Shooting blanks: Why so many Canadian defence policies fail to launch

Gen. Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff, acknowledged the world and Canada are "in a fundamentally different situation now" than they were when previous policy reviews were released.

But the policy is also a political document, and its unstated intention may have been to prop up the Liberal government in the face of anxious allies and an increasingly uneasy electorate.

Steve Saideman, a political scientist who holds the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University, said he believes the emphasis on climate change and the Arctic is meant to sell the defence strategy to a skeptical public and a Parliament that may be reluctant to appropriate billions of dollars.

Even as western nations began cashing their so-called "peace dividends" at the end of the Cold War, a previous Liberal government's 1994 defence white paper (one of the few without a snappy title) issued a blunt warning:

A Canadian soldier carries spent light anti-tank weapons after the conclusion of Exercise Steele Crescendo outside Riga, Latvia in 2020.

A previous defence policy — Challenge and Commitment, released by the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney — proposed the purchase of nuclear-powered submarines to patrol under the ice of Canada's Arctic.