We are in the midst of the publicity blizzard around the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, celebrated as Canada’s “coming of age” on the world stage and the 150th anniversary of Canada herself. (Add two zeros here if you are aboriginal Canadian.)
These celebrations, and the extensive attention we accord to the Great War, by no means evoke glorification of war in everyone, but that is the underlying official narrative. If Canada really came of age at Vimy, then she should not shrink from invitations to join other armed conflicts. Indeed, she should be alert for new opportunities. Canada as a warrior nation was the Harper-era message, and it remains the official narrative.
The exaggerated attention given to Vimy might well be explained by two recurring factors that appear in every involvement by Canada in someone else’s war, from 1899 to the present. They are military skill and bravery in spite of poor leadership, and longing for recognition.
There is usually some truth in every myth. On Easter Monday, 1917, Canadian-led forces fighting together for the first time captured a piece of terrain allied forces had been unable to secure. The victory did not change the strategic situation. It was, in fact, part of a larger offensive that failed badly. And it was all part of a petty European squabble that got horribly out of hand, killing 60,000 Canadians and as many as 13 million civilians.
The Canadians who took Vimy Ridge, some of whom were children, were fighting under abominable conditions in a senseless war that should have ended a year earlier after the bloodbath at the Somme. They were not fighting for freedom, justice, democracy or to end wars. By this time, most were just trying to improve the chance that they and their friends would survive.
Those chances were not improved by the fact that they were under the overall command of British General Douglas Haig, who considered that the war was not going well on any day that 5,000 of his own troops were not killed. His staff began to refer to that number as “normal wastage.” Haig then looped them back to Ypres, and over the objections of Canadian commanders, assigned them a new ridge: Passchendaele.
There, thousands did not “fall bravely in battle.” They drowned in mud. Not mud as we know it, but a foul-smelling gumbo spiced with the bloated corpses of their comrades.
Shouldn’t it be possible to remember respectfully the core truth of the Vimy myth, to honour Canadian troops, understand the national pride produced and leave it at that?
Canada did not come of age at Vimy in any meaningful sense. She has continued to fight other people’s wars at the behest of powerful patrons, ceding control of decisions about expenditure of blood and treasure and being complicit in killing civilians, torture, abuse of child soldiers. To what end? There is always another terrible enemy. If we could just help defeat them, peace would come. In truth, it is the war-makers who are naïve.
With this history, the need has never been greater for a national conversation about extricating ourselves from fealty to foreign patrons and claiming the right to make our own decisions. I might not like our decisions, but we need to be free to make them. Our current patron is a corrupt and dangerous regime.
Until we stop celebrating our non-existent international influence and have that conversation, we continue down the same path. That includes complicity in the recent killing of more than 100 civilians in Mosul. Canada might have stopped direct bombing, but our Polaris refuelling project literally fuels the bombing and resulting civilian deaths.
The conversation needs to include funding priorities. Canada’s military expenditures have been rising for 20 years. Last year, they reached $28 billion. Spending on environment and climate change, the greatest threat to our security, has remained flat at about $1 billion.
Yet the Department of National Defence will soon tell us that its 2016 review shows a need for more weapons. More bombers. More submarines. To what end? Peace? Security? Please.
The Canucks and Royals are done. Now is the time to talk.
William Geimer is a veteran of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, and a retired lawyer and law professor. His latest book is Canada: The Case for Staying Out of Other People’s Wars.
