"As for Canada, our Arctic surveillance remains gossamer thin and our navy is still waiting for the first Arctic/offshore patrol ships, which were initially promised eight years ago and whose numbers have been slashed back to help slay the Conservative's deficit dragon."

That is from a CBC article http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-pacific-arctic-brian-stewart-1.3297267

Canada needs to take a hard look at our armed forces, decide what strategic and national interests they will face/be used for and get to it. If we are going to have an army then we have the responsibility to support it. Same goes for navy and air force. We need military leadership that follows through on the government's orders, but we must recognize that stupid orders lead to stupid results and that what we really need is a clearer vision of what role we want to play in world affairs, if any.

We have had ten years of bad government, something we can only fault ourselves for because we put them in office. Since we're back to the drawing board anyway, we may as well fix it right. If we continue to have standing armed forces, what should be our priorities? I think we have to drop the strategic dimension and concentrate on home defence at the national level, SAR (on land and sea), large emergencies like floods and snow/ice storms, and if we get entangled internationally it should not be at the behest of existing empires like the US, China, Russia or the oil-rich countries.

We have got ourselves into increasingly shady wars and for what? We have done some of the UN's dirty work and for what? We initially put troops in Afghanistan so as to free-up some American troops the US needed pronto for the Iraq War. Over a decade later we're still involved. For what? Our special warfare troops are world-class, and maybe we need more concentration in that area of combat operations, or maybe we need to change our approach to the countries that want not so much our help but more tellingly, our involvement.

And if we are going to have armed forces, we'd be well advised to build the weapons here, in Canada. We can do very well without so much of the crap we buy from elsewhere, and that includes boats and planes.