Prime Minister Louis St.-Laurent was in Washington on this date in 1953. He was in the American capital for talks with President Dwight Eisenhower and members of the new President’s Administration. One of the briefing notes prepared by the U.S. State Department ahead of the PM’s visit makes interesting reading today, an era where the Americans and many other Canadian allies feel Canada is not pulling its military weight in the defence of North America and in NATO.
“Their home air squadrons are equipped with obsolete aircraft and the RCAF has stripped itself of trained manpower for the squadrons in Europe,” the State Department briefing note said bluntly. “In theory there is an airborne brigade in Canada to check a surprise invasion of Canadian soil, but its personnel are scattered, the unit is seriously undermanned, and it lacks the aircraft to become operational. The Canadian naval program is at best feeble and is greatly in arrears. Canada has no organized anti-aircraft defense...”
The report then continued: “At the moment the RCAF squadrons in Europe have little behind them at home in terms of equipment or trained men. The ground troops abroad, also, however effective and self-sufficient in themselves, do not have behind them a solid structure of trained men and adequate equipment. To all intents and purposes, the Canadians have no usable reserve forces, and even as training cadres they are thin. Considerable progress is being made in producing military stores for an army buildup in the event of an emergency, but even this is spotty and there are many crucial deficiencies.”
Finally, the State Department author concluded. “As the situation stands today, the United States is almost exclusively responsible for the defense of North America, including the defense of Canada in the event of an emergency.”
You can read the entire report at this link: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v06p2/d967
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.