Secure Line Podcast Episode 10 - Playing Defence

In this wide-ranging episode of Secure Line, Stephanie Carvin and Leah West tackle the growing uncertainty in Canada’s defense posture amid escalating rhetoric from U.S. President Donald Trump.

With Jessica Davis away this week, they’re joined by defense and security expert Philippe Lagassé to unpack what it all means for Canadian sovereignty, NORAD, and our military's future.

From Justin Trudeau’s stark warning about Trump’s threat to Canadian sovereignty to the challenges facing the Canadian Armed Forces—aging equipment, recruitment struggles, and a reliance on U.S. systems—this episode dives deep. Lagassé explains how Canada’s “plug and play” model of defense has left us vulnerable and what a real path to military independence might look like (spoiler: it’s generational).

They also discuss the 2024 defense policy update, the Arctic, NATO, the F-35, and whether the political class is ready to meet this historic moment. As Canadian defense policy gets dragged from the margins to the headlines, this episode is a must-listen for anyone trying to understand what’s next.

What happens when the U.S. treats Canada like the Global South? What should the Canadian Armed Forces actually be for? And are we ready for the hard choices ahead?

This is one of the most important episodes of the season.

Listen to the episode below:

Read the transcript below:

Intro:  Steph, Leah, Jess. Is this line Secure?

Stephanie: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Secure Line. I'm Stephanie Carvin and I'm joined today with co-host Leah West.

Leah: Hi, Steph.

Stephanie: Jessica Davis will be back again to join us soon.

When we set out to begin the season of Secure Line, we knew there would be one very large elephant in the room, Donald Trump, but I don't think we could have ever imagined the extent to which he has seemed to upend Canadian politics and conversations about our defense and national security.

In early March, in one of his last speeches as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau bluntly explained to Canadians, quote, "Trump is trying to prompt a total collapse of the Canadian economy because he thinks that will make it easier to annex us." What once seemed like a bad joke meant to target and demean a rival has become a dire warning about Canada's sovereignty and security. This has prompted existential questions about Canada's future, namely its sovereignty that, frankly, I did not think would be asked in my lifetime.

There will be a lot to unpack over the next few weeks on the podcast, but right now we wanted to speak with Philippe Lagassé, Associate Professor at Carleton University. He is one of Canada's foremost experts on defense and security, and of course, the Westminster system of government.

Needless to say, it's been a pretty busy few weeks for Phil. He's recently had a series of articles on his own Substack, the Globe Mail and The Atlantic, and we are really happy to speak with him on what's next for Canadian defense and in what seems to be our new normal. Welcome, Phil.

Philippe: Thanks very much.

Stephanie: So this is a difficult thing to summarize in a few sentences, but I think we need to kind of set a baseline here. What is the current state of the Canadian Armed Forces?

Philippe: The CAF is in an In-Between period, so it's undergoing a transition in more ways than one. So when you look at the current readiness of the force, it doesn't look great.

The reason for that is threefold. First, after a generation of waiting to recapitalize the force, a lot of legacy equipment is struggling. So we can think of older fighter aircraft, older ships, older trucks, whatever it is, that are hovering around 40 to 50% serviceability. So that's, that's not great and part of that is a function of the age of the fleets. Part of that is a function of lack of technicians, , part of that is a function of parts and things like that.

As well, the CAF is struggling with recruitment and retention, so it is having difficulty getting people to stay in the CAF after they've been trained and become very specialized and very valuable when the private sector reaches out to these people.

Equally important, you have a number of people who would like to join the Canadian Armed Forces, but we have difficulty processing their applications and difficulty training them, getting them through the system. And this becomes, as defense Minister Blair said about a year ago, a death spiral because you're lacking the people to train the new people and you need to dedicate your personnel to getting new people in, which means that they're not doing other jobs that need to be done. So because the CAF is so overstretched, you're trying to get people to do three jobs, that is really, in some cases, only meant for one person right?

And finally there's the infrastructure problem which is that a lot of CAF infrastructure is quite aged. It has needed to be recapitalized and rebuilt for some time now, but because the infrastructure file has been sent back and forth from the services back to the center, to the services, it's been a neglected piece and is only starting to get the attention that it deserves.

I just want to close this off though by saying when I say transition period, it's because there is a recapitalization underway, so a lot of these serviceability issues will be addressed with a number of the new equipment that is coming online. Even the infrastructure piece is starting to get some investment and hopefully the personnel piece will be addressed in a number of ways.

First, by changing recruitment standards, by increasing pay, which seems to be what political parties are offering, as well as if the Canadian economy fundamentally tanks you may suddenly see quite a few more people want to stay in the CAF because there may not be the strength of the private sector as it is today.

Leah: You mentioned highly trained individuals. I mean, obviously there is competition across all of the national security and defense space for people with specific skills as it relates to technology. Are you familiar with how the CAF is doing and, and thinking about recruiting people with, you know, cyber defense skills, IT skills, et cetera, and competing with not just the private sector, but other elements of government that are desperate for those types of folks.

Philippe: I think that's one of the areas of challenge where the military is, is currently trying to experiment with different ways of bringing people on board and what kind of things that you put them through to do certain tasks. So we understand universality of service. We understand that everybody needs to be able to perform particular roles within the armed forces in case of war.

But this is part of a larger conversation of does everybody need to adhere to the same standards that you might expect from them physically and in terms of basic training and others, if they're not doing a position that would see them on the front lines.

Now, that's a very uncomfortable conversation for the CAF to have because it's, it's kind of core to professional militaries that you, you want everybody who is in uniform to be able to do the fundamental tasks of an armed force. But you may need to start asking: okay, are there some positions or some things that we could do that would be better suited to a civilian? Or is there ways to have particular trades or positions that are excluded from certain requirements?

But as you yourself Leah have written about, in some cases, particularly in the cyber domain, you may be creating targets and you have to start asking questions like, should, shouldn't these people be under the CAF's unlimited liability, right? If they are legitimate targets.

So there's, this is a complex question, but the, the CAF is struggling with it, not just in cyber, but in a number of different domains where it's not entirely clear whether the previous model of universality of service and unlimited liability is applicable in all cases.

Stephanie: In an article published in the Atlantic last week, you noted that Canada's defense model is effectively what you describe as a plug and play model, right? Where a country has developed its own military to compliment US missions rather than an independent defense force. I'm really interested in that idea that, you know, we're not, when you think of a military, it kind of tends to go hand in hand with sovereignty, right? But you're saying no, actually we developed in such a way that we just kind of plug into the iPod that is the American, or iPhone, I should say that is the American military and we are basically more of an accessory than we are our own independent military force.

Philippe: Right. So I think it's important for, for listeners to understand that when you have such a limited defense budget like we do which does not reach 2% of GDP, but at the same time, you want to maintain a combat capable multipurpose force, you have to start making decisions around what that combat capable multipurpose force is actually able to do. When you spend about 1.3% of GDP on defense, you can't do everything on your own while being multipurpose and combat capable.

So how do you address that problem? And the way you do that is by just taking it for granted that somebody else is taking care of some fundamental backend capability, right? So your force planning model assumes that there is a larger ally providing some of your effective logistics, communications, whatever it is, so that you can do kind of

Stephanie: Heavy aircraft lift

Philippe: Whatever it is right? I'll give an example, which is a good one. When you're trying to recruit and retain people today, one of the hard things that you need to do is make sure that these people can connect with their friends and family back home because the expectation that this current generation has is that they should be able to speak to friends and family.

That demands a lot of internet connectivity. And that therefore demands a lot of satellite connectivity for operations overseas. That's very expensive. So we plug into an American system, we buy into that system. Right, just as an example.

But even when you think about it in the overall construct of the Canadian Armed Forces, it has been predicated on the idea that within North America we do aerospace defense alongside the United States under a binational command. So the force structuring and the way forces are configured is built within that and overseas, we always, since the end of the Cold War, taking that for granted that we, that we undertake operations alongside the United States under American leadership. It doesn't mean we're going to do all of them, but when we do deploy overseas, we kind of do it with the United States upon the assumption that the United States is going to supply a lot of the core logistical functions and other things that we need.

So that's what I mean by plug and play. It's not meant to be dismissive. It's just meant to say when you want to maximize that dollar. And you know that your larger ally is going to do a lot of this stuff, and your larger ally is kind of telling you that they're going to do a lot of this stuff because they used to have an incentive to have you along, maybe not anymore, but you could plan around the idea that “I'm going to contribute these specific forces that will fit into this larger coalition concept”.

Leah: That's premised on the idea of the Canadian Armed Forces being an expeditionary force. And if we look to the new defense policy update, I mean, they call it a defense policy update, not an entirely new defense policy, it was released in May, 2024, and it's called “Our North Strong and Free, a renewed vision for Canada's Defense”.

It really emphasizes point one Canadian sovereignty, which at the time meant something different. And number two, defense of North America which really was, both of those were about our role in the Arctic. So rather than being focused on an expeditionary force, although we still are, we have the NATO missions in Lavia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and I don't see us ever backing away from those kinds of NATO missions, really turning a focus towards the defense of the Northern Hemisphere.

And a lot of money even recently announced towards that effort. Under that defense policy update for those not tracking, the expectation was, we'd meet 2% GDP by 2029, 2030, subsequent to that coming out then there was a subsequent announcement for 12 new submarines that wasn't included in that funding, which if they do come on board before 2029, 2030 would get us there faster.

We've since had announced recently by Prime Minister Carney a new Arctic Over the Horizon Radar System partnering with Australia, which has a $6 billion price tag and, and an expanded footprint with military hubs in the far north, that's, that's not new money, as I understand it. That's money that was already within the defense policy update.

So that to me is a little less plug and play. I mean, obviously it, it did still rely on NORAD and still understand us having this partnership with the United States, especially as it as it came to air superiority and defense of the North from from the air, but I'm just wondering what your take is on that and how you think all of that looks now in the new geopolitical landscape we're in.

Philippe: So, I would argue that Our North Strong and Free was written at a time when the plug and play concept was still very much at the forefront. So this emphasis on the Arctic and the defense of North America, I'll make two points on this one.

First, we see this every other white paper. This is like a recurring theme. So 1970, Arctic. 1987, Arctic. 1994, everywhere now again, then 2004 everywhere, then 2008, Arctic. 2017, everywhere. Now 2024, Arctic. Right. So it's a bit of a recurring theme when we kind of rediscover the Arctic for myriad reasons.

In this context, when that was written, that came in light of the United States telling us for some time, like, we want you to do this, we need you to do this because we have other things to do in the world and we would like you to take on more of a leadership role there. So after much kind of cajoling, I think we, we finally got there and said, okay, we're going to do the Arctic again but it was always premised on the idea that you'd be working with the United States. So a number of these capabilities belong to NORAD modernization and NORAD modernization is obviously alongside, well up until we don't, we'll see what the future is, but up until recently was doing so in a binational activity with the United States, right?

So even, even things like the, the Over Horizon Radar were, were understood to be part of a binational kind of capability over the long term.

You're right, the submarines. We're hoping to get a contract in place by 2027 with the first boat arriving by 2035. So there, that would give us more of an autonomous capability. I think the, we shouldn't over exaggerate though what that capability will provide in the Arctic. It's a conventional submarine. Even one with air independent propulsion is not a nuclear boat. It cannot operate under ice for significant periods of time.

Our main capabilities in the Arctic are going to be Coast Guard ships, polar ice breakers. So the defense piece to all this is still a little unclear. So the political parties now are talking about setting up, you know, permanent bases and things like that. But the Arctic has largely been an area where the military has not been enthusiastic and they've had to kind of be pushed there by the government because they don't really see how they fit in there. And to be frank, you know as I explain to a lot of people, if you want to deal with a threat immediately in the Arctic, it's, it's not an armed icebreaker that's gong to deal with it. If you see something up there, the fastest, quickest way to deal with it is a fighter. Right? Which was again, something that we built into a North American binational construct.

Leah: And to be fair is how we've been dealing with the issue. Yeah. I mean, it's not, you know, on a very regular basis we have Russian aircraft probing our, our airspace and fighters responding. So not a new thing.

Philippe: No. And if you had a ship up there that you really wanted to know what the hell it was up to right. This is why our drones are going to be able to go up there, the Predators and it's, you know, why your fighter aircraft like an F-35 is a big sensor as well. Like it's all part of this, right? So even the Arctic conversation is still very much tied into this North American construct and we'll need to have a different conversation about what does that look like if we want to have more autonomy as Canada in the North. And the other thing, I'll, just to finish off this thought, you're right, yes, we said we were going to do the Arctic, but you'll notice like we never let go of the Latvia mission. We, when Canada says that they're going to focus on something, they never mean that we're going to prioritize it as compared to other things. They just add it as another priority. Like, Canada is the academic of defense policy.

Stephanie: I just want to say I feel attacked.

Philippe: Taking on every single project all the time and never actually seeing whether or not it's feasible to do it all.

Stephanie: Maybe now I just feel seen.

Philippe: We have an academics view approach to defense policy. We'll do everything. And we never, you know, decide to focus in on things - we don't do priorities, you know.

Leah: I just wanted to follow up before we move on. One of the things. I haven't heard, and maybe it's because I'm not paying close enough attention , is any discussion of a threat to NORAD. We've heard about threats about pulling Canada out of the Five Eyes, but I haven't heard anything specific attacking that relationship. Am I missing it? Has there been any discussion of it and, and what does it look like?

Philippe: Apparently that, that came up in the same conversation as the Five Eyes conversation. But the data point that we have right now around that is Minister Joly telling us that Secretary of State Rubio told her that NORAD wasn't under threat.

On the other hand, we now have Prime Minister Carney last week coming out and telling us that the economic and security relationship that we have been taking for granted in North America is over. So what does that actually mean, right? I don't think we know right now, but it is one of these things, NORAD, that if President Trump wants to make a point or if he eventually gets around to discovering it, right, I think a lot of this is premised on the fact that he maybe doesn't know about it yet. Right. Because he's too busy looking at treaties.

Leah: Can't build a casino up there, Phil.

Philippe: Well, he is too busy looking at treaties from, you know, the 18th century. So maybe when he gets around to the treaties from the fifties, you know, he might, he might suddenly discover it. So he has got you know, a few decades of treaties to get through before he gets NORAD maybe. But when that happens, right? I think it, we, we can't take it for granted that it's just going to endure, at least in its current form. It might, and then I think there's going to be a lot of pressure on both sides to make sure that it does, but we can't take it for granted.

Leah: Just a fun fact, the last time NORAD renewal was up for debate was in 2006 but the conversations at the height of American-Canadian tension around ballistic missile defense at the time, and I, I remember being in Colorado Springs and it being unsure whether or not NORAD would continue so this isn't the first time this has been in question.

Philippe: No. And it's important to recognize that the United States always maintains a parallel combatant command next to NORAD.

Stephanie: NORTHCOM correct.

Philippe: NORTHCOM in this context. It used to be Stratcom, but so it maintains NORTHCOM. And you know, if you're the United States and you decide you want to do some of this yourself, you might choose to go down that path.

It, it wouldn't mean some level of continental defense cooperation would always endure just because of the nature of geography. I think it comes down to, for instance, NORAD does ballistic missile early warning. Would the United States choose to keep that as a NORAD function or just kick Canada out of that room?

If it wants to do a, a missile defense system, it might choose to make that as a condition, right, for Canada to keep NORAD alive saying, we need some of your territory to do this well, whatever it is. So we might actually, contrary to what the president says, we might have some cards, namely our land mass, but the conversation could go in many different ways, and I don't know if we can assume that it's simply going to endure.

Stephanie: This brings me to my question, which is, you know. And, and I think we've highlighted, we've kind of been talking about this or dancing around this for the last, you know, 10 minutes or so, which is the key risks of our plug and play model of defense, right?

You know, there's the F 35, there's this issue, you know, does the F 35 have a kill switch? And Lockheed Martin has come out and said, no, there's no kill switch. But the fact is that a plane or any piece of US military equipment, let's be honest, like anything that we get from the US is going to have the same problem.

Which is effectively any software updates, any supply chain components that you would need would have to come from the United States and the US could very easily cut us off. And that I think, you know, to a certain extent Trump kind of, spoke about this when they were talking about the, I think they're calling it the F-47 plane, this new plane, and said, oh, okay, well, we'll sell it to the allies, but we'll sell them a more crappy version. Which is not really maybe the news that the US defense industry wanted the president to say out loud. So how do we take all that into consideration? And then is this a model that can, that Canada can realistically back away from?

Philippe: Okay, so to your point, this isn't an F-35 issue, this is a general capability from the United States issue. In a way, the F-35 is in a better position simply because as it stands, a lot of components are made in a lot of the member states of the consortium. So, if the United States really tried to use that as leverage, they would have to build up their own capacity to supply the entire chain, which is not clear that they'd be able to do that that quickly. So the F-35 in a way is, is they have, they'd be playing with quite a bit of fire if they did that.

But generally speaking, right, when it comes to who's funding the upgrade paths, who's giving you access to the upgrade paths, who's giving you access to the software upgrades, who's giving you access to parts when it comes to certain planes that are, or platforms that are manufactured in the United States, who is giving you the intelligence data for a lot of the systems that you have on your planes? Who's providing you with cryptographic capability? I mean, you go through the list and all this is really provided by the United States in most cases.

Now, as a number of your listeners, particularly those who are in the CAF will point out, this is equally true of a lot of European capability. Everybody is somewhat dependent on the US. The US is just kind of made this, the reality. The only country that that has a a greater degree of independence is France right, and the Japanese to some extent, because they chose, when they take American capability in the past anyway, they would just build their own version like, that's just how they would do it in some cases.

But most NATO and Western allies of the United States are dependent on the United States for various things. So how do you get away from that? You get away from that in a generation, it's not something that you're doing tomorrow. It's not realistic to think that within the next five to ten years you're going to be able to to move on from that.

What you need to do is work with partners to build up parallel capabilities, redundancies, and different paths. So that in 15 to 20 years you might be able to have greater independence, but the -

Stephanie: At the same time maintaining NATO interoperability.

Philippe: Right. And I think the other thing to kind of bear in mind here, and this is the risk, Canada's defense budget is simply not large enough to maintain a fully sovereign capability. Right. Particularly if we want a military that does all these different things. Getting back to the early conversation that we were talking about.

So even when you start partnering with other countries, right? European, Asian countries or whatever it is, you have to, you're accepting a similar type of risk with them. So today everybody's kind of saying, oh look, Marie Le Pen can't run in the French presidential election. The far right is over in France. Well, come on. Realistically speaking, you can't say that. You don't know who else is going to run. So you don't, I mean, when you look at the the European political scene, you can exactly assume that the far right isn't going to be an issue there too. So you, you're running risks kind of across the board here. And it's just a question of what, how are you managing that risk and what, what partnerships do you think are wise in the next few years but knowing that everybody's in the same boat when it comes to their dependence on the United States in the short to medium term, and what investments do you have to make now so that you divest, build redundancies and somewhat divest yourself of that over the long term.

Leah: I think we need to stop and take a minute and just realize that we're now talking about building away from reliance on the United States. Right. Because we're afraid that we will need military capabilities to rely on, that they will not either support or could use against us. That is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world, that did not exist three months ago. It's crazy.

Philippe: Yes. I mean, and this is, I think why it's so hard, right?

Because it's not when people are, are saying they're just going to cut you off from capability or they're not going to let you do this, that, or the other thing. I don't, we need more imagination than that. It comes down to if you have a far more transactional United States that very much tries to use whatever it has at its disposal to get its way. It's a question of how much leverage are you allowing the United States to have over you? Right?

That's the issue and what we're coming to grips with, okay, is that the United States has done this with the Global South for decades. This is nothing new. What is new is that we're like, oh my God, we're being increasingly treated like the Global South. And that's what's shocking to us. It’s that suddenly we no longer have this privileged position that we had in the past. We're now dealing with the United States that treats you in a way that, you know, it treated countries in the Global South. And we're kind of panicking 'cause we're saying, oh, we always thought that, you know, the West and the Global North would get treated differently. Right. And that's, I think what we're having to come to grips with is we're going to look a lot more like a Grenada, a Chile, a Mexico.

Stephanie: Without the palm trees.

Philippe: Yeah. Than we were used to. Right. And so when you look at how those countries have dealt with the United States and how they've adapted and you start getting a better sense of like what your future looks like.

Stephanie: I think I'm maybe a little bit more optimistic than that. I think that we have seen, I mean, look, it's, this is three months to Leah's point, like this is three months. And the fact that we're having this conversation is completely something I did not have on the Bingo card, but just not even close to the Bingo card, was kind of in the realm of science fiction and, and things like this so I want to be really careful here and how we go.

It is interesting to me that like we have seen the Europeans invite Canada to this new defense procurement, arrangement. But based on what you're saying, you think we should be skeptical of this as well?

Philippe: No. I think the key thing is just to realize that we have to open our aperture of what the possible futures are in a way that we haven't in the past.

I think the issue is less, I don't think anybody can predict with certainty what the future of the defense relationship is going to look like either with Canada or with NATO. We don't know that for sure. What's happened is something that we could take for granted or a pretty strong assumption that it would remain , is now being brought back in as a risk and a vulnerability. Right. And I think that's the difference. It's not that we're inevitably going to be treated like the Global South, it's that it's a possibility now in a way that we weren't used to. Up until recently. Right?

It's, it's that suddenly now you have to start taking that into account, into your calculations in a way that you may not have in the past.

That's what's different about this. And I think what, where it's becoming stark, right, is if you look at the way Ukraine's been treated, and if you look at how the United States, even if it's not doing so aggressively, even if the United States simply says, we don't want to do this anymore. That places a, a burden on, on allies that they're not used to.

And what worries me from a Canadian perspective is more if the United States simply decides that, you know, some things are core to its interests as it keeps talking about when it comes to Greenland, what if that becomes the Arctic in general, right? Yeah. Or it becomes, “Look Canada. We're not going to invade you, we just don't think that you can handle this core region that's critical to our security, so we're just going to be there, and you just kind of have to live with that”.

That's more kind of the reality of what we face. Similarly, we think that the border is a problem, so we're going to preposition forces along the border, and if there's a crisis, we may need to cross the border. It's that kind of, you know, soft shaping that we need to be more cognizant of. And when it comes to our defense policy, it's more if we want to do certain things ourselves and we don't want to have to ask permission what, what are those core functions that we think we should be able to do ourselves? And I think any future defense policy review is going to have to ask that if it's being honest.

Stephanie: To your point though, and I want to emphasize we are a politically neutral platform here at Secure Line.

You may have noticed, I don't know if this is news to you, breaking news, that there is an election happening.

Leah: That's what those signs are about.

Stephanie: Apparently, who knew? But do you think political parties are meeting the moment when it comes to confronting these challenges? I mean, to be fair, we are, we've just entered into the second week. We are recording this on the 31st of March, so we still have almost a month to go in this campaign. But I'm wondering what you're thinking about the way that the political parties seem to be at least talking about these challenges.

Are we meeting the moment and, and what would you like to know more about?

Philippe: I, it's difficult to say, I think because we're asking too much of political parties right now to be able to meet the moment because they don't really have the information that they need to meet it. In the sense that if you have a new government that's come in, I don't know how much contact has been, or information has been transmitted between say, DND/CAF and the Carney Prime Minister's office. So what are they being told?

I think we can, it's pretty safe to assume that the security and defense community in Canada is probably saying “Everything's fine, don't worry, nothing's changed. We'll get through this. Everything's working at the officials level. No need to panic, no need to review anything”, and they will hold to that as dearly as they can, I suspect, because otherwise it requires a major change in worldview and they're, they're worried that we're going to make some very odd decisions based on something that'll eventually pass. Right. So when a new government, or the current government, or a new government comes in, then I think is going to be the time when we have to ask whether or not they're meeting the moment. Right now they're, they're all talking about re-arming. Great. They're talking about partnerships with Europe.

Stephanie: They all seem to be talking about tax cuts. I say this because in this case, I mean, it’s going to cost money.

Leah: We ain't getting to 2% with tax cuts.

Philippe: No, I think that's, that's the key point here is, I don't think anybody is really fully serious or aware yet of what they're looking at. And it's somewhat, it's somewhat unfair to ask political campaigns to come up with details, things.

What I would like to see in an ideal world would be a political party saying, we're going to do a complete rethink of Canadian defense policy. Like that's the kind of thing where you need somebody coming in and saying, “okay, we need to rethink of what this is going to be for a different future”. I mean, the Prime Minister has hinted at that when he says that the economic and security relationship is fundamentally changed. We are hinting at that when we're saying, you know, that we're going to be working with European partners and Asian partners and allies, so we're kind of moving in that direction.

But all this needs some kind of policy foundation for it to make sense. Right. So when I see piecemeal things like more in the Arctic or increasing spending or whatever it is, that's all good, but what do you actually want to do with your armed forces. That I think, has to be the fundamental question. What do you want the Canadian Armed Forces to do if the American relationship is not what it was anymore? Right. That's the question that I would love to see answered in the campaign is, “What do we think the Canadian armed forces are for?”

You'll recall just a couple of years ago when we were deploying the armed forces more domestically, senior military leadership came out and said: “This is overstretching us. We can't do this. We can't be doing the expeditionary operations and doing the domestic operations, it's too much for us. And our expeditionary operations are our main mission.”

Is that going to be the case going forward, if the United States is not undertaking these major operations anymore? Like we may have the Latvia mission that will continue, or we may have forces in Ukraine. We don't know, but we need to have that conversation. Getting back to what both of you were asking when it came to Our North Strong and Free, are we serious about doing the Arctic? Okay. Then what does the defense policy look like if you're doing the Arctic, are we serious about the Indo-Pacific strategy? Okay. Then what does that look like? Are you serious about doing Ukraine? Okay, then what does that look like? And I will just say, you can't have all three, even at 2% of GDP, you cannot. That is not realistic to do all three of those well.

Leah: Well, and the weather gets a vote realistically, we don't have anyone else in this country to respond to climate disasters other than the Canadian Armed Forces, and that's not stopping or going away. That has to factor into any assessment of how military money and personnel, their time is spent. Because the number of days military personnel were spent deployed on natural disaster response in this country over the last several years far out shadows anything ever seen before. And that's not going to stop unless we fundamentally restructure how we respond to domestic natural disasters. That's another element to all of this, that needs serious consideration, I think from the political level because it's not gong to be the CAF that can say no.

Philippe: And to your point though, and this is the other thing is that has to be part of a discussion of where we see the future of Canadian defense policy, if that becomes an assumption, right, that we know that we're going to require far more CAF domestic operations because we're not going to fund a domestic civilian disaster response agency, at least I don't see one being proposed, and where would you get the people for that? It'd be the same people who presumably you either want to put in the Coast Guard or the CAF, or the police, like, I mean there, there's only so many young people committed to national service in this country that you're all trying to draw on. At some point something has

Stephanie: Mandatory service!

Philippe: Well this is, I mean

Stephanie: That's going to get people @-ing me.

Philippe: But to your point, I mean, what other force are is going to be doing this and I don't see, I mean, we can say, oh the provinces should be doing more for disasters and you know, realistically, I think the CAF is still going to be the force of last resort for this. So that should be baked into your planning, not kind of seen as like an impediment to your planning. And maybe this is a discussion for a future pod, but I think we're heading into a really difficult civil-military situation in this country between a political leadership and a population that's going to be in one place and the security and defense community that's going to be in another place, and that's going to be a tough thing to weather.

Stephanie: Phil, thank you so much for spending time with us today and answering these challenging questions. And again, we will almost certainly have you on in the future because I feel like we have just scratched the surface of some of these key challenging questions that Canada's going to have to be confronting in the future.

Leah: People actually care now!

Stephanie: That's right. That's right. Security and Defense.

Philippe: Thanks to both of you and I appreciate it. Important conversation and I look forward to coming back. if you'll have me.

Leah: Thanks, Phil.

Stephanie: Thank you for listening to this episode of Secure Line, we are so grateful for the emails and messages we are receiving. So please keep them coming. And if you enjoyed this particular episode, please rate and review on any of the platforms out there, or better yet, share it with your friends and social networks.

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