E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

April 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: The Canadian Navy Feature: Haida Gwaii Feature: Wallaceburg, Ontario The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Reviews Mosaic

Once out on the North Atlantic on Operation Salty Dips with destroyer HMCS Athabaskan, the Toronto becomes a mix of military training facility and smalltown village.

Photo: David Barbour

“Morale starts and ends in the galley,”says Tony Stewart, one of seven cooks who will help prepare 700 to 800 meals today — a careful balance of comfort food and healthy options and always with an assortment of irresistible desserts. The ship’s vast food-storage units must contain at least two weeks’ worth of supplies at all times, in case of rapid deployment. There are crates of frozen steaks, cartons of spices, bricks of cheese, boxes of Tim Hortons coffee and about 455 kilograms of potatoes. (Petty Officer 1st Class Mike Hillier once mistakenly put the bananas in the refrigerator and had to placate the cooks by making banana bread for weeks.)

Other dangerous things here: daydreaming outside on the bridge wings during firing exercises; showering barefoot; sleeping without a sleep belt on; and defying the coxswain.

Chief Petty Officer 1st Class Serge Lavigne is the coxswain in charge of the crew’s non-commissioned officers and is responsible for safety, cleanliness and discipline. He is also a dead ringer for my dad: a bilingual Montrealer and natural- born leader condensed into about five feet four inches. He even holds the equivalent rank my dad held when he retired from the Air Force. “Where were you, Ms. Gregoire?” he asks. I had failed to report during a “verification muster,” and when I finally arrived, after being paged twice, others were patiently waiting. I stuttered my explanation before I realized he was joking. Sort of.

“Yes sir,” I joked. Sort of.

As a minority left-winger in a family of six siblings, two of them Canadian Forces (CF) members, I don’t always fit in. My CF brothers are brave and loyal, and so was my father. I’m proud of everything they’ve accomplished at home and abroad, and they know it. But military aggression makes me uncomfortable. Canada, however, has the longest coastline of any nation in the world, at 244,000 kilometres. Protecting the country’s sovereignty — and billions of dollars in trade and jobs — seems not only wise but necessary. “There’s an old saying,” says Commander Feltham, “that if you don’t patrol your waters, somebody else will.”

With the war in Afghanistan luring new recruits into the Army, the Navy has been left with a dwindling labour pool, especially among electricians, mechanics, marine systems engineers and sonar operators. Vacancies hover at or above 50 percent. Still, Canada expects to spend more than $755 million on Navy personnel in 2010, up from $538 million in 2001, and that does not include operations, maintenance and capital costs, such as these recent announcements: $3.1 billion to modernize the frigates; $47 million to upgrade fleet-maintenance facilities; an estimated $100 million to build a deep-sea port at Nanisivik, Nunavut (see sidebar on page 58); and approximately $40 billion to purchase new ships over the next three decades. Annual budgets fluctuate, but ultimately, Canada spends more on marine defence than it does on air or land defence.

It is Rob Huebert, an international relations professor with the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, who later explains why. “Ships are expensive,” he says. “But we’ve needed a navy since Confederation. The whole discovery and creation of Canada was, to a large degree, the result of sea power. Canada is a maritime nation.” With potential conflict brewing in the Arctic and in Asia, where China and North Korea remain military wild cards, he says, Canada cannot hide behind the Americans. “But how do you convince a skeptical bureaucracy, government and public that you need this expensive insurance policy?”