in the new strategic context there was “no obvious need to maintain the wide range of air, ground, and anti-submarine conventional forces needed to repel a military attack” and that in any event, the Canadian defence budget “today cannot not meet the rapidly increasing costs of a modern, high-technology military. Unless policy is changed quite radically, the result will be that Canada will have simply a miniature model of a traditional ‘general purpose’ military force—one with just a little of everything, but not enough of anything to be effective in any conceivable situation.”
To the Canada 21 Council, the “new global circumstances” and the “reality of financial stringency” demanded a restructured military establishment “that would be capable of assuring our territorial sovereignty, assisting in the protection of North America, and participating in common security operations to a greater extent than is possible now.” The protection of territorial sovereignty, a task falling primarily upon the air force and the navy, required “an ability to know what is going on within our borders, in our airspace, and in our contiguous oceans.” By contrast, participating in common security operations, “usually under the aegis of the United Nations, implies having reasonable numbers of combat-ready, well-trained troops, with fully adequate equipment, able to respond to requests in well-defined circumstances.” The Council advocated the “adoption of a Canadian policy that would specify the level of military operations above which Canada would decline to participate,” adding that it did “not believe that Canada either wishes to or could afford to maintain armed forces that would be capable of undertaking a peace enforcement role against modern, heavily-armoured military forces.” Moreover, “if we wish to expand and improve the armed forces’ ability to support common security missions, while also protecting territorial sovereignty, operating the search and rescue system, maintaining stand-by forces for aid to the civil power, and being prepared to act in national disasters, we must find the necessary resources by reducing or eliminating some current roles. This, in turn, implies the reduction or elimination of some of the armed forces’ traditional military capabilities.”
Now the motivations are a bit different (especially the desire by Gerald Butts etc. to turn funding towards domestic clients and pro Liberal riding's), but the end results will be the same, highly constrained capabilities and a lack of ability or desire to participate in larger coalition efforts. Look for more "Virtue Signalling" behaviours, including expanded "Blue Beret" missions to promote the peacekeeping mythology.
Sadly, if anything, traditional peacekeeping missions are even less likely now, and the proliferation of inexpensive cast off Soviet era tanks ranging from T-55 to T-72s in large numbers around the world (along with Chinese knock offs) mans that we are more likely to encounter modern, heavily-armoured military forces, rather than less.
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