Shooting blanks: Why so many Canadian defence policies fail to launch

With absolutely no exceptions, every defence policy presented by the Canadian government over the past five decades has presented a vision of the world beyond our borders going to hell in a handbasket.

The wars may be different, the adversaries might change, threats might have evolved — but the language almost always stays the same.

And almost without exception, none of those defence policies ever lived up to their hype, or to the expectations and political spin that accompanied them.

The ink wasn't even dry on some defence policies before they were being dismissed by people in government as unaffordable or overtaken by world events. Others died a quiet, curious death of benign neglect.

But the differences between the security and defence snapshot presented on Monday and those that came before it could not be more stark.

There's a shooting war in Europe — allies are openly talking about being in a "prewar" period. Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic is at, or exceeding, Cold War levels. Canada's own top military commander is calling for the defence industry to be put on a "war footing." And many of the nuclear treaties that underpinned security during the standoff with the former Soviet Union have been dropped in the shredder.

When you look back at the past five decades, if ever there was a time to convince Canadians that the world is a nasty place and is likely to get worse, it's now.

Gen. Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff, acknowledged the world and Canada are "in a fundamentally different situation now" than they were when previous policy reviews were released.

For that reason, he's arguing for a sense of urgency.

"What keeps me up at night — with the state of the world and what we need to do — is something I've been calling harmful bureaucracy," Eyre said in an interview late Friday with CBC News.

"Because that will inhibit our ability to implement this policy. It will slow us down. It'll be the molasses that does not allow us to proceed apace."

The new policy does contain the expected warnings about how Russia's war in Ukraine represents a threat to the stability of the post-Second World War international order. China was called out for having an eye on the Canadian Arctic, but in language that's more attuned to the tightrope Canada has tried to walk following the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The strategy promises to manage the relationship with Beijing through "frank, open and respectful dialogue." 

The policy document also refers to how technology is reshaping conflict in both stark and subtle ways. 

But the policy is also a political document, and its unstated intention may have been to prop up the Liberal government in the face of anxious allies and an increasingly uneasy electorate.