Cyclone helicopters to reach full operating capability in 2025

By: Murray Brester, CBC News 

Long, tortured story of getting replacement for Sea Kings a 'case study' in how not to do it

A CH-148 Cyclone maritime helicopter is seen during a training exercise at 12 Wing Shearwater near Dartmouth, N.S., on Wednesday, March 4, 2015. The air force says it will now be 2025 before the Cyclone fleet reaches full operating capability. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)

The country's air force is now projecting it will be 2025 before its long-suffering CH-148 Cyclone helicopter fleet is fully up to speed with all of the aircraft, pilots and ground crew needed for deployments — both at home and overseas.

The date for what's known in the military as Full Operational Capability (FOC) will be almost 21 years after Paul Martin's Liberal government signed a contract with U.S. defence giant Sikorsky Aircraft to deliver 28 state-of-the-art maritime helicopters.

Related:
Cyclones delays could lead to chopper shortage as Sea Kings retire
CH-148 Cyclones delivered to Halifax airbase

It will also be seven years after the last of the vintage CH-124 Sea King choppers is scheduled to retire after flying for over five decades.
'It is really a case study in how not to acquire something' - Retired colonel George Petrolekas, Conference of Defence Associations Institute

The timelines were released to CBC News as part of research into the country's defence policy review.

Delays in the Cyclone program, which former defence minister Peter MacKay once described as the "worst" procurement in the country's history, may seem routine.

But some defence experts are concerned what the absence of a fully capable maritime helicopter will mean for the military, in light of increasing Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic and recent plans by a number of Asia-Pacific countries to build bigger underwater fleets.
Canada lagging in maritime defence

"Canada needs an enhanced ability to detect submarines and counter them if necessary," said Dave Perry, an analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

"Currently, we're lagging in this area, and getting a fully capable maritime helicopter is crucial, along with maritime patrol assets and capable subs. If the FOC date is now 2025, the project has fallen behind, again, at a time when their [anti-submarine warfare] capabilities are needed more than ever."

Canadian soldiers board a Sea King helicopter as they participate in advanced amphibious training from the Shearwater Jetty in Halifax on Tuesday, July 30, 2013. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)

The last report on major Crown projects, tabled in the spring, said the Cyclone project would be completed and closed out in 2022.

"It is really a case study in how not to acquire something," said George Petrolekas, a retired colonel and senior military adviser. "It's a long saga that has to do with choices made by various governments across the political spectrum."

It is also a cautionary tale for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan as he resets the country's defence policy.
Navy woes blunt impact of delays

The military would be in a lot more trouble with the slow roll-out of the Cyclones if the navy wasn't in such dire straights, he added.

"We're fortunate, in a way, because we have lost four-to-five ships, but we actually ordered a full compliment of helicopters for a navy that no longer exists," said Petrolekas, of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute.

Over the last few years, the navy has retired both of its supply ships, two destroyers and is about to decommission a third warship. A fourth Tribal class destroyer was mothballed in the early 2000s because of budget cuts.

Petrolekas says if the navy "carefully husbands its resources" there should be enough helicopters to meet its requirements.

Another defence expert, John Orr, a retired Sea King pilot and a fellow at Dalhousie University's foreign policy centre, suggested the public should look at the situation in context.

"To my knowledge, there was never a halcyon time when major projects marched smartly through all their major milestones in an orderly fashion," said Orr, a former colonel and author of a history on the Sea Kings, in an email.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces a new $155-million facility at Canadian Forces Base 443 Squadron in Sidney, B.C., in 2011. The new facility is to be home to some of the 28 Cyclone helicopters. (Ben Nelms/Reuters)

He noted in an article in Canadian Naval Review how there were technical problems integrating the Sea Kings into service during the 1960s and that program had "the luxury of sufficient numbers of knowledgeable personnel" and operated "within a coherent procurement system."

Long-running corporate battles

The former Conservative government engaged in a long-running battle with Sikorsky, after the company missed the first deadline for delivery in 2008. A series of contract extensions and further missed deadlines resulted in the government taking a hard look, in the fall of 2013, into whether the troubled program should be ditched.

The Tories elected to stick with it and even doubled-down, announcing a fixed date of June 2015 to begin retiring the Sea Kings, which were still in service because of a decision by Jean Chrétien's Liberal government in 1993 to cancel the first replacement program.

Under the renegotiated terms with Sikorsky, announced by Public Works in January 2014, the air force was promised Cyclones that would be "fully operational" by 2018.

Instead, National Defence now says it will have 12 helicopters outfitted with basic capabilities available that year.
'There was never a halcyon time when major projects marched smartly through all their major milestones in an orderly fashion'- John Orr, retired Sea King pilot

The company will begin delivery in 2018 of the remaining 16 aircraft, which are expected to have fully operational combat software. Helicopters will continue arriving until 2021, but it will take an additional four years before the fleet is fully capable of delivering what the government ordered.

"Although delivery of all 28 aircraft in their final configuration is expected to be completed by the end of 2021, full operational capability, which includes the [air force] having the full complement of Cyclone personnel available and trained to enable the maximum helicopter-detachment deployment capability on [navy] ships, is expected to occur in 2025," said a statement by National Defence.

In a separate written response last week, defence spokesman Evan Koronewski said the Cyclones are expected to be available for deployment aboard navy frigates in 2018. Three of the warships have already been modified to receive them.

Will a Sizeable Canadian military deployment to Mali make matters worse?

By: David Pugliese, Defence Watch

Defence Watch received some views about the potential upcoming Canadian Forces mission to Mali from of an individual involved in the NGO community who has recently returned from that country. They have asked that their name not be published. Here is what that person has written to Defence Watch:

The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) is clearly seen as a party to the conflict by the many islamist groups, and by local powerholders profiting from the black market routes running through Northern Mali, but also increasingly to the north and south borders from Bamako.

MINUSMA was the expected passive UN force locked in by the financial and political interests of participating African contingents.

MINUSMA in Northern Mali has weak counter-IED capability, weak medical, weak engineering assets, and weak tactical ISR. They have had a weaker track record of protecting civilians who displaced themselves near UN bases. Canadians in MINUSMA would likely take casualties from IEDs or ambushes from local forces, so no happy story about blue helmets helping a transition to a peace that no local powerholder really supports. There’s no economy in Mali except the international assistance money they are getting to support this fight, and black market routes connecting Libya to Senegal to Ivory Coast for guns and drugs.

Given the context in Mali it is difficult to guess why the government can win a media victory with the Canadian public over sending more than a few advisers to MINUSMA, or a support company or two such as a role 3 hospital or engineers.


With MINUSMA’s track record something will happen soon that will cast a bad light on the mission (such as the performance of African contingents in making security worse for IDPs in South Sudan), which will expose the folly of placing CF combat assets under UN command run by African interests with little to no interest in tactical security of civilians.

International NGOs in Mali barely operate in the North, and the few that do, like the ICRC, distance themselves sternly from MINUSMA. So no easy media victory for the government in claiming that the Canadian mission will enable the delivery of aid. Whatever Canadians decide to do, it will always be overshadowed by the backroom efforts that the French are throwing around in aid, governance and foreign military support to the government.

The French seem to have an attitude to contain MINUSMA so as not to interfere with their strategic objectives and the influence networks in their former colony. The authorities in Bamako and the different clan-based politics are caught in a political struggle over the change of president sometime next year. So no happy story about governance and democracy promotion for Canadian aid either.

That struggle alone may generate more violence than the jihadist threat, leaving the CF with a weak operational situation as the UN mission gets evacuated and the narrative of the mission slips away from a story of a mission focused on north-south reconciliation and protecting governance from an islamist threat.

Where it would make some strategic sense for the CF to commit to Mali is if the mission is really in support of the US-French/Eurocorps (there are German and Belgian military deployed with the French not under UN command) counter-terrorism mission for West Africa.

AFRICOM may be asking Canada to shore up MINUSMA for better alignment to anti-extremists intelligence and influence activities. Working in continuation of US counter-terrorism objectives would make the most sense for the CF in Mali and with other Canadian commitments in Western Africa, but it would make a deployment under MINUSMA a travesty of the official aims of the UN mission and what will likely be couched in terms of absolute virtues by the government to sell the deployment to Canadians. Frankly the context in Mali is awful if the government hopes to score an easy PR win with the peacekeeping romantics in Canada. That security council seat may be a more substantial justification, but may come at a heavy price when something goes south in Mali to make the Canadian mission look bad.

Opportunities for a CF contingent to enable the delivery of humanitarian assistance may be limited. There are few international aid agencies active in Northern Mali where Minusma is deployed, and NGOs and agencies such the International Committee of the Red Cross who are very active through the Mali Red Cross rely on their own contacts with local communities and all armed groups.

MINUSMA is a party to the conflict in Mali, and aid agencies hoping to maintain their neutrality to access beneficiaries and ensure the safety of their staff often stay away from Minusma and UN coordination mechanisms in their field operations.

My personal comment is that a sizeable CF deployment outside of few staff officers or a field hospital may very well decrease the security and access to beneficiaries for Canadian-funded aid activities in the South of Mali. The statement by Minister Bibeau in support of the mission makes it a bit odd, since there will be no direct contribution at best to Canadian aid project outcomes by deploying the CF in Mali, and at worst Canadian funded aid projects can become the soft targets of the increased Canadian security involvement in country.

The good news is that a CF deployment would likely come with additional money for Canadian agencies present in Mali, notably the Canadian Red Cross who have started a sizeable maternal and child health program in support of the Mali Red Cross and ministry of health North and South of Bamako.

Three RCN Vesselsoutfitted to take Cyclone helicopters; 9 helicopters now with RCAF

By: David Pugliese, Defence Watch

The RCAF now has nine CH-148 Cyclone helicopters in various stages of capabilities/configurations. Another six will be delivered by July of 2017.

But as being reported full operational capability – which the Canadian Forces says is having the full complement of Cyclone personnel available and trained to enable the maximum helicopter-detachment deployment capability on RCN ships – won’t take place until 2025.

At this point, HMCS Montreal, Halifax, and Calgary are currently outfitted to receive the CH-148 Cyclone, Department of National Defence spokeswoman Ashley Lemire told Defence Watch. “The hangar configuration and physical integration on all 12 Halifax-class frigates, which is included as part of the overall MHP project cost and scope, are being done concurrently with the RCN’s Halifax-class Modernization Project and almost all of the flight deck structural work is now complete, with the exception of HMCS Montreal, which was the prototype ship modification designed and implemented under the contract with Sikorsky,” Lemire noted in an email. “The remaining ships will be converted at a rate that closely matches and supports the production of deployable RCAF helicopter detachments.”

CFAV Quest to be Decomissioned

By: David Pugliese, Defence Watch 

The Canadian navy’s last research vessel will be decommissioned, leaving the country’s defence scientists without their own ship to conduct research in the Arctic and other locations, according to documents leaked to Postmedia.

The Canadian Forces Auxiliary Vessel Quest, an oceanographic research ship used by the navy and Defence Research and Development Canada, was sidelined in 2014 as a result of cost-cutting measures by the Conservative government.

But on Friday afternoon an internal Department of National Defence email announced that the ship was being decommissioned.

In the email Canadian Forces Base Halifax commander Capt. Chris Sutherland confirmed he had received a letter from the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, Vice Admiral Mark Norman, about the fate of the ship.

“I am now able to share with you the decision from the VCDS that CFAV Quest will be divested,” Sutherland wrote.

A disposal plan for the ship will be developed but Sutherland’s message did not contain details on the timing of that process.

The ship has a 55-member civilian crew, which includes defence scientists.

John MacLennan, national president for the Union of National Defence Employees, said his organization has been trying for two years to get an answer from the Canadian military and the DND about the future of the ship.

“They’ve refused to tell us anything and then on a Friday afternoon, just before a long weekend, they spring this on their employees,” said MacLennan. “It’s par for the course on the way that DND treats its workers.”

The ship has conducted valuable research in the Arctic and in testing sonar and other specialized equipment, as well as contributing to NATO testing, said MacLennan, whose union represents some of the crew.

The ship was commissioned in 1969 but underwent an upgrade in 1999.

In a 2012 article in the Canadian Naval Review, Mark Tunnicliffe, a retired navy officer, noted the vessel has a mandate of not only contributing to acoustic systems development but an “entire range of technologies and concepts needed to support the requirement specifications for the next generation of Canadian warships.”

During a 2012 Arctic mission, for instance, the vessel supported testing for unmanned air, surface

and subsurface vehicles and an experimental Arctic surveillance system, Tunnicliffe wrote.

Sutherland said in his email message that he wants to meet next week with union representatives as well as hold a town hall with the crew of CFAV Quest. “We are committed to working with them and supporting them through this transition,” he wrote Friday. “My biggest concern is for the crew’s welfare, and I believe we need to work together to monitor the health of the workforce and ensure individuals receive the support that they need.”

MacLennan said Vice Admiral Norman was at meetings when he asked about the fate of the ship and how the military planned to do the research job in the future. At one point he was told by Norman’s staff that the Canadian researchers could install their equipment on board U.S. vessels.

“The navy procrastinated and then they mismanaged the situation,” said MacLennan. “I don’t think they have a plan B on how to fill this capability gap.”

MacLennan said for the last two years the crew has been taking care of the ship, painting it and doing other minor jobs.

The Problems with Peacekeeping

By: Richard Warnica, National Post 

Jacob Kathman takes a Moneyball approach to political science. He studies huge data sets on things like civilian deaths in civil war and international military intervention. As a political scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, Kathman has spent most of the past decade using that big data to puzzle out issues tied to global peace and security. But he keeps coming back to one question: Does peacekeeping work?

It turns out to be remarkably hard to figure out. That’s partially because researchers can’t seem to agree on what “work” should mean. Does success in UN peacekeeping mean ending war? Sustaining peace? Reducing attacks on civilians? Is it about fostering stable government, fighting terrorists or protecting human rights? Maybe it means just not making things worse?

Like a lot of big data analysts, Kathman speaks about his own work with boundless enthusiasm but also endless caveats. He hedges and qualifies, and always makes the listener aware of the limits of what he can know. Still, in his own cautious way, he’s pretty sure he has an answer. “The general consensus,” he said in a recent interview, “is, for the most part, peacekeeping seems to improve the situation on the ground, generally speaking.”

In other words, yes, peacekeeping does work. At least according to the kind of analysis Kathman and his colleagues perform. What they’ve done over several studies is look at UN troop and police deployments, month by month, all over the world for many decades. What they’ve found is that, despite some high-profile failures, peacekeeping does tend to improve things on the ground. “In terms of reducing violence, maintaining stability, improving progress towards democracy and economic stability, peacekeeping appears to be a pretty positive way forward for many war-torn countries,” Kathman said.

Last week, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that Canada will soon commit up to 600 troops and about 100 police officers to a United Nations peacekeeping missionin an undisclosed location in Africa. That would mark the most significant Canadian contribution to a single UN mission in a generation. The deployment would fulfill a major Liberal promise from last year’s election. It would also pivot the country in a rhetorical way toward a more big-L Liberal vision of what Canada should be in the world.

But Canada’s renewed interest comes at a difficult time for peacekeeping. The peacekeeping office, the largest in the UN, is in crisis. It is overstretched, undermanned and beset by serial scandals about sexual abuse, disease and self-serving bureaucracy. The system is in such trouble it could be at risk of a massive failure — a Srebrenica-like moment that could doom peacekeeping for decades, believes Richard Gowan, a peacekeeping expert in New York.

At the same time, research from Kathman and others suggests that, for all its many problems, peacekeeping can pay off. “The UN gets a pretty bad rap,” Kathman said. “But … it’s pretty surprisingly effective.”

And therein lies the problem for Canada. Peacekeeping can be abusive, bureaucratic, buck-passing, cholera-spreading and rape-ignoring. It also works. Can Canada re-engage and still keeps its soul?

***

Peacekeeping in the public imagination tends to ping pong back and forth between poles of horror and heroism. The idea was dreamed up during the Suez crisis in 1956 by, among others, Lester Pearson, the Canadian foreign minister at the time. During the Cold War, division on the Security Council kept large-scale peacekeeping missions to a minimum. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the age of mass peacekeeping began.

It didn’t last long.

A string of horrific failures in the early to mid 1990s soured many in the Western world on peacekeeping. In Canada, members of an elite airborne regiment tortured a local teenager to death while on a mission in Somalia in 1993. Early the next year, the UN failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, despite the pleas of Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, who was on the ground at the time.

In 1995, in what became the last straw for many in the West, UN peacekeepers allowed the wholesale slaughter of Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica. The attack served as a turning point in UN peacekeeping. “Prior to Bosnia, almost half of UN peacekeepers had been from Western countries,” Jean-Marie Guehenno, who served as the head of UN peacekeeping between 2000 and 2008, wrote in a memoir published last year. “When I left office, the West provided fewer than one in 10 of our blue helmets.”

Postmedia Network fileCpl. Tyler Gallant, of Petawawa, watches from the turret of his Coyote as a patrol of Canadian peacekeeping troops roll through the Bosnian village of Sanski Most in December 2003.

Peacekeeping didn’t stop in 1995, though it did slow down dramatically for several years. When it picked up again in earnest in the early 2000s, the missions looked different. The developed world continued to pay for peacekeeping, in Guatemala, Burundi, Haiti, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and more than a dozen other countries. But the soldiers increasingly came from poorer parts of the world.

By July 2016, more than 100,000 uniformed peacekeepers were deployed on 16 missions around the globe, at a cost of over US$8 billion a year. More than 30 per cent of those soldiers came from just four countries: Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. (Canada currently has a total of 103 soldiers, police officers and official observers deployed to five different missions in Africa and Haiti.)

The missions themselves had morphed, too. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Darfur region of Sudan, peacekeepers were deployed into combat where “there was little or no peace to keep,” according to a major UN peacekeeping review published by the organization in 2015. They were tasked with broad mandates to carry out over vast geographical spaces with little high-calibre support.

In his book, Guehenno suggests peacekeeping has become, at times, a way for the Western world to deal with problems it cares about, just not that much. In Darfur, “the leading Western countries … wanted ‘to do’ something, but certainly were not prepared to deploy their own troops and did not want to pay too much,” he wrote. The result was an overstretched, poorly manned mission that had little hope of containing the violence across a huge area of land.

Darfur was no exception. The peacekeeping review panel found, in mission after mission, a “widening gap between what is being asked of United Nations peace operations today and what they are able to deliver.”

ED OUDENAARDEN/AFP/Getty ImagesTwo Dutch soldiers riding on an armored vehicle accompanying a Dutch-UN convoy of 56 engineering vehicles on their way to Lukavac in Bosnia-Hercegovina on Feb. 28, 1994

The answer, some believe, is more Western troops and better equipment. Others see a problem of scale and politics. But scope and structure aren’t the UN’s only issues. Scandals, too, have continued to dog the peacekeeping world. In the past several months alone, as Canada has ramped up its peacekeeping talk, several embarrassing, atrocious incidents have come to light.

In June, Anders Kompass, a veteran Swedish diplomat and longtime UN employee, quit the organization in disgust. Kompass blew the whistle on allegations of child sexual abuse by UN and UN-affiliated peacekeepers in the Central African Republic in 2014. For his trouble, he was hounded by his superiors, asked to resign, suspended and investigated as a leaker. Even after a high-level, independent panel — chaired by former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps — cleared him of wrongdoing, he felt no option but to leave.

Related
Michael Den Tandt: The rose-tinted Liberal reminiscence of blue-helmets contains bomb-crater-sized holes
Matthew Fisher: Why an African mission could be more dangerous than Afghanistan
Chris Selley: Are we really any good at peacekeeping?
Matt Gurney: Don’t send Canadian troops to dysfunctional UN missions

Kompass thinks there’s something fundamentally broken about the UN. There’s an ingrained culture of secrecy and self-protection that allows horrific acts like child sexual abuse to go unpunished at the highest levels. “Instead of protecting the people, they are abusing them,” he said in an interview from his new home in Sweden. “And then no one is saying anything. It’s terrible.”

Kompass sees the same instinct — to circle the wagons — at play in another recent UN scandal. In August, the UN admitted for the first time that peacekeepers had been responsible for the introduction of cholera into Haiti in 2010. The disease has since killed more than 10,000 Haitians and made over 100,000 more desperately ill. The evidence linking the outbreak to a UN camp has been overwhelming, and public, for years, but the United Nations secretariat has, until this summer, done nothing but dodge.

“It was a very similar reaction to what I experienced,” Kompass said. “They just can’t recognize that they had (done) something wrong. They expect the rest of the world to do it, but they (won’t do it) themselves.”

AP Photo/Jason Patinkin, FileIn this July 25, 2016 file photo, some of the more than 30,000 civilians sheltering in a United Nations base in South Sudan's capital Juba for fear of targeted killings by government forces walk by an armoured vehicle and a watchtower manned by Chinese UN peacekeepers. According to reports from victims which have come to light Monday Aug. 15, 2016, South Sudanese troops, fresh from winning a battle against opposition forces in the capital, Juba, on July 11, 2016, went on a nearly four-hour rampage through a residential compound popular with foreigners, and the UN peacekeeping force stationed nearby are accused of refusing to respond to desperate calls for help.

Perhaps the most damaging, and disturbing, recent scandal, though has been playing out in South Sudan. According to a series of reports by the Associated Press, UN peacekeepers there have failed to intervene in a host of rampaging sexual assaults by government soldiers against both local and international women this summer. In one particularly brutal attack, on July 11, according to the AP, government troops broke into a hotel compound popular with foreign aid workers and spent four hours abusing the residents within. One aide worker was allegedly raped by 15 different soldiers.

“They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions,” the AP reported. “For hours throughout the assault, the UN peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help.”

Taken together, the three scandals would seem to confirm the worst fears of the UN-ophobic. Peacekeeping can appear, and indeed sometimes is, a horrific cluster of the ineffective, the abusive and the self-serving. But researchers, and even some critics, don’t think that necessarily means Canada should stay away. Without the renewed involvement of Canada, some believe, peacekeeping will only get worse.

“I think Canada is doing the right thing by re-engaging,” said Gowan, a non-resident fellow at New York University’s Centre on International Cooperation. But they have to do it the right way.

What that means differs depending on whom you ask. Gowan, for his part, sees the UN peacekeeping system as desperately overstretched, with peacekeepers on the ground in places where they have no credible local partners and no hope of restoring peace or protecting more than a fraction of the civilians at risk. “The system almost lives in denial about the number of civilians who have died on its watch in Darfur, South Sudan and the Congo,” he said.

Alex Urosevic / Postmedia News fileCanadian troops in Bosnia in December 2003.

Canada could make a tangible difference in some of those missions by providing high-end equipment or special forces —”no one wants, frankly, battalions and brigades of standard infantry from NATO countries,” he said. But it could make a larger impact by engaging in the system itself and pressing for widespread reform.

Charles Petrie, a former UN assistant secretary general, who helped write the 2015 peacekeeping review, agrees, to an extent. Petrie thinks the entire system needs to be rethought. The focus, he believes should be more on supporting political agreements and structures. He’d like to see smaller, more targeted peace-building missions, supported by small teams of highly trained soldiers able to react quickly to the worst humanitarian dangers. Canadian soldiers, he believes, could help form those rapid reaction teams.

Based on his research, Kathman thinks any increase in Canadian involvement would help. But if Canada does recommit in a serious way, he said, it would be better off focusing on a small number of missions rather than spreading its soldiers out. “The other thing we’ve found is that the more coherent a mission”— in other words, more troops from fewer countries — “the more effective those missions tend to be,” he said.

The consensus, though, seems to be that Canada can’t just focus on its own UN mission. “I think it’s much more than money and much more than troops,” Petrie said. “I think there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of how (peacekeeping works).”

***

On Thursday, the Canadian government announced a new reconnaissance mission to Mali, home to a large, unusually violent peacekeeping mission. The trip follows an earlier African excursion that saw Sajjan and a team of peacekeeping experts tour the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda.

The government insists that no final decision on a destination for Canadian troops has been made. But the Liberals do seem committed to the idea of sending a new wave of Canadian blue helmets somewhere, at some point soon.

“There’s a sense of incredible vulnerability across the UN system,” said Gowan. “And a sense that the organization has gone beyond its capabilities and some sort of reckoning is necessary.”

For better or worse, that reckoning is Canada’s now, too.