Brooke Claxton, arguably Canada’s most effective minister of national defence, managed the transformation of Canada’s armed forces from 1946 to 1954 thorough the turbulent post-Second-World-War demobilization and into the dangerous early years of NATO. His fundamental objective, at the direction of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, was to bring Canada’s armed forces, the control of which had been more or less usurped by the Allies, once again under Ottawa’s control.<\/p>\n
Claxton’s first challenge was to rein in the cohort of young, veteran wartime generals, air marshals and admirals, who enjoyed wide public support\u2014 especially from the thousands of veterans they had recently commanded\u2014 and who expected Canadian governments to follow uncritically their professional advice in peacetime as they had, however unwillingly, in wartime. Few of these officers, moreover, were shy about expressing their concerns openly to members of Parliament and the public.<\/p>\n
So serious was the contest between these postwar officers and the government that Claxton was forced to warn the officers that henceforth there would be \u201cone department and one boss…if an officer cannot be loyal [to the government] and silent he should get out [of the service]. A government that wishes to stay a government,\u201d he continued, \u201cwould have no choice but to replace [any officer] who was not content to express his opinions in private and to conform to public policy. I am,\u201d he declared more than once, \u201call for silent soldiers and sailors too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through the next few years trouble between the government and military leaders continued. Some, like Lieutenant General Guy Simons, left noisily and accused the government of neglect. Others, more or less on their own, continued to make what they considered prudent arrangements with traditional allies as the Cold War evolved. In the late 1950s, these continuing strains and confusions infected every defence policy question\u2014 Canada\/United States defence cooperation, nuclear weapons acquisitions and deployment, and the Avro Arrow project\u2014 and they climaxed during the October 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, when the Diefenbaker government almost lost control of the armed forces completely.<\/p>\n
Although many observers believe that defence policy and civil-military relations have no influence on Canadian federal elections, that notion is certainly challenged by the defeat of John Diefenbaker in 1963. No matter what scholars might suggest, Mike Pearson concluded that the Diefenbaker \u201cgovernment’s mishandling of the defence issue was the main reason for [Diefenbaker’s] downfall.\u201d Pearson was not about to let the same thing happen to his government, and he sent the young, self-confident Paul Hellyer, who was defence minister from 1963 to 1967, to defence headquarters to bring the defence establishment to heel.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaul the Reformer,\u201d as one scholar dubbed him, had a touch of Claxton in his outlook. He identified the \u201cdefence problem\u201d as caused by the unwieldy command structure headed by navy, army and air force chiefs of staff, each of whom had equal authority under the National Defence Act<\/em>, and who were determined to advance their own service over the others. As Hellyer noted immediately, the real defence policy process was for each service chief \u201cto try to get you alone so they can force their own views on you without any coordination with anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n On his first day in office Hellyer was convinced of the urgent need to break this logjam, and in May 1964 he tabled in the House of Commons \u201can Act to amend the National Defence Act<\/em>\u201d; that is, an act to transfer all the authority of the three service chiefs to a new position, \u201cthe chief of the defence staff.\u201d The bill passed quickly and without amendment, and in late 1964 Air Chief Marshal Miller was appointed the first chief of the defence staff. Although the formal unification of the armed services into a single service did not occur until 1968, the deed had been done once the chain-of-command ended in the office of one officer who held complete authority for the direction of Canada’s armed forces. Hellyer may have solved one problem, but only by creating another.<\/p>\n The chief of the defence staff (CDS) of the Canadian Forces is appointed by order-in-council and serves \u201cat pleasure.\u201d He or she has specific authority based in law, specifically in the National Defence Act<\/em>, but also in custom. Neither the CDS nor any member of the Canadian Forces is a \u201cpublic servant.\u201d The CDS is not a delegate of the minister of national defence and does not draw his authority from the minister’s authority. Neither the minister nor the prime minister can legally act in the place of the CDS by, for instance, issuing orders directly to any member or unit of the Canadian Forces. In all cases orders from the government to the Canadian Forces must be passed through the CDS to subordinate officers.<\/p>\n Paradoxically, though the civil authority\u2014 civilians elected to Parliament\u2014 is responsible and accountable to Canadians for the civil control of the Canadian Forces, governments cannot effect such control without the cooperation of the CDS. For example, the CDS protects the government from improper military interference in political affairs, by disciplining members of the Canadian Forces who step into this arena, something that in law politicians cannot do. The CDS also maintains \u201cgood order and discipline\u201d in the Canadian Forces by controlling the behaviour of members and units of the armed forces living in our midst. The CDS alone can change\u2014 or not\u2014 the government’s defence policy intentions into practical outcomes. While the government can dismiss a CDS who might resist its directions, it must eventually appoint another officer as CDS if it is to give orders and directions to the Canadian Forces. Thus, the CDS shares with the civil authority a degree of responsibility and accountability for the civil control of the armed forces.<\/p>\n The CDS is the government’s official and formal policy advisor inter alia on matters of national defence policy as they may involve the armed forces; the organization and development of military capabilities; and especially in the command and operations of the Canadian Forces at home and abroad. The government, unless the prime minister wishes to act as his or her own military advisor, is effectively obliged to consult the CDS in these and other matters or risk an open conflict with the CDS and possibly the entire senior cadre of the officer corps, as Paul Hellyer did throughout his term in office. The prime minister, of course, is not obliged to follow the CDS’s counsel, but if the government were to act contrary to it, the prime minister and not the CDS would be accountable for the consequences.<\/p>\n \u201cShared responsibility\u201d and \u201crightful authority in law\u201d placed in the hands of one officer create a degree of instability in Canadian civil-military relations, a fact recognized by some experts when the office was created in 1964. Richard Malone, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press<\/em> and an influential militia officer, for instance, warned Hellyer that the proposed chief of the defence staff \u201cwould become a \u201d\u02dcsupremo’ who would overpower the minister.\u201d Better, he suggested, an ineffective, divided command system than a unified system that would unite all the implicit political power of the military under one officer.<\/p>\n Yet over the 40-year history of the office Malone’s warning seems overstated. Chiefs of the defence staff have exercised their rightful and implicit authority in a very nuanced and responsible way, mainly because they wholeheartedly support the principle that the civil authority must ultimately control and direct the Canadian Forces and Canada’s national defence. Nevertheless, policy disagreements between chiefs of the defence staff and governments, especially during defence emergencies, have from time-to-time exposed a fault-line in Canadian civil-military relations. Sometimes the break has been dramatic, as during the 1970s FLQ crisis and the Somalia scandal in the 1990s. Some observers believe that Canada is in another such situation today, as the government and the Canadian Forces and the CDS struggle with the consequences of Canada’s commitments in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n General Hillier is at the centre of this controversy. Almost accidentally he is the architect of Canada’s defence policy, a situation forced on him by the absence of any coherent indication from Prime Minister Paul Martin on which way to move Canada’s defence and foreign policy. The country in 2008 is at war. That fact propels defence policy, the armed forces and the CDS into the media spotlight and Hillier’s decisions onto the floor of the House of Commons. Hillier is a strong advocate for his views on war and peace and the Canadian Forces, and he is unusually popular\u2014 for a Canadian general\u2014 with many Canadians. These circumstances, and the General Hiller’s skill at presenting them, appear to critics to give the CDS an inappropriate and disproportionate influence over Canada’s foreign and defence policies, and even over who might be appointed minister of national defence.<\/p>\n Critics of the CDS’s place in public life suggest, therefore, that civil control over the armed forces and policy and a change in Canadian military strategy in Afghanistan will occur only after General Hillier is replaced or decides to retire. Those who hold this view, however, have missed the fundamental shift, the renaissance, if you will, of the professional spirit in the officer corps of the Canadian Forces. The change is now so deeply embedded in the officer corps that in all likelihood General Hillier will be replaced by another officer who holds very much to Hillier’s views of the role of the CDS in Canadian public policy.<\/p>\n Three indelible and intertwined experiences at the close of the twentieth century engulfed the Canadian Forces and shaped General Hillier and every other senior officer who might replace him as CDS. First, he and they were all junior commanders\u2014 majors, colonels and naval captains\u2014 at the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n Without much pause to reflect on the changes in international relations at that time, they were flung willy-nilly into the insanity of the Balkans War. Little other than discipline and order prepared them for what they experienced there. The best officers made sensible adjustments to the circumstances of this and other \u201cwars among the people\u201d into which their government had thrust them. Armies learn by doing, but it’s always the hard way to learn.<\/p>\n While they learned about the socalled new wars, they learned something else as well. And that was that the Canadian governments and most Canadians cared little about what they were doing or the effects the wars were having on them or their soldiers. The Liberal government of Jean Chr\u00e9tien was particularly neglectful. Reports at the time\u2014 never refuted by officials or officers in Ottawa then or since\u2014 suggest that the facts about casualties and dead and severely wounded soldiers incurred in the Balkans wars were hidden from Canadians, for fear that the information would prompt a public outcry to properly equip the Canadian Forces for the battles the government had sent them to fight. Spending money on the Canadian Forces, even in these circumstances, was anathema to Chr\u00e9tien, and so the soldiers suffered, mostly in silence.<\/p>\n But young Hillier and his comrades experienced the slight and the damage first hand, and the experience soured their attitudes toward Canadian politicians and most of their senior military leaders in Ottawa.<\/p>\n The Somali debacle was the second formative event for most young officers in the 1990s, whether they were in the theatre or not. Indeed, for almost everyone at the time \u201cthe theatre\u201d was the small hearing room on Slater Street in Ottawa, where the television cameras revealed to officers and soldiers across the country a senior cadre of the Canadian Forces that had so obviously lost its way. They watched officers on the witness stand trying to shirk the consequences of their careless decisions; trying to \u201cpass the buck\u201d for their failures to their subordinates; and trying to hide their errors by confessing ignorance of the most basic military norms for deploying and commanding military units on active operations.<\/p>\n The most shocking revelation for officers who had not served in the upper ranks of National Defence Headquarters were the confessions by their leaders that they had surrendered easily and routinely to mere public servants matters requiring professional competence and judgement\u2014 matters, these junior officers had been taught, fundamental to their raison-d’\u00e9\u201atre as officers. In the aftermath of the inquiry, many junior and middle-ranking officers far from civilian ears admitted to a deep sense of professional shame at what they had witnessed during the inquiry into the Somalia operation.<\/p>\n Finally, this cadre of middleranking officers and some of their rising leaders came to resent politicians’ expectations that loyalty to Canada and obedience to government policy should be taken by officers to mean loyalty at all costs to the partisan interests of ministers and their political party. Time and again, they had listened to explanations from senior officers and ministers about why they and their units would have to undertake dangerous missions without the proper equipment\u2014 to lead the UN Zaire operation, \u201cthe bungle in the jungle,\u201d for instance. They were told that \u201cloyalty\u201d meant covering up mistakes and untruths uttered by ministers. The reasoning was sometimes that \u201cthe government has control of\u00a0the armed forces and so we have to obey.\u201d At other times, senior officers suggested that \u201cby helping the government out of a difficult political jam, the prime minister would be generous and fund this or that new project.\u201d In every case, no rewards followed. Senior officers discovered that they had compromised their integrity and that of the officer corps in the eyes of the public service, sometimes the public, and certainly their subordinate officers.<\/p>\n At the time when General Hillier was rising into the general officer ranks, his immediate superiors\u2014 all post-Somalia appointments\u2014 began a slow but deliberate re-evaluation of themselves and their professional responsibilities to Canada. In several very frank \u201cgeneral officers’ seminars\u201d led by incumbent CDSs, a new allegiance grew within the officer corps. \u201cNever again!\u201d became the unofficial pledge. Never again the compromising of professional standards, the surrendering of professional responsibilities to the public service, and the offering of tainted advice meant only to protect partisan political interests.<\/p>\n Commanding officers at Canadian Forces staff colleges initiated new curricula emphasizing \u201ctruth, duty and valour.\u201d The CDS ordered that war dead returning from Afghanistan be provided full, open, and traditional military honours, no matter how this might embarrass the government and its political agenda. Officers were instructed that as witnesses before senate and parliamentary committees and in public discussions elsewhere they were to be \u201cfrank unto the Kaiser.\u201d<\/p>\n The most astonishing example of this rebirth of pride and place occurred unexpectedly when then minister of national defence, Art Eggleton, declared he had not been told that members of the Canadian Forces task force in Afghanistan had captured Taliban fighters. His apparent expectation was that the CDS, at the time General Ray Henault, would confirm what was in fact not true. When subsequently General Henault and Deputy Chief of Staff Vice Admiral Greg Madison were questioned about the matter in a public, televised meeting of the House of Commons Committee on National Defence, members of Parliament and everyone in the room were astonished to hear both officers flatly (and, it appeared to some, enthusiastically) contradict the minister. After that event, which brought much praise as a \u201cbreath of fresh air in Ottawa,\u201d Canadian politicians were put on notice that they could no longer expect senior officers to cover politicians’ failures or indiscretions.<\/p>\n General Hillier is a product of that recovered military ethic. He and other officers are, as well, the messengers of the new ethic. He and the officers who promoted him and his subordinate officers learned in the glare of the Somalia inquiry that the Canadian Forces need the respect and trust of Canadians if they are to have the support of the people in war and in peace. Officers have learned again that respect and trust can only be sustained if it stands on a platform of truth and sacrifice. Certainly, Hillier’s ability to engage the public effectively in matters important to the Canadian Forces and to Canada’s national defence helps explain his public popularity. But his popularity is more likely due to Canadians’ willingness to trust what he says.<\/p>\n Who will replace General Rick Hiller as chief of the defence staff of the Canadian Forces? No one can say today. No matter who is promoted to this singular office, it is a safe bet that person will seem to many Canadians very much like General Ray Henault and General Rick Hillier, the first leaders in the new generation of Canadian Forces officers.<\/p>\n Brooke Claxton in 1946 merely reiterated Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s rule for civil-military relations at the time: \u201cIf an officer cannot be loyal [to the government] and silent he should get out [of the service].\u201d And he repeated also every Canadian politician’s preference, then and now, \u201cfor silent soldiers and sailors too\u201d\u2014 for officers who are \u201ccontent to express [their] opinions in private and to conform to public policy.\u201d<\/p>\n Canadians today, however, seem to see things differently. They understand that Canada has military secrets, but citizens clearly are not \u201call for silent soldiers and sailors too.\u201d Rather, they look to Canadian military leaders to tell them the plain truth so they can judge for themselves what is to be done to defend the nation and to find for Canada \u201ca place of pride and influence in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brooke Claxton, arguably Canada’s most effective minister of national defence, managed the transformation of Canada’s armed forces from 1946 to 1954 thorough the turbulent post-Second-World-War demobilization and into the dangerous early years of NATO. His fundamental objective, at the direction of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, was to bring Canada’s armed forces, the control of which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-08T00:05:43Z","apple_news_api_id":"aec0e111-1047-4c3e-8556-76494a0079d7","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-08T00:05:43Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ArsDhERBHTD6FVnZJSgB51w","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9346],"tags":[8657],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[4217],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[],"class_list":["post-262527","issues","type-issues","status-publish","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nato-fr","irpp-category-affaires-internationales"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n