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Hillier’s shoes, hard to fill? That’s an understatement
Rick Hillier was too able, too outspoken, too likable and too impatient to last for more than a few years in the upper echelons of Ottawa. Yet in little more than three years as Chief of the Defence Staff he achieved more than half a dozen of his predecessors did combined.
Virtually single-handedly, Hillier reversed the disgraceful mistreatment of the Canadian Forces by the Chretien Liberals in the 1990s. He transformed the CF into a modern fighting force. He persuaded and bullied a succession of hapless defence ministers into doing the right thing - about equipment, about budget, and about Afghanistan. Always and everywhere, he stood up for his people. For all those reasons, Canadian soldiers don’t just like the man: They love him. To say that his shoes will be hard to fill, doesn’t quite cut it.
The broader public didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to Rick Hillier until July of 2005, when he famously said of the Taliban: These are detestable murderers and scumbags, Ill tell you that right up front. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties.
The context of those remarks was a public push by the then-Liberal government to prepare Canadians for a much bolder and more dangerous military mission than we had seen since the Korean War. And of course, Hillier was exactly right: The Taliban are detestable murderers and scumbags. There’s no other way to describe people who behead teachers and doctors and blow up children by remote control.
But Hillier’s choice of words, as often seemed to happen to him, were too vivid for us to leave in context. Overnight he became the brash general, and the outspoken Newfoundlander with a gift of the gab. With that came popularity and a big public persona that made politicians twitchy. And the chattering classes were delighted to be scandalized by this throwback, who could say with a straight face: We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people.
When Hillier said that, soldiers, sailors and airmen across Canada and around the world whispered a silent thank-you. Finally, someone with the stones to tell the truth. But in Ottawa, among the flatterers and the courtiers, honesty goes down very poorly indeed. Its impolite. It makes all the liars look bad.
And that was the least of it. Behind the scenes, Hillier was bulldogging past decades-worth of bureaucratic inertia. In 2005, after he persuaded Prime Minister Paul Martin and Bill Graham, then defence minister, that Canada could take on the bigger mission in Kandahar, Hillier needed gear - trucks, armoured vehicles, tanks, helicopters, planes. He needed everything and he needed it now.
So never mind the traditional procurement process, which typically involved at least a decade of bidding by various global defence contractors and thousands of pages of reports. Instead, Hillier in effect sketched a wish list on the back of a napkin and handed it to the defence minister. My guess is that this took him all of five minutes. Miraculously, it worked.
That ruffled feathers in a serious way, because by then there was big money at stake - billions. Corporations such as Lockheed-Martin and Boeing were vying for the right to build aircraft for Canada. Lobbyists for one firm would whisper, anonymously, that Hillier was too friendly with lobbyists from the other. The backbiting was intense. In the end the general shut them all up, by persuading the new Harper government to buy aircraft from both companies, as well as helicopters, ships, trucks, personnel carriers, tanks and other badly needed materiel.
There were more twists: The very Liberals who’d claimed prideful ownership of the Afghan mission in 2005 turned dead against it the moment they fell from power in 2006. The Harper government developed a mania for controlling every speech by any senior government figure and tried to impose this on Hillier. He resisted. He clashed with his new defence minister, Gordon O’Connor, and won.
Through it all, Hillier continued speaking out in defence of his soldiers and in defence of the mission in Afghanistan. He developed a madcap friendship with comedian Rick Mercer. He persuaded the chief executive of Tim Hortons to set up a franchise in Kandahar. He flattered his troops as though he was their proud father, rather than their boss. And he continued to take the calls, at all hours of the day or night, each time a Canadian soldier fell in combat. Those moments, he said, were always his worst. And somehow, you believed him.
The supreme irony of Rick Hillier’s career? His greatest gifts are those we once expected of politicians: vision, idealism, brains, eloquence, bluntness. Yet he’ll never be in politics. He said so categorically this week. The reason why is obvious five minutes into any of his speeches: He’s too dead-honest to have anything but loathing for that profession, as it now exists in our capital city. A sad state indeed.
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michael.dentandt@sunmedia.ca
Good for you!! We sent him a PEI Rockets jersey during my tenure as the Det Comd there ... his name on the back and everything. Slightly worn of course. 
I simply couldn't resist hauling it on over my uniform for the requisite pic opportunity that presented itself.
And if he shakes your hand you will remember that for a long time and aviod it a second time, what a grip.
