Not a “Real State”?
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000412 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Author | Christopher Spearin |
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Not a “real state”?
Defence privatization in Canada
Since the 1990s, pundits, parliamentarians, and professors alike have
criticized the Liberal government for its seeming neglect of the Canadian
forces (CF) and the resulting decline.1 They claim that spending cuts in
defence threaten Canada’s international standing. They contend that, for the
United States, troop cuts make Canada an even more junior (and burden-
some) partner in terms of North American defence. They assert that govern-
ment priorities directed elsewhere have left the Canadian populace poorly
protected in the post-9/11 environment. In this mix of criticisms, it is also
frequently asserted that the CF’s growing reliance upon private commercial
actors for the execution of critical tasks is representative of this neglect and
decline. Reliance upon private actors is a poor second choice because, they
contend, it puts the defence of the country in the hands of commercial rather
than national interests. Moreover, this policy choice reveals that the government
is not serious about protecting Canadians or ensuring the sovereignty of
Christopher Spearin is an assistant professor of national security studies and the deputy
director of research at the Canadian Forces College, Toronto. The views expressed in the arti-
cle are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Canadian
Department of National Defence or the government of Canada.
1 For a survey of these arguments, see Barry Cooper et al., “Canada’s military posture: an analy-
sis of recent civilian reports,” 2004 Critical Issues Bulletin, Fraser Institute, 2004.
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| Christopher Spearin |
Canada because it has surrendered, for the entire world to see, state respon-
sibilities to the private sector. Overall, the complaint is that Canada may no
longer be a “real state” as a result.2
While this privatization is partially symptomatic of the government’s
stance towards defence since the end of the Cold War, this article argues that
the net needs to be more widely cast in order to understand fully the ration-
ale behind this shift in the balance between public and private.
In fact, the private presence may even have been intended to at least
address some of the concerns noted above. As such, many other variables,
some of them independent of the Canadian context, have arisen that pro-
mote the private presence. To make this case, the article first describes the
nature of defence privatization in Canada and then identifies the catalytic
effects of neoliberal thinking, technological innovation, recruitment/reten-
tion issues, and the influence of the American military model. We will see
that the motivators for privatization are often not straightforward; these fac-
tors frequently impact upon each other or stand in contradistinction.
Additionally, while the change in the public/private balance does not neces-
sarily indicate a lack of government seriousness regarding defence, it does
present pitfalls and risks. Challenging issues pertaining to foreign influence,
occupationalism in the CF, and governance and policymaking will likely affect
Canada in specific ways.
C A N A D I A N D E F E N C E P R I VAT I Z AT I O N
On the one hand, the control and management of violence has fluctuated
between public and private actors over the course of history.3 Civilians have
long supported military operations, something explicitly identified in the
2 “Stand on guard for thee: Canada can no longer shirk its responsibility to defend itself,” Ottawa
Citizen, 30 September 2003, A16. See also Madelaine Drohan, “Private enterprise joins up,”
Globe and Mail, 17 November 2003, www.theglobeandmail.com; David Pugliese and Bill
Cleverley, “Hard-up navy looks to hire out: Private companies may conduct coastal air patrols,”
Victoria Times Colonist, 27 September 2003, www.canada.com.
3 See Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and
Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
For analyses of the contemporary private military/security industry, see Peter W. Singer,
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2003); Deborah Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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| Defence privatization in Canada |
Hague conventions on warfare. Similarly, while nationalization has some-
times occurred, private firms are usually responsible for producing the
weaponry and equipment employed by militaries. This has been the case for
Canada. During the Cold War, private firms provided for the CF’s needs,
whether they supplied the myriad bases and depots across Canada or the
forward stockpiles located in western Europe. As for the production of arma-
ments, government policy in recent decades has generally been not to inter-
fere with the dynamics of the marketplace by overly directing, or even taking
over, privately owned and operated firms.
On the other hand, despite this type of private presence, it has generally
been felt over the past 200 years that it is unexpected, inappropriate, and
even dangerous for civilians to be overly involved in military endeavours.
Civilians, so the argument goes, should not be deployed in large numbers
and they should not provide services that are either critical to mission suc-
cess or are needed near frontlines. It is also thought that military activities
are best left to individuals who—imbued with a sense of patriotism—have
agreed to the possibility of losing their lives in the course of performing
them, rather than the unsavoury forces of the marketplace and private
reward. This thinking has been prominent since the rise of Napoleon’s citi-
zen army, the levée en masse, in the 19th century. As such, there has histor-
ically been a divide in terms of what services the CF has allowed to fall into
private hands, as described by Macarena Barker and Pam Hatton: “[The CF
has had] extensive exposure to large-scale use and varied applications of the
private sector in support of the CF and the Department of National Defence
in Canada, primarily as it applied to materiel acquisition and related support.
However this has been limited in terms of support to deployed operations,
whether at home or abroad”.4
Yet it is in areas thought to be off-limits that the CF now relies upon pri-
vate actors in a variety of ways. For instance, firms such as Bombardier,
Cubic Defense Applications, Seco Facilities Management, L-3 Communica-
tions, and Phoenix Air maintain and support CF training facilities and exer-
cises in places like Moose Jaw, Cold Lake, and Goose Bay to train the next
generation of Canadian military pilots. In some cases, company employees
even fly the training aircraft. Med-Emerg International Incorporated provides
many of the physicians, nurses, and therapists necessary to ensure the
4 Macarena Barker and Pam Hatton, “Contractors in support of operations: A Canadian per-
spective,” PASOLS Log, August 2000, www.pasols.org.
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| Christopher Spearin |
health and well-being of CF personnel. CF parachutists in Trenton, ON, fre-
quently train using aircraft rented from the United States. The 2004 $5 bil-
lion price tag of the Sikorsky H-92 helicopters includes service and mainte-
nance costs to be covered by firms over a 20-year contract. Similarly, private
firms maintain the CF’s fleet of search-and-rescue Cormorant helicopters.
Massive cargo jets contracted from east European firms have transported
equipment around the world for recent Canadian operations in Haiti and
Afghanistan. In fact, one of the largest Canadian airlifts since the first Gulf
War, in this case for the 1994 humanitarian activities in Rwanda, was con-
ducted primarily by Russian-crewed Ilyushin Il-76 and Antonev An-124 air-
craft.5 Strategic sealift for the CF is also supplied by commercial actors.
Coastal sovereignty surveillance flights, which facilitate the endeavours by
the Department of National Defence and other governmental agencies to
counter unlawful fishing, environmental threats, and illegal immigration, are
conducted by commercial firms like Provincial Air. Finally, in the Balkans
and Afghanistan, arguably “infrastructure poor” environments, the CF
relied upon ATCO-Frontec and SNC-Lavalin respectively to fulfill logistical
and support responsibilities once performed by CF personnel. In total,
DND holds several hundred contracts with civilian firms, not necessarily
Canadian in their ownership, makeup, or personnel, that provide services
necessary for the upkeep, training, and operations of the CF. Why is this the
case, given the importance of these tasks and the apparent sensitivity regarding
a private presence in the past?
C ATA LY S T S
Neoliberal thinking in the unstable post–Cold War world
Dating back to at least the 1970s, defence firms have lobbied to have greater
participation in CF activities. In response to these efforts, the Mulroney gov-
ernment in the 1980s, for instance, privatized certain functions such as
many of the CF’s aerial fisheries protection duties. But it was the 1994
defence white paper that cleared away the privatization taboo in defence
management once and for all. Its drafters recognized that with the end of the
Cold War and Canada’s debt sitting at over $500 billion, DND would have to
do things differently. In part, this...
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