Canada now ‘a little bit of a laughingstock in NATO’

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This is a conversation series by Donna Kennedy-Glans, a writer and former Alberta cabinet minister, featuring newsmakers and intriguing personalities.

“Canada, you are freeloading!” That’s how businessman and former Canadian soldier Lawrence (Larry) Stevenson interprets last week’s letter from 23 U.S. Democratic and Republican senators to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The American lawmakers urged Canada to uphold its NATO commitments, and speed up efforts to increase defence spending to two per cent of GDP.

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A NATO summit is planned for July in Washington. It’s not business-as-usual for American senators to publicly deliver such a blunt message to a NATO ally and neighbour in advance of a summit; I’m more than a little curious to understand its timing and meaning.

Larry’s a military insider: he graduated top-of-his-class from Canada’s Royal Military College in 1978, served on peacekeeping tours in Cyprus before leaving the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) as a captain to get a Harvard MBA and go into business, and continues to work with military reservists.

The 67-year-old man chatting with me from downtown Toronto — a dark navy vest over his crisply ironed white shirt with meticulously rolled cuffs — is charming. But, I remind myself, he’s no pushover. As founder and former CEO of Chapters bookstores, Larry went toe-to-toe with Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman when the duo launched an unfriendly takeover bid in 2001. And in 2015, when SNC- Lavalin was embroiled in a serious bribery and ethics scandal, Larry was the guy brought in to overhaul the company’s management team and the board.

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And Larry is no pontificating armchair expert; my inquiry is deeply personal. Two of the senators who signed that letter to Trudeau are well known to him — Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, Larry’s former boss at Bain and Company, and Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a combat veteran who was seriously injured. “When two serious people like (Romney and Duckworth) write us a letter,” Larry submits, “you have to pay attention and stop worrying about the United States interfering with Canada. Where have you been for the last 100 years? Yeah, the United States interferes in Canada. If we were carrying our weight, I would push back.”

But we’re not. We’re seen as freeloaders, Larry asserts, crossing his muscular arms and leaning back in his chair. “We made a commitment back in 2006 that we’d be at two per cent (of GDP) and here we are at 1.33 per cent almost 20 years later, with no plan to get to two per cent by the end of the decade …. We basically say the Americans would never let anybody take us over, so therefore, we don’t have to invest in our own defence.

“There’s only a few things Democrats and Republicans agree on,” Larry continues. “One is that they are paying more than their fair share.” And then he explains: “If everybody really does believe that Ukraine should be helped, why are they (the Americans) having to do most of the heavy lifting? I think Ukraine was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back.

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“And then they look at China and Taiwan,” Larry speculates gravely, “and they go, ‘OK, we’ve got to send a signal. We’re not going to fight that battle on our own.’ If we’re on our own, then Taiwan is going to be part of China.”

He pauses for a moment, to let that sink in, and continues.

“Unfortunately, we have become a little bit of a laughingstock in NATO. You know there’s no mission they can give us because we either can’t get the troops there, or the troops don’t have the right equipment when they get there, or the avionics on the planes aren’t up to date so they can’t fly in formation with the other NATO members.”

And more ominously, Larry explains, there’s the growing nuclear challenge. “We now have lunatics in North Korea who have nuclear weapons. We’re probably going to have lunatics in Iran who will have nuclear weapons. And, you know, we’re going to have non-state actors who I think are going to have access to nuclear weapons. And even if it’s one nuclear weapon being directed at Calgary or Vancouver or Toronto, to say we have zero defence against some lunatic, it’s pretty sad,” he concludes. “I think we have to develop it. We can’t rely on, ‘Oh the Americans and Norad will do it.’”

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The implications of what Larry is sharing leave me momentarily speechless. Is patriotism truly dead in Canada? The inevitable outcome of a prime minister who declares our country to be a post-nation nation-state, I mutter in frustration.

Last week I was in Detroit, honouring the passing of a favourite aunt; it was a marvel observing how enthusiastically Americans prepare for Memorial Day. Larry nods in agreement: “I was on a plane ride from Philly, going to Chicago … in business class,” he shares, “and an American soldier walked onto the plane. The guy across the aisle from me stood up and said to the soldier, ‘Here, take my seat.’”

It’s such a beautiful gesture. Yet in Canada, rather than honouring our military and figuring out better ways to defend our country, we’re focused on tearing down long-standing institutions. Can we turn this conversation around? It’s not easy, Larry replies, once again crossing his arms. Yes, he’s excited about building up the capacity of reservists, offering education and training as recruiting tools. But that’s not what most military insiders are talking about, Larry reports; their dinner conversations are absorbed in figuring out ways to stop the further erosion of military institutions.

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In 2022, when former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour issued an independent report on sexual misconduct in the CAF, Larry took issue with Arbour’s assessment that “military colleges appear as institutions from a different era, with an outdated and problematic leadership model.”

And he’s weighed in on the decision by Bill Blair, Canada’s Defence Minister, to create a largely civilian Military Colleges Review Board — chaired by Dr. Kathy Hogarth, former dean of social work at Wilfrid Laurier University — to decide the fate of Canada’s two Royal Military Colleges. This makes me nervous too: Wilfrid Laurier’s my alma mater and I’ve watched with chagrin as the university wades deeper and deeper into woke territory.

We console ourselves with our history; in a crisis, Canadians do step up. “Whether it was Korea or it was the Second World War, we step up,” Larry concludes. “The difference, this time around, is you won’t have six or nine months of mobilization; the war could be over in that time. I think it was Donald Rumsfeld who said, you go to war with the weapons you have, not the weapons you wish you had.”

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