Once a leader, Canada's peacekeeping efforts dwindling for decades, experts say

In 2016, at a United Nations conference in London, then-minister of national defence Harjit Sajjan made a pledge to fellow representatives from 70 countries: that Canada was prepared to deploy as many as 600 members of the armed forces to support future international peacekeeping operations.

Combined with the existing 133 military and police personnel already in the field by December of that year, Canada’s peacekeeping contributions were primed to reach a 20-year high, not seen since the drawdown of deployments to the Balkans in the mid-1990s.

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“Canada is committed to leading international efforts in peace support operations,” Sajjan said in a 2016 statement about the conference.

“I’m confident that our unique whole-of-government approach will make tangible contributions to peace support operations around the world.”

Data from the UN shows that in the seven years since the London conference, Canadian peacekeeping has not met Sajjan’s pledge.

And according to personnel totals from July of this year, there were just 57 Canadian peacekeepers active globally, split between missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, South Sudan, Haiti, Cyprus, Kosovo, Lebanon and the Golan Heights. 

UN totals for peacekeeping personnel may vary from those counted by the contributing nations, as they typically reflect the number of individuals whose expenses were reimbursed by the UN.

For example, the most recent UN numbers list 29 members of the Canadian Armed Forces active in peacekeeping operations, but in response to a CTV News inquiry, Canada’s Department of National Defence tallied 28 service members in that role, with an additional 57 personnel engaged in non-UN peace missions.

In a written statement to CTV News, Defence Minister Bill Blair underscored Canada’s contribution of “personnel, military capabilities and funds,” as well as training, to the UN’s efforts abroad.

Blair highlighted the December 2021 announcement of $85 million in contributions and related projects “to continue responding to the needs of UN peace operations and peacebuilding.”

“For decades, Canada has played a key role in supporting United Nations Peace Operations – and that will continue,” the statement read.

But to retired lieutenant-general and former senator Roméo Dallaire, who served as force-commander for UN peace operations preceding and amid the Rwandan genocide, Canadian peacekeeping has changed greatly.

“This country is failing miserably in taking the lead,” said Lt.-Gen. Dallaire in an interview with CTV News. “We used to; we’re not doing it now.”

Walter Dorn, a professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) and the Canadian Forces College, says the country lags behind not just its own past peace efforts, but those of dozens of its fellow nations today.

“For so many decades, Canada was the go-to source. We were the only country to have provided peacekeepers to every single UN mission of the Cold War,” he said in an interview. “Now, the UN can’t depend on us to provide anywhere near those kind of numbers.”

More recent comments from the prime minister and cabinet officials have underscored Canada’s financial and policy supports for peacekeeping, including inclusivity efforts for women and a set of guiding principles coined at 2017’s UN conference in Vancouver.

“The Government of Canada continues to support efforts to make peacekeeping more effective and more inclusive,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement this August. “Canada’s leadership in peacekeeping is a source of national pride.”

Dorn says it doesn’t measure up to prior commitments.

“The rhetoric remains lofty on paper and in speeches but the Canadian government has yet to match its words with deeds,” an ongoing analysis by Dorn of Canadian peacekeeping reads. “Canada defaulted on its promises and is not leading by example.”

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Peacekeepers dwindling for decades

The recent lows are the latest in a decades-long decline in Canadian peacekeeping.

UN figures show a 30-year peak of more than 3,000 active personnel in the early 1990s, the majority of which deployed to the Balkans during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia as part of the United Nations Protection Force.

But by the end of 1997, listed personnel counts had dropped by more than 90 per cent, to 254 troops. Brief increases followed at the turn of the millenium, amid conflict in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and in the mid-2000s, as part of political stabilization efforts in Haiti.

But in 2006, amid withdrawals of peacekeepers from the Golan Heights, personnel counts fell below 200, where they would plateau for the next decade.

In a 2019 review for the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, Graeme Young of the University of Glasgow describes “politics of disengagement” through the Harper years, as Conservative governments pursued a “Canada First” approach that saw increased militarism amid the American-led “War on Terror” after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, but the disappearance of peacekeeping from party platforms.

“[Harper’s] government’s turn away from liberal internationalism and concerted efforts to reorient Canadian foreign policy around the use of force … embodied fundamental lack of commitment to peacekeeping as a public good in the international system,” Young wrote.

The Liberal government that followed campaigned on the promise to “recommit to supporting international peace operations with the United Nations,” but as Dorn notes, declines in peacekeeping continued.

“Before his election in October 2015, Trudeau criticized the Conservative government of Stephen Harper for a decline in [the] number of uniformed personnel (rank 66th on the list of contributors),” Dorn’s analysis reads. “Surprisingly, under the Trudeau government, the contribution [would] fall further for over two years until Canada reached its lowest rank in history: 81st.”

At the most recent significant increase in 2018, Canada deployed peacekeeping forces to Mali, as part of Operation Presence. The following year, however, personnel would begin departing the country, leaving a standing roster of 10 peacekeepers, as of this year.

Canada once a leader in the field

As of this July, Canada ranks 66th among participating UN countries for its peacekeeping contributions, down from its December 1992 standing as third in the world, behind France and the United Kingdom.

Lt.-Gen. Dallaire says it is a matter of priorities shifting away from lasting peace globally, and more to domestic self-interest.

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“During the Cold War, peacekeeping was really a rich country’s sort-of arena,” Lt.-Gen. Dallaire said. “When the big powers didn’t need all those small countries anymore, and the dictators, many of them, took over; the frictions of the past exploded. We ended up in an era, which we’re still stumbling through, of imploding nations and failing states, mass atrocities and even genocide.”

The path to lasting peace, the former force-commander said, is an altruistic one -- beyond any contributing nation’s self-interest. That sense of responsibility to protect others, he said, had been a Canadian strong-suit, but mindsets have changed.

“What we’re still seeing now is a reticence of taking risks, of fear of casualties, and not providing the level of resources and people capable of not just stopping a conflict, but actually preventing conflicts from happening,” he said.

“That, I fear, is a long way down the road, still.” 

Edited by CTVNews.ca producer Phil Hahn