The Canadian Armed Forces’ domestic operations are meant to be an emergency backstop for Canadians; a lifeline when civilian institutions are overwhelmed.
In reality, they are increasingly used to manage natural disasters that are a matter of provincial responsibility.
“There’s a growing number of deployments where the government will respond to requests for assistance … long before provincial resources and local resources are exhausted,” said Christian Leuprecht, a distinguished professor at the Royal Military College of Canada.
“We now have provinces that send requests for assistance before storms even hit.”
That shift has helped make military uniforms a familiar presence at disaster sites across the country. But it has also raised concerns about what experts call “mission creep,” and its impact on the Forces’ preparedness for foreign deployments.
“People always think the military just sits around and does nothing when there’s no war,” said Leuprecht, who is co–author of the new book Military Operations in Response to Domestic Emergencies and Global Pandemics.
“It turns out that the military is completely tapped out.”
“Every time we send people on domestic operations, it means they are not on the training that they should be on. It means we’re pulling people off another operation … [or] pulling people off their desk jobs where they’re procuring [resources] for the military.”
CAF’s domestic presence
Since 2010, the frequency of the Canadian Armed Forces’ domestic deployments has risen dramatically.
Between 2010 and 2023, Operation LENTUS was activated 51 times — including eight requests in 2023 alone. LENTUS is the CAF’s standing domestic operation to assist civilian authorities with natural disasters, and does not include assistance provided during the pandemic.
The number of CAF deployments under Operation LENTUS has “broadly doubled every five years since 2010,” according to the Department of National Defence. Today, provinces facing floods, wildfires or hurricanes can call on CAF for personnel, equipment and airlifts when local resources are — or seem likely to become — overwhelmed.
During the pandemic, the military responded to 118 provincial and territorial requests under Operations LASER and VECTOR. LASER, the pandemic-response operation, deployed CAF personnel to long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec, while VECTOR supported the distribution of vaccines nationwide.
Impact on readiness
Provinces’ instinct to call on the CAF in times of crisis encourages a “cheap and easy way to outsource disaster assistance to the federal government,” Leuprecht said.
The provinces’ ability to rely on CAF weakens the political incentives for them to invest in their own emergency response capabilities, he says.
Peter Kasurak, a military historian and former public servant, says the federal government is also incentivized to deploy the Forces to domestic tasks.
“ From the point of view of the federal government, this is a very attractive option, right?” Kasurak said. “To employ the people you’ve got, because there’s no incremental cost. It doesn’t add to the size of the federal public service. It doesn’t add to your overall planned personnel expenditure for the year.”
But the regular use of the Forces for domestic operations comes at a cost to military readiness, Leuprecht says.
Only 58 per cent of the Forces would be ready to respond if called upon in a crisis by NATO allies, a December 2023 internal DND presentation obtained by CBC News showed.
Leuprecht notes that even though Canada is not currently engaged in any declared conflicts, numerous geopolitical threats warrant preparedness.
“This really increasingly becomes a zero-sum game,” he said. “[If] you deploy these resources domestically, it will further deplete the ability to deploy resources for an international operation … And for 25, 30 years, that was fine, when we didn’t really face major international threats.
“Now that we face potentially existential threats — to our own national security, to the continent, and to many of our closest allies, both in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific — that’s a very dangerous political game to play in a Canadian Armed Forces that … has been heavily undercapitalized, understaffed, and over-tasked.”
Kasurak, who has collaborated with Leuprecht on research into the CAF’s domestic operations, notes that the CAF’s domestic deployments are relatively modest in size.
For example, the CAF’s response to the 2019 spring floods in Quebec and Ontario deployed roughly 2,300 troops at its peak, representing a small fraction of the CAF’s approximately 68,000 regular members.
But the deployment of the CAF to domestic operations can impact troop morale, he says.
“[Domestic operations] do not fit with the CAF’s image or belief of what the profession of arms should be about,” he said. “So it’s a cultural issue as much as it is an actual administrative and logistic issue that is going to actually affect combat operations.”
‘Local level first’
Public Safety Canada says CAF is a backstop — not a frontline responder.
“Emergencies are managed first at the local level: hospitals, fire departments, police and municipalities,” a Public Safety Canada spokesperson told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement.
“If they need assistance at the local level, [municipalities] request it from the provinces or territories. If the emergency escalates beyond the provinces or territories’ capabilities, they can request that assistance be provided by the Federal Government.”
The spokesperson said the agency works with the Forces to minimize the impact of domestic deployments on its “primary defence mission,” but also noted that domestic assistance is part of the Forces’ stated mission.
Kasurak says that, ultimately, the risk posed by the CAF’s domestic operations is a question of scale.
“If you’ve miscalculated the risk — if all of a sudden you need to deploy a brigade in Latvia — you could have a real problem, because you’ve compromised your readiness … But that’s what cabinet ministers are supposedly for, right? You’re supposed to look at those national commitments and decide what the trade-offs are.
“And so far, ministers have been largely content to say, ‘The risk of having to deploy large numbers of the Canadian Forces in combat is so low that we’re quite happy to send them to fight forest fires.
“’We’ll take the hit on readiness. We don’t care.’”
Christian Leuprecht is the furthest thing from educated or intelligent.
“Cultural image” is his reasoning that the CF can’t help Canadians?
Or some unfounded existential dread.
Get real clown. The best use of the CF is to assist with domestic issues. Those triple vaxxed losers can’t do anything else. At least when they help with local emergencies, Canadians see tangible benefits from the tax burden that the CF represents.
“We now have provinces that send requests for assistance before storms even hit.”
That’s a stretch. Give us an example of premature responses that were unnecessary. If the CAF has 68,000 personnel, surely it can afford to deploy some for disaster situations. Waiting for provincial or local resources to be tapped out first is irresponsible. When there are wildfires to deal with it’s crucial to react quickly and efficiently because they will only get bigger and more catastrophic with time. That’s what our soldiers are there for: to serve the country, whether it’s overseas or domestically as long as personnel numbers aren’t exhausted. In fact, dealing with emergencies itself is a form of training. A preference for going to Latvia for (possibly dubious) security reasons is more desirable or glamorous? That’s a joke, and makes a mockery of the CAF’s priorities.