There's no doubt that Canadians have developed a full-blown, if heartbreaking, romance with their soldiers – and, it can be argued, a more robust sense of the country's place in the world. They have become modern-day action heroes, fighting the Taliban in lethal skirmishes, chasing pirates off the Somali coast, providing a worthy air escort for the Olympic torch across the ocean. But it's an awkward love affair.
And if Canadians have accepted – and even come to admire – a military that is more muscular, they are still more comfortable with Joe, the Canadian of that decade-old beer ad who declared: “I believe in peacekeeping, not policing.”
But after decades of keeping the peace, our soldiers have become police – immersed in a deadly combat mission which, according to several polls, a majority of Canadians oppose. While tending to accept that their soldiers should stay in Afghanistan to the 2011 deadline, a war-shy public will be hesitant to commit to a future of grieving over the Highway of Heroes, however renewed their patriotism. Afghanistan, some analysts say, may be the country's last war, at least for a while. So a hard conversation looms when the fighting side of the mission ends two summers from now: Welcome home, brave soldier. But where and how will you serve next?
“The question facing Canadians – and it's very important – is what do we want to do with a better armed, better equipped, better funded military,” says Janice Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. “Are we willing to use it? That's the debate that's coming.”
For a country shaped over the past 50 years by its peacekeeping identity, that means a truth-telling: “Classic peacekeeping of the kind where you interpose yourselves between two armies and play volleyball in the middle, that's gone.” Now wars are fought inside countries between armies and militants, and civilians are killed deliberately. In Afghanistan, Dr. Stein observes, “we can talk about it as a reconstruction mission or stabilization mission, but that actually involves fighting and dying. [That makes] many Canadians uncomfortable still.”
Canadians largely support a military presence in Canada's north, but that's a matter of “standing on guard” for sovereignty, not advancing into war. As Dr. Stein says, “Nobody is going to die in combat in the Arctic.”
The military – particularly under the outspoken command of Rick Hiller, now retired as chief of defence staff and promoting his autobiography across the country – has been quite deliberate in self-promotion, and successful, to a point. “If the key icons of the 80s were things like medicare and the CBC, the military became the new icon of the 21st century,” says pollster Frank Graves, president of the social research firm EKOS. Once the Afghanistan mission began, “the military became the most recognizable face of the federal government,” he said.
The lingering shame of atrocities by Canadian soldiers in Somalia has dissipated into history, the images of soldiers piling sandbags during the Red River flood or saving stranded citizens during the ice storm that struck Quebec and Eastern Ontario in 1998 sparked the return of affection. But it is the war in Afghanistan – and the steady, wrenching return of fresh-faced young men (and a few women) in coffins – that inspires the solemn crowds on those dozens of overpasses between CFB Trenton and the Coroner's office in Toronto, and the ribbons of support on car windows (or the more hostile bumper-sticker rebuke “If you don't stand behind our troops feel free to stand in front of them”). Annual Armed Forces appreciation nights have become de rigueur at professional sports events across the country. most recently at a Senators game in Ottawa, where 2,200 uniformed soldiers were given free tickets. “Ten years ago,” Mr. Hillier said during a phone interview this week, “that would have been incomprehensible.”
