Ed T., thanks for posting that article by Susan Delacourt.

I agree with you about shallow thinking by the Conservative government. Mr Harper sure talked a great game of Arctic sovereignty and strengthening the Forces, but, once we were clear of Afghanistan, delivery just kept not happening. Priorities shifted, then drifted. To the best of my knowledge, we still don't have the fixed-wing search-and-rescue aircraft that has been promised in every Report on Plans and Priorities since the late 1990s, and I recently read in the Globe and Mail that the Navy is out looking to rent operational support ships as the fleet is now down to its last creaky old oiler. What ever happened to General Hillier's "big honkin' ship"? Oh, right. We got four Globemasters instead.

However, I think Canadians should give up any hope of a return to "traditional" peacekeeping. The practice of forming a multinational force to sit a buffer zone and babysit the cooling hostilities of two belligerent powers was a thing of the Cold War, when the belligerents were typically clients of the super-powers and the peacekeepers came from other clients of the super-powers. (UNEF I, fielded after the Suez Crisis, and the International Control Commission in Indo-China are the most glaringly obvious examples of this phenomenon.) The failure of UN-style interpositional peacekeeping in Somalia (1993), Croatia and Bosnia (1995) and Rwanda (1996) should have convinced even the most starry-eyed romantic long ago, but this fantasy just refuses to die. Bottom line: the Canadian Forces will never do that again. "Traditional" peacekeeping is over.

We can, however, expect to see a lot more deployments like Operation Hestia, the humanitarian mission in Haiti after the big earthquake of January 2011, and Operation Mobile, Canada's participation in the 2011 blockade and no-fly zone in Libya.