Study says Canada is too lax on civilian oversight of the military

Minister of National Defence David J. McGuinty waits to appear before the Standing Committee on National Defence (NDDN) on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Monday, Oct. 27, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby

OTTAWA — Canada maintains a low level of civilian oversight of the military due to Parliament’s rigid party discipline, according to a new book that compares it with fourteen other democracies.

That conclusion was arrived at after a 10-year study conducted by a trio of defence experts — academics David Auerswald, Philippe Lagassé and Stephen Saideman — and reported in a new book titled: “Overseen or Overlooked? Legislators, Armed Forces and Democratic Accountability.”

“When the military makes mistakes, it can be catastrophic. So you want to have more overseers, not less,” Saideman, an international relations professor at Carleton University, told The Canadian Press.

That stark conclusion comes as the federal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares to embark on a massive military spending binge at levels not seen since the Cold War. And it follows a major military sexual misconduct scandal that saw multiple senior military officials sidelined in recent years.

Saideman said the idea for the book started in 2007, when he expressed surprise over the modest role Parliament played in overseeing the Canadian Armed Forces — and the fact that parliamentary committees examining defence issues do not have security clearances allowing them to review classified information.

He said he raised this point with former prime minister Paul Martin, who told him Canada’s military oversight should be compared not with the U.S. but with Australia or the U.K. — democracies that have similar parliamentary systems of government.

Saideman took him up on that challenge, enlisted his colleagues and — after 18 years and a lot of travel — produced a book that argues Canada’s approach to military oversight is not at all like the approach taken by its parliamentary peers.

The book argues Canada is competing with Japan, Chile and Brazil for the bottom of the pack as “democracies with the most irrelevant legislatures for their civil-military relations.”

“We found out that the British and the Australians actually take this stuff much more seriously than we do,” Saideman said.

While Parliament has various panels that examine defence issues, the main one is the House of Commons national defence committee.

Not only do those MPs not have security clearances, they have little control over what they can do with the information they do get — and few tools they can use once they learn something, the authors write.

Committee agendas are controlled by both majority governments and minority governments like the one led by Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Former senior military brass, including former chief of the defence staff Tom Lawson and former vice-chief of the defence staff Guy Thibeault, told the authors they found the questions they got from MPs to be partisan or superficial. They said they prepared to defend themselves from hostile questioning in committee hearings, rather than explain what’s happening beneath the surface.

The authors say the pattern is clear: government MPs ask questions to which they already know the answers, while opposition MPs look to score political points rather than thoroughly investigate an issue.

A 2021 study into a sexual misconduct scandal involving top brass, including Gen. Jonathan Vance and his successor, Admiral Art McDonald, was stymied by a Liberal government filibuster — despite the fact that it was a minority Parliament where the government held less control over the political agenda.

“The Liberals still held the chair of the committee, and that person basically prevented the committee from producing a report that would have been critical of the defence minister,” Saideman said. “Party discipline is a real constraint.”

Britain has the same system of Parliament as Canada. But it has a tradition of looser party discipline and tends to produce rabble-rousers on the government bench — MPs who know they will never be in cabinet and are open to being a thorn in the government’s side.

Australia has an elected Senate that is rarely dominated by the governing party and serves as a check against the lower House.

The authors found that the countries with the highest levels of civilian political oversight of the military are the United States and Germany. The U.S. Armed Services committee holds the budgetary purse strings and control over promotions, giving individual members of Congress power and influence over the military.

Germany’s defence oversight committee is cleared to review classified material, has the power to approve deployments and can launch inquiries that grant it special investigative powers.

Canada’s Parliament does have such powers and can enforce them through the House of Commons itself. During the Afghanistan war, for example, a minority Parliament obtained classified information about the treatment of detainees.

But Saideman said even that effort got sidetracked by politics.

“Ultimately, the fight became about that (disclosure of documents), rather than actually, are we fighting the war right, or is the military behaving well in Afghanistan?” he said.

The authors argue Canadian MPs may not want to obtain security clearances because it would run against their immediate political interests.

The authors cite an interview they conducted with former NDP MP Randall Garrison, who opposed the idea of obtaining security clearance on the grounds that he would not be able to say anything publicly about what he learned.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has long refused to obtain a security clearance, arguing that he wouldn’t be able to freely speak or criticize the government based on secret information.

The authors argue most countries’ legislatures are “distracted, disinterested or underpowered” when it comes to rigorous military oversight, and lack a political incentive to change that.

But they also conclude that if politicians want to make reforms to civilian oversight, they can pursue “reasonable changes” inspired by other legislatures.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press