General wants to team with business
Private sector has role in military missions
Chris Wattie
CanWest News Service
July 23, 2005
TORONTO -- The head of the Canadian Forces Friday called on Canadian business leaders to take a "Team Canada" approach to overseas operations and join his soldiers on missions to troubled nations such as Afghanistan.
Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier said in a speech to a Toronto think-tank that the private sector has a role to play in future military missions. He called for the same type of campaign used by official foreign trade trips during the 1990s.
"I think it's a Team Canada approach that we need," he told the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies. "We need private industry involved ... you want to come in and make money from us, build our camps, fill our contracts or do our maintenance for us and then 10 years later when everything's stabilized and secure you can come and start operating your business.
"We need you there on Day 1. Take some risks with us on Day 1 as part of a team that we build ... with you supporting us and us being supported by you."
Hillier said he wants to expand the Canadian Forces partnerships with diplomats and aid agencies, such as the military-protected provincial reconstruction team which deployed to southern Afghanistan this week, to help rebuild the war-torn nations where the military is often sent.
"The Canadian Forces obviously has a part to play in that, but if you're just asking us to conduct military operations without a country being built around us, without a more stable society being built ... we really are just setting ourselves up for longer term failure."
Speaking to reporters after the speech, Hillier said he has no specific plans to involve industry in future missions, but indicated he wants the private sector to do more than fill contracts to service the military.
"When we decide to disarm militia forces in various countries, like Kosovo, like Afghanistan, the stumbling block is always can we provide jobs ... to these men who've been soldiers all their lives," he said.
"That's when we want industry to be stepping up to the plate and starting small enterprises and offering some jobs and therefore some hope for the future."
Hillier said Canada is just now beginning to realize that it is facing a multi-faceted threat from terrorists and organized criminals, which he called "a ball of snakes."
"The Canadian population right now, in general, is waking up from a bit of a long slumber," he said. "The times have changed. Canada is starting to realize that, and that realization, I think, grows."
And missions such as the latest Canadian Forces deployment to Afghanistan are a way of denying terrorists the use of such countries as bases of operations.
"It's a fertile garden ... where you prepare your venom and your violence to send it worldwide."
Hillier said Afghanistan now exports 4,000 tons of raw opium a year, most of it going to Europe and North America, which he called "a weapon of mass destruction. And there's no easy solution to getting rid of it whatsoever."