What's the future of Canada's military？
Episode Stats
Words per minute
190.90909
Summary
The other day Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defense Staff announced his retirement from being Canada's top soldier. There will be a lot of conversation in the days and weeks to come about who will replace him, who they're looking for in a candidate, and what they want out of Canada's military in the years moving forward. Now is the perfect time to have a bigger picture conversation about what we actually want to achieve on the world stage, and the things we want at home here in Canada.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
the other day Jonathan Vance chief of the defense staff announced his retirement from being Canada's
00:00:10.380
top soldier and there'll be a lot of conversation in the days and weeks to come about who will
00:00:15.000
replace them who they're looking for in a candidate but I think we should have another
00:00:19.020
conversation as well a bigger picture conversation about what we want out of Canada's military out of
00:00:25.640
Canada's national defense in the years moving forward and now is the perfect time to have that
00:00:31.180
conversation go big picture talk about the things we actually want to achieve on the world stage and
00:00:36.800
the things we want to achieve at home here in Canada for our own safety and security I got just
00:00:42.360
two ideas that I want to put forward right now one of them has to do with arctic sovereignty a major
00:00:48.000
issue right now and we are dropping the ball on it yes we are getting various arctic offshore patrol
00:00:53.700
ships to be able to go out and explore the arctic a little bit more and the good news is those orders
00:00:58.940
were put in hopefully those vessels will be ready on time on schedule we also need to bolster the
00:01:04.400
Canadian Rangers that force made up of largely first nations Canadians who are out there protecting the
00:01:10.300
northern frontier they have not been all that well served with equipment and more we need to do more
00:01:15.620
for them and we need to bolster them the second is we're talking about China a whole lot more and
00:01:22.280
we're talking about them largely in in diplomatic and economic ways but make no mistake about it
00:01:28.500
China is increasing their military they are increasing their navy Asia Pacific is increasingly
00:01:34.220
going to be a zone of interest for Canada when it comes to our defense strategy it's a good thing that
00:01:39.800
we are rebuilding our shipbuilding we have a major national shipbuilding strategy I think we're not
00:01:45.220
thinking big enough at all we need a much longer term objective I think Canada needs an aircraft carrier
00:01:52.860
likely to be positioned on the Pacific on the west coast now we would be years away from that happening
00:01:58.840
probably decades from delivering that but if we don't talk about it more and push for the issue more
00:02:04.200
now we won't even get it decades from now so those are just a couple of my ideas there are many others
00:02:10.360
that I know people have out there and that are worth airing out and hashing out because I think now
00:02:14.820
with Jonathan Vance stepping down is the time to have those conversations