting us and we didn’t have the capability,” Perrin shares, leaning into the computer screen in a virtual conversation from the screened-in porch of his home in a hot and muggy Ottawa, visibly animated by the memories. “We knew that both the Soviets and the Americans were going into the Canadian Arctic, under the Arctic ice,” he describes, “They had the capability of going there and we did not, in our own waters.”

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As defence minister, Perrin released a white paper on defence in 1987, calling for vastly increased spending, including the purchase of a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines capable of navigating the Far North. Reading the decades-old document, I was startled by an overpowering sense of deja vu. Here we are today, albeit in an arguably far more dangerous world, talking about the very same issues and undertaking, once again, to purchase submarines to be able to defend our Arctic.

“The fundamental principle (of the white paper),” Perrin explains, “was that if you contract out your defence to somebody else (the Americans), you are a protectorate … not a sovereign nation and you have to accept that protection on the terms on which it’s offered.”

Perrin mimics how Admiral Charles (Chuck) Thomas, head of Canada’s Navy at the time, bluntly advised him: “Minister, you can have as much sovereignty as you’re prepared to pay for.”

By the way, Perrin points out, Jody Thomas — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s very recently retired national security adviser— is Admiral Thomas’s daughter.

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To make the point unambiguous, Perrin elaborates. In essence, the admiral was saying: “If you want to be a freeloader, don’t think you’re a sovereign country. If you want to be truly sovereign and exercise jurisdiction over your own territory, then you have to be prepared to bear the burden for doing that.”

Mulroney’s government chose sovereignty.

Another decision Perrin took, as the political leader of Canada’s military, was to pull our forces out of operations — including the Brave Lion mission to defend northern Norway against potential Soviet attacks — when it was obvious our soldiers were not equipped to do the job. “We have a moral contract with the men and women in the Canadian Forces,” Perrin declares in a firm tone, “and we ask them to willingly give up their lives in defence of their country.”

“That’s not an abstraction. That’s real,” he continues. “That’s their end of the contract. And our end of the contract needs to be that we give them a mandate which is doable and secondly, we give them the tools to do the job.”

The Mulroney government fell — hard — in 1993, and Perrin’s white paper was crumpled by Chrétien’s Liberal government.

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Another Mulroney-era initiative, the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, fared better, and was subsequently expanded to include Mexico, in what is now the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Following politics, Perrin was tapped to assume many leadership roles that kept his finger on the pulse of Canada’s trade relationships. In 1995, Chrétien named him head of the CBC; in 1999 Perrin was appointed to lead the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters business association; and for the past 17 years, he’s been CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. At the end of August, Perrin is passing that baton to new leadership — Candace Laing, an executive with Nutrien Ltd.

But you would be wrong to assume he’s retiring; as we speak, Perrin is collaborating with Carleton University’s Fen Hampson to assemble a cross-country team of senior former officials, business people and academics (Perrin’s “Team Canada”) to look at what we can do as a country to strengthen our bilateral relationship with the U.S. and prepare for the looming renewal of USMCA by July 1, 2026. 

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“So essentially, we have less than a year to strengthen our relationship with the United States and persuade Americans that we should not pull the threads on USMCA, that it’s in the interest in both of our countries. Otherwise, if the three countries don’t agree to simply rolling it over … (with some tweaking allowed) … we’re then into annual renegotiations of the agreement for the next 10 years and this would be extremely disadvantageous to Canada.”

With a protectionist mood growing in America, Perrin is rightly concerned Canadian trade negotiators will be hammered by their American counterparts.

“Charm offensives by Canada, similar to what we did at the time of the negotiation of USMCA,” Perrin predicts, “will not work.” And the digital services tax, “where we went ahead of all of the other countries, imposing unilaterally a digital services tax that the Americans see as being directed at them,” is already leading to calls for retaliation, Perrin says.

As for the protection of our dairy supply management system, he continues, “it’s like putting up a neon sign with an arrow for the Americans to say, ‘Put this at the top of your list.’” And, the effect, Perrin predicts, will be exactly the opposite of what the politicians were hoping to achieve. “Our politicians need to take a Hippocratic oath,” Perrin suggests, a sly smile on his face: “Do no harm, and stop pulling at the tail feathers of the American eagle.”

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“The priority for Canada is trade,” Perrin asserts, both hands now in the air to emphasize his point. “Why? Because three-quarters of our trade is done with the U.S. But for the Americans, it is a much, much smaller portion of their international trade, which has in fact shrunk since USCMA was signed.

“If you listen to what’s being said during the election, the top issue for the United States is security,” Perrin emphasizes. “It is physical security, whether you’re dealing with the Russians or the Chinese, but also the security of borders… and economic security.”

What Perrin is saying, quite emphatically: Canada cannot get to a discussion of trade with the Americans until we’ve unlocked some of these other issues. And security is at the top of America’s list.

We’re overdue to connect the dots.

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