Ezra Levant and David Redmond, a 27-year Canadian Armed Forces veteran, expose Justin Trudeau’s leadership failures: Canada spends just 1.35% of GDP on defense—far below NATO’s 2% target—while its CF-18s lag behind F-35s and F-22s, and only one tank reached Ukraine due to delays. Redmond’s Unfit for Duty essay slams Trudeau’s shift from combat readiness to "social experiments," like wildfire relief, while basic supplies like food and gear go unmet, calling it a betrayal of sovereignty. Excluded from AUKUS, Canada risks losing global respect as its military, once credible with a mechanized brigade in Germany, now struggles under Pierre Trudeau’s 1970s cuts (105,000 to 50,000 troops) and ideological distractions. A democracy’s survival depends on defending itself—not just rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, Justin Trudeau has tried to finish off the Canadian Armed Forces continuing the awful project that his father, Pierre Trudeau, started.
Well, today we've got a great guest, David Redman, a veteran and a bit of a scholar and a thinker when it comes to reviving the Canadian military.
You're really going to appreciate his comments today.
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Tonight, can the Canadian Armed Forces be revived after Trudeau has tried to destroy it?
A feature conversation with veteran David Redmond.
It's December 31st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
shame on you you sensorism bug i think 2025 is going to be a year of great change in canada a great change for the world Donald Trump is back as president, and what America does always echoes around the world.
In few places will it echo more than Canada.
One of Trump's beefs, and this stretched back to his first term, is that many NATO countries were not carrying their load.
I remember the dramatic meetings when he would fly to Europe, be surrounded by NATO leaders, and he would scold them.
And I think they sort of, in a way, liked it.
They liked the fact that America was demanding that they live up to the promise.
And it wasn't just America being the globo cop.
Trudeau didn't do as well.
He took it personally.
Here's a great interaction between Trump and Trudeau, where Trump asks Trudeau what percentage of our GDP is being spent on defense.
I know the target in NATO is 2%.
And watch Trudeau sort of fib and Trump calling him out in a way that no Canadian journalist had done.
This was from Trump's first term.
Take a look.
Mr. President, Canada does not meet the 2% standard.
Should it have a plan to meet the 2%, Sam?
Well, we'll put them on a payment plan, you know?
We'll put Gannon on a payment plan, right?
I'm sure the Prime Minister would love that.
What are you at?
What is your number?
The number we talk about is 70% increase over these past years, including and for the coming years, including significant investments in our fighter jets, significant investments in our naval fleets.
We are increasing significantly our defense spending from previous governments that cut it.
Okay.
Where are you now in terms of your number?
We're at 135?
1.3. 1. 1. 1.
And continuing to move.
They're getting there.
They know it's important to do that.
And their economy is doing well.
They'll get there quickly, I think.
And look, it's to their benefit.
And the president knows well as well that Canada has been there for every NATO deployment.
We have consistently stepped up, sent our troops into harm's way.
We're leading in Iraq.
We're leading in NATO, in Latvia.
We continue to step up like most of our allies.
There are some countries that, even though they might reach the 2%, don't step up nearly as much.
And I think it's important to look at what is actually being done.
And the United States and all NATO allies know that Canada is a solid, reliable partner that will continue to defend NATO and defend our interests.
And we do have tremendous coordination with radar, with all of the different things that, you know, technologically, we have tremendous coordination between Canada and the United States.
Well, things are even worse.
It won't surprise you to hear, although Trudeau has certainly got the headlines for his bold support of Ukraine during the Russian-Ukraine war, announcing weapons systems going over there.
In fact, my understanding is that only a single tank was actually delivered, and much of the other weaponry was not, because it was not up to standard.
It wasn't operational.
It wasn't co-operational with other equipment sent by our allies.
This rings true to me when I realized that Canada was not a participant in a major NATO exercise this year.
We simply didn't have the stuff.
You might recall there used to be an annual sort of top gun fighter jet contest in Alberta, in Cold Lake, Alberta, called Operation Maple Flag.
It was like a multinational training contest.
Canada simply hasn't hosted it.
And I think the reason is we can't keep up with the countries that have F-35s and F-22s and F-16s and F-15s.
Our old CF-18s just don't do the job.
So what will happen in Canada if, as every poll suggests, Pierre Polyev becomes the new prime minister?
We lack the American tradition of military service for our political class.
Trump himself did not serve in combat.
JD Vance, in fact, was at West Point, if my memory serves.
There is a tradition in American leaders to have a connection to the military.
Despite having no such personal connection, will Pierre Polyev rebuild the armed forces, not just in terms of equipment and payment, but in terms of moral support, in terms of giving it a proper mission, not just using it as a press release.
Joining us now to talk about this is someone who probably knows more than most.
His name is David Redmond.
For 27 years, he served in the Canadian Armed Forces before moving on to other public service careers, including acting as an emergency preparedness officer in the Alberta government.
He recently published a lengthy essay in the C2C Journal, which is a conservative magazine.
You can find it at C2, the numeral 2, cjournal.ca.
The essay was called Unfit for Duty.
It is time to rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces.
And David Redmond joins us now.
Pleasure to have you on the show.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you for having me.
Well, a 33-page essay, at least that's what it is when I printed it out.
That's more than just an op-ed or an editorial.
That is a deep review of our armed forces.
I think the timing of your deep review is perfect because I think the Conservative Party of Canada knows that it will be forming government probably within six or nine months, and it's probably starting to think we better put some meat on the bones of our plans.
Is that why you wrote it?
You want to influence the incoming government?
I wrote it to get any government, probably the Conservative government, to realize the state of the armed forces.
But even more than that, back in March, I published on Frontier Center for Public Policy an article on the complete set of six national interests that define a democracy, one of which, of course, is national security.
And a part of national security is the Canadian Armed Forces for our country, national defense.
And I've been watching with absolute horror what's happened to our military over the past nine years.
And like many veterans, found it completely unacceptable.
And so what I tried to do is to put into a paper what's happened to our armed forces, why we are where we are, and then to present a solution, because you never just bring a challenge in the Army.
You always have to show up with the solution.
So if you read the paper, the first half defines the problem and states how we got where we are.
And the second half presents what's needed to overcome the challenge and then an actual process to implement what's needed.
You know, I find it interesting how Donald Trump is sort of threatening NATO.
It's sort of like his tariff threat.
I don't think he wants the or else to come through.
It's just he wants to get people's attention.
He sort of says, if you don't carry your weight, then we're out of here.
Well, he doesn't want to leave.
If he wanted to leave, he would just leave.
He's trying to get their attention.
I think people are deliberately misinterpreting him because they would rather quarrel than fix the problem at hand.
I think his style works.
I think Trump's threats have really coaxed Europeans to start to chip in more to their military.
It hasn't worked with Canada yet, has it?
No, it definitely hasn't.
And when I hear things coming out of this government's mouth, it's the same as before.
Back when they were first elected in 2015, they promised new fighter jets, they promised new ships, they promised new tanks and equipment for the Army.
And not a single one of the things they promised in 2015 has come true.
So anything that they promise now in a knee-jerk reaction to the threats coming from south of the border, I believe is just that, a knee-jerk reaction, once again, rhetoric, which won't have any substance.
You know, we absolutely depend on the United States to protect us.
I was just talking with Gordon Chang about the Chinese hot air balloon spy device.
It was tracked over Canada.
I think it was the Yanks who first spotted it.
I don't know if it was the Canadians.
And it was allowed just to traverse our whole country before it was taken down in the States.
And I just, I don't know if we would have even spotted it.
I mean, correct me if my facts are wrong on that.
I don't think we would have spotted it without them.
And there might come a time if we continue on our path of just sort of demoralizing and defunding our armed forces when some hot air balloon, some ship, some country plants a flag on some Arctic island.
We find out about it months later by accident, and we literally can't do anything about it.
Like, I think that would be very much on brand for the Canada of the 2020s if we continue on our path.
I agree with you, and that's why I wrote the paper.
And you'll see I put the solution in five steps.
And the first is to define the purpose.
You can't just suddenly say you're going to buy 12 submarines.
It's a joke.
You have to define what is the purpose of the armed forces of Canada.
And from that falls the combat capability of the personnel and then the appropriate equipment for those combat capable personnel.
And the whole idea that Canada at this point has less operationally deployable personnel than the New York City Police Department is not only makes me ashamed, it's terrifying.
The sovereignty of our country should be our number one aim.
And for the Armed Forces of Canada, it should be the number one mission, not their sole mission, but their number one mission.
And to do that, they have to have combat-capable people that are capable to deploy on every type of mission.
And as you use as an example, the sovereignty of our North, I believe, we need to have mission-oriented soldiers in every province and territory in Canada.
We need an Air Force and a Navy that can protect our three coasts and our airspace.
But we need to be able to deploy surge capacity into every corner of our country as our number one mission in response to any threat.
Then we need to understand that we share this continent with one of the largest superpowers in the world, probably at the present time, still the largest.
And our neighbor to our south counts on us to make sure that we can at least do our part to defend our piece of the continent and not allow it to become a hotbed of international organizations which mean to do both us and them harm.
So I believe the Canadian Armed Forces has the outward-looking mission while other members of our national security, our border services, our Coast Guard, our police take care of the internal measures, but with an armed forces that's capable of backing them up from coast to coast to coast on land, sea, and air.
You know, I was just thinking about the different values.
Like you say the purpose of a military is very important.
And I have started thinking about that.
And I'm leaping through your paper here where you talk about purpose.
So many of the reasons and the morale and the mission of a military are at odds with the mindset of the Trudeau regime.
And I'm not particularly picking on him because I think there's been a decline under all parties over the last 50 years.
But if you de-racinate your country, if you pull out the roots, if you erase your history, if you take Sir John A. McDonald off the $10 bill, if you change your anthem, if you replace lethality of the military with wokeness,
if you call your country a country of genociders, if you say we're a post-national state, we're really just an address, and you give away your citizenship to anyone who says they're a foreign student and now we have a million folks.
Defending Sovereignty Not Keeping Peace00:12:46
Like if you devalue your country so much, of course you're against the military because the military is the opposite of all those things.
It's about identity.
It's about pride.
It's about excellence, not affirmative action.
It's about distinguishing our country from foreign countries.
It's about saying that our judgment is superior to that of our enemies.
Like it would almost be impossible for someone like Justin Trudeau to support the military because every single thing a military requires or a military is contrary to his worldview.
But you could not have a strong, proud, effective military run by Justin Trudeau because it's an anathema to everything he believes.
What do you think of that?
Okay, I want to answer you in three parts.
The first part is why I wrote the paper back in March, Canada 2024, a strong, resilient nation or a fractured country.
And in it, I define the six national interests that form any democracy.
The first two of those is unity, and the second is national security.
And then there's good governance, rights and freedoms, economic prosperity and growth, and individual and societal well-being.
Those are the six.
But the first two, unity and sovereignty, without them, the other four might as well not exist.
And what we've seen in the last nine years is a direct attack on those first two elements, the unity of our nation and the unity of our citizens, the intentionally fragmenting and breaking up of the members of our Canadian public,
and a direct attack on all elements of national security, not just the Canadian Armed Forces, our intelligence services, our policing services, our courts, all of the pieces that fit into our complete umbrella of national security.
And the largest tool that was used against it was massive and overwhelming immigration.
So then I want to go to the second part of what you said.
When we look at a country, it's the common ethics and values that form the unity of a nation.
And when you intentionally attack the common ethics and values, you are intentionally trying to erode the country.
And I always use the country of Switzerland as a good example of a country where you can have three cultures, Italian, German, and French, but with one binding set of ethics and values.
And I believe that the mass immigration that we've seen coming into our country has intentionally attacked both the unity and our national security.
So then the third part of what you've said is about the armed forces specifically.
I presented two years ago to the National Standing Committee on Defense at their request when the Trudeau government was trying to re-roll one-third of the Armed Forces of Canada to be the emergency management force to take care of wildfires and floods.
The Armed Forces of Canada is your combat capable force.
Its job is to defend our country.
It is to fight.
It is not to do anything else.
It's not for social experiments.
It's not for fighting wildfires and forest fires.
It is to fight an enemy using every possible tool to destroy them or neutralize them.
And so every day that you take away from a combat capable force, you are taking away a day of them training.
And as I say clearly in the paper, to make a sergeant, a sergeant who commands a section of 10 takes 10 years because you have to teach individual skills, collective skills, then battalion skills, brigade skills, divisional skills.
You need to incorporate them into a complete overall environment.
You need to give them their personal trade as well as the collective trade to work and fight together.
People don't even know the words dash down, crawl, observed, sites, fire when they come in as a citizen, but they have to be taught over and over and over and refreshed, and then continuous training to keep their skills at an intense level.
So if you do anything that takes away from the training cycle and the deployment cycle of a combat capable force, you are eroding that capability.
There is many other people to do all those other roles.
Our border services, our police services, emergency management, which is in every province and territory of Canada, takes care of wildfires, floods, and tornadoes.
You don't need the armed forces to do that.
So the three parts, yes, there's an intentional erosion of the unity and the national security, all elements of it in our country.
There is the breakdown of that ability within the armed forces to do their core mission, which is to be combat capable on a moment's notice to deploy anywhere within our country against all enemies,
foreign and domestic, but also to be able to deploy in support of our allies in North America and wherever else the government of Canada determines is in the national interests of our country abroad in support of friends and allies.
You know, you're talking about the core mission of the military, and you're right.
I remember a few decades ago, there was a bad snowstorm in Toronto.
And at the time, the mayor, Mel Lassman, wanted the military to come shovel.
You know, every single battle.
I was in the Army during that period.
I served from 72 to 99.
And a very good friend of mine that I'd served in Egypt with back in 1978 was the commander of Land Forces Western Area.
And he phoned me.
I was in Borden, Ontario.
And he was a joke, but he called me up.
He was a general, and he called me up.
And he says, Dave, you haven't happened to see a battalion driving down the road past you.
I seem to have lost my immediate rapid reaction force.
I'm told they're on their way to shovel snow in Toronto.
The two of us laughed, but it wasn't funny.
It was absolutely ridiculous.
I was also there for the ice storm.
I closed my complete training establishment and deployed 300 soldiers to help restore power in both Ontario and Quebec.
Now, don't get me wrong, Canadian soldiers are extremely proud when they can be used as the force of last resort to help in emergency management tasks in our country.
But every minute of every day that they are away from their training and deployment missions to fight for our country is a day that their skills diminish.
And so we should only use them as the force of last resort.
And what we're seeing in this last nine-year period is the armed forces being called routinely by premiers of provinces, by mayors of towns, to deploy because they have failed to invest properly in their armies.
Exactly right.
That's exactly it.
And they have failed to prepare.
And it's like, oh, we'll call the army.
They'll do anything.
Correct.
You know, and I think of one of the, and by the way, you know, I remember growing up, people used to say, well, Canada, we're two things.
We're the best health care in the world.
No one says that anymore.
And we're the peacekeepers.
I don't know if we have any peacekeepers deployed anywhere.
I know there's a little force of Canadians in the Baltics, but they're not peacekeepers.
They're sort of with, I think, in Latvia or Estonia.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
But, I mean, David, is it true that we don't actually have any Canadians on a UN peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world?
Is that accurate to say?
To the best of my knowledge, we have individuals deployed in UN missions, but we don't have formed units of any type.
And maybe I need to be a little more clear on the UN peacekeeping.
I served 72 to 99, and so I did my share of United Nations peacekeeping missions.
And I would put it to you that while they were a great source of national pride at times, their effectiveness was very limited because in almost every one of them, there was no peace to keep unless the nations had already decided they wanted it.
The forces were routinely sent simply to give a cooling off period, and most of the time that didn't work.
So peacekeeping missions are a bit of a misnomer.
Canadian forces deployed routinely in them.
And if you look in my paper, to me, it's not one of the missions that I support.
I support combat capable training and capability.
And every type of mission that is not focused on that diminishes the ability of our forces to respond when the time is required.
Well, I agree completely.
I mean, peacekeepers are cast out of the country when the nations involved want to go to war.
Often peacekeeping is used by third world countries as a source of revenue because they get paid to peacekeep.
We've heard terrible stories about some peacekeepers, largely from third world countries as well, engaging in sex trafficking.
I guess my only point was, even though it was only for bragging purposes 20 years ago, we don't even have that anymore.
Correct.
And the fact that, you know, I think the last mission we were on was when Justin Trudeau's mom came back from a sort of an eco-tourism trip to Mali, Africa.
Like his mom went there and came back and had a huddle with Justin.
And so he sent peacekeepers to Mali, a very dangerous country.
Thank God that mission ended with no casualties.
But I mean, it's so obvious that Trudeau does not believe the core mission of the military is what you said.
It's not about lethality.
It's not about projecting force.
If you were to ask him, and frankly, I think a lot of the entire political class, I don't have to pick on Justin Trudeau, the NDP would say the same.
The bloc would say the same.
And I bet you half the members of the Conservative Party who haven't thought about it clearly would say the same.
I bet you 80% of the media, if you ask them the core purpose of the military, they would not say it's to project force, to destroy or neutralize the other side, to protect our territory.
They would talk about, like I see an absurd story out of the UK.
They're thinking of having, I think it was in the UK, electric-powered military vehicles for carbon reduction reasons.
We saw under the Biden-Harris administration an emphasis on transgenderism in the military.
These are other, and I mean, to me, they're ridiculous.
Other people might find them worthwhile, but they certainly have nothing to do with lethality.
And I don't think the modern liberal state can embrace the idea of we are trying to kill the other side as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I don't think they're even comfortable with the idea of a military.
What do you think about that?
Well, I start the paper with an ancient quote from ancient Greece.
It's anonymous, but every country has an army.
Theirs are somebody else's.
And the intent of that quote was, if you don't defend yourself, someone will come in and take you.
And then you'll have their army with their foot on your neck.
Now, my entire point in the paper is to try and refocus that combat capability is the core essence of any military.
And if you're not training to use it, you are using it.
But behind it all, and I think President-elect Trump said it very clearly in his first tenure, that the threat of a fully combat-capable force helps with diplomacy.
And that that's part of the intent.
If you have in Canada a force that can be deployed and that people know is credible and it can cover each of our partnership agreements, all of our alliance agreements, it can defend the sovereignty of Canada and assist in the sovereignty of North America, and the world sees it as best in class, even though it may not be the largest.
The mere threat of its use helps in all of our foreign affairs and diplomatic missions because we are a credible nation.
Defending North America's Sovereignty00:06:50
We are exactly the opposite now.
People look at Canada.
Our alliances laugh at us, don't invite us to meetings, intentionally ignore our input.
Our foreign affairs people have great difficulty getting any credibility in the world because they look at us and they know we're not a serious country and we don't take our national security and part of that national defense seriously at all.
In fact, we have intentionally destroyed them.
Yeah, I mean, in the last few years, I've heard the phrase AUKUS, which we never heard of before.
AUKUS is Australia, UK, and U.S., those three countries sort of smushed together into one word.
Well, who's missing from AUKUS?
We are.
We're still part of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, though I'm not sure how much our allies are sharing with us, given how the Chinese government has penetrated the parliament.
But we're just not even part of AUKUS.
We weren't even invited.
That's not just an alliance.
They're buying equipment together.
It's its own sort of treaty.
That name is a spin-off of when I served.
It was called ABCA, the American British Canada, Australia, brackets, New Zealand.
New Zealand is in there as well.
And so it used to be ABCA, and the sea was clearly us.
They formed AUKUS because they threw the sea up.
That's very sad, by the way.
I mean, we were disproportionately there in World War I, World War II.
Absolutely.
In the late 40s, I think we had the third largest Navy in the world.
We actually had an aircraft carrier for a while.
I mean, we had a whole beach, Juneau Beach, next to our allies, Juneau and Sword and Utah, and, you know, on Normandy.
That Canada is gone.
And you can even see it in recruitment efforts.
I mean, how important it was to Justin Trudeau to have those tampon dispensers in the men's bathrooms on military bases.
That was such a high priority.
But regular kit for the soldiers, well, they had to buy it themselves.
There's food banks every year on Canadian military bases.
We did a story once about one of the, I think it was even CFP Borden, when they had like Christmas hampers for soldiers who couldn't afford to feed their families.
We did a story about it, and we raised money to donate money to this base.
The government refused to take the check because it was too embarrassing.
We did an access to information request.
They needed the money, but they refused to take a gift to their Christmas hamper project because they didn't want to be embarrassed.
But they found money for the tampon dispensers.
It's madness.
I mean, I suppose you're always going to have people who join the military no matter what.
But who would sign up for a military that's underequipped, that's main job is shoveling snow, that's ordered around based on the whim of Trudeau's mom, I talk about Molly, and that is left out of all the action.
I mean, if you were a young Canadian man who wanted adventure and patriotism, you're probably more likely to find it in the British Army or the American Army.
Absolutely.
In the Latvian deployment, there were serious, clear articles of soldiers buying their own personal kit because the supply system couldn't supply it to them.
We know that we're supposedly there training other forces how to fight and be combat capable on equipment that we don't even have in our own armed forces here in Canada, air defense systems and the munitions for our artillery.
The story goes on and on and on.
And so that's why I wrote the paper to try and reorient both our political class, but in particular, Canadian citizens.
And I hope they actually read it and understand that combat capability is something that every country in the world that's a serious nation has.
And that all the things that we seem to be using our armed forces for are incorrect.
And if you want to have a peacekeeping force, then make a Peace Corps and let someone invite someone.
You know, I hear Mr. Trump, President-elect Trump talking about perhaps it's time for us to become a state.
For those who haven't read either my paper from March or this paper, the Monroe Doctrine was a real thing back in the late 1800s after the Civil War in the U.S.
It was felt that the United States had the right to all of North America, including Mexico and Canada.
And I hear people talking about wanting to be part of the United States.
Well, sir, I don't.
I am a very proud Canadian.
Both my mother and father fought in World War II.
Both were in the RCAF.
My mother is a WAF.
My father is a pilot in the Pacific.
My grandfather fought in the First World War in the trenches in France as a Canadian in the 1st Canadian Division.
I understand from my travels, 27 years in the Army in some pretty awful places in the world, what it means to live in a democracy.
But a democracy comes with the responsibility to defend your rights and freedoms.
And if you don't, you will lose them.
There was a very powerful presentation at the National Citizens Inquiry in Red Deer in April 2023 by a lady who had grown up in the Solidarity Movement in Poland.
And her purpose coming to the NCI was to plead with Canadians to take their rights and freedoms, which were totally demolished during the COVID incident, because she saw happening in Canada what had happened in Poland.
And she did not, she had fled Poland to get away from all of that at the end of the Solidarity Movement.
And she saw Poland re-emerging in Canada and she couldn't believe it.
If you don't defend your rights and freedoms, you don't have them.
And a country that isn't prepared to defend their rights and freedoms isn't a country worth defending.
And that was in the white paper on defense under the Cretchin era, who then turned around and tried to destroy the armed forces at that time in the 1990s.
So the hypocrisy isn't new, but Canadians need to understand that this beautiful country they live in is being demolished in front of them with the protests we see, the Hamas supporters in our streets, the Eritrean supporters in our streets, the Khalestani people in the streets fighting for wars that aren't part of Canada and don't represent the ethics and values of our country.
Need More Canada?00:04:33
And it's time we took our democracy seriously and stopped bringing people into our country who don't respect our ethics and values, but at the same time standing up for the people that do respect our ethics and values and having a combat capable force that can defend our sovereignty within our own country.
Wow, you touched on a lot of things there for sure.
You know, when Trump, in his joking, provocative way, like he finds a sensitive spot and he keeps poking at it.
And watching different Canadian reactions to the 51st state thing is very illuminating.
Your reaction is: you know, if you value being Canadian, you got to keep it.
You got to show it.
You got to do something about it, not just whine.
I saw Jean Charais was saying, we should all be deeply offended.
That's not an action plan.
That's an emotional response, frankly, one of weakness and one of reaction.
You know, there's an old saying, you win one army, you know, as in you have a strong point of view, you believe in something, okay, you win one army.
And I think in his own way, Trump is trying to say, well, get a bloody army, get a border, enforce the law.
Like, if you actually go to the beginning of this whole shenanigans with Trump, he said to Canada and Mexico, do me a favor and keep my main campaign promise for me before I even take office, fix the border.
Because we share a border where neighbors, you know, good fences make good neighbors.
The president of Mexico pretty much said yes right away.
She grumbled a bit, but she said yes.
Only Canada went into this great Hamlet-like, you know, you know, soliloquy.
How about fix your border?
If you think you're a sovereign country, prove it by fixing your border.
If you think you're an independent country, prove it by funding your army.
In a way, Trump is saying things that hurt feelings, I think, that are pointing us towards, well, how about man up?
How about fix our problems?
If you actually are deeply offended, as Jean Charais says he is, why not say, we'll show those Americans, we'll have a strong border, we'll have a strong military, we won't let them push us around.
I think secretly that's what Trump wants.
I don't think secretly.
I think he's been quite open in Canada about it.
And let's be very clear: the United States has been calling us out for an awfully long time.
When Obama stood up in our legislature and said we need more Canada, he wasn't talking about feminism and women's issues.
He was, if you go to the speech, he had just opened the whole discussion with the fact that we weren't paying our way and meeting our NATO commitment.
And when he said we need more Canada, he was saying we need Canada to meet its 2% and to contribute militarily to NATO.
And Trump is just simply reiterating what's been said to Canada for an awfully long time.
When I served in uniform, back when I did three tours in Germany from 72 to 99.
And when we went on an exercise in Germany as part of a U.S. or a German corps, we're talking 130,000 troops deployed.
Canada was tiny, but we were respected because we had kept a full mechanized brigade group on the ground and contributed with good combat capability.
And everyone said a Canadian soldier was worth 10 of any other soldiers.
We just needed to have at least 10 times more to be credible.
And so that was being said in the 1980s.
This isn't the first time.
It won't be the last.
But if we don't take it seriously this time, there will be massive trade implications, as there should be.
If I can take you back to 1970, when Justin Trudeau's father was the prime minister and he destroyed the Canadian Armed Forces, when we had a country with 20,000 people, we had armed forces of 105,000.
Pierre Trudeau came to power, cut it to 70,000 with the intention of taking it to 50,000 and turning it into a peace corps until the NATO alliance said no main battle tank, no committed brigade group in Europe, no trade with Europe.
Well, we've come full circle under his sun, only it's worse now.
Rebuilding Canadian Armed Forces00:01:15
Incredible.
Well, I think your timing here is sound because I do believe that 2025 will be the year where Canada says goodbye to Justin Trudeau.
In fact, it seems like half of his caucus want him gone already.
We're taping this show a couple of days before it goes to air.
There's even a chance by the time it airs, Trudeau will be given the boot, but I very much doubt that.
I think that it's important that the Conservative Party of Canada reassert the values that give rise to a strong and self-respecting military, because it's not just about equipment and money.
It's about the ideas behind the military, why we have one, why we need one, the mindset of the people in the military, what is their purpose and mission.
And you're so right that we've lost our way.
I've really enjoyed talking with you over the course of the last half hour.
Folks, if you want to read the very detailed essay by our guest, you can find it at C2C Journal.