I fought for investment in Canada’s defence as international order eroded

Wayne Eyre/The Globe and Mail: …Our international standing and relevance were in freefall, and our members around the world reported being excluded from more meetings, including with Five Eyes partners. I shared these observations with a very senior public servant, who was quite candid in stating the government didn’t care. In various DM meetings, I detected a level of frustration in getting parts of government to deal with long-term threats, with some lamenting the lack of security literacy. For our part, we kept our ministers updated very frequently with operations and intelligence briefings, and for the others we offered threat and technical briefings, which were invariably poorly attended. I upset some in government at the end of January, 2023, for being too candid about the needs of the CAF during an interview; questioned if, in the context of policy delays, we were entering another decade of darkness for the CAF, I truthfully responded, “History will tell.”…