Charles Nixon

CHARLES NIXON

*Interviewers: Hill, Cox, Pawelek.

 

[HILL]* Good afternoon. Our guest this afternoon is Mr. Charles Nixon, former Deputy Minister of National Defence. We are very pleased that you could join us today Mr. Nixon and we are certainly appreciative of your readiness to participate in this oral history of Canadian policy in NATO.

 

[NIXON] I am pleased to be asked, because I do believe the recording of history is important, and particularly when it gathers together, as I understand you are trying to do, the participation and the impressions of people such as myself, who have been in rather senior positions involved with Canada's policy with NATO.

 

Part I - Naval Career, to 1963

 

[HILL] To begin with, perhaps you could tell us briefly about your own background, where you grew up, were educated and so on and why you decided to join the Navy - aside from the fact that that seems a natural thing for Prairie folks to do.

 

[NIXON] On that latter point, many of us from the Prairies never saw a body of water we couldn’t avoid or swim across, so I joined the Navy. I was born in, and received all my preliminary education in, Shore Lake, Manitoba, a small town about 175 miles northwest of Winnipeg, practically on the Saskatchewan border. In 1943 or thereabouts, when I was still too young to join the Forces, I became aware of the Royal Canadian Naval College at Royal Roads. My father and I wrote a letter to find out about this establishment, and in due course I wrote some exams, went through interviews and such and was accepted to go to Royal Roads. As to precisely why I did that, at the time, I have to say it was because it was the easiest way and the quickest way I could figure out to maintain the momentum in my education and at the same time be ready for active service at the earliest age. A little digression - I received the name Buzz, the nickname Buzz, which I have had ever since (for everyone except my own family) because of the interview that I had for Royal Roads. The interview board consisted of several naval officers, in fact Admiral Mainguy, Dan Mainguy's father, was a Captain, Chairman of the Board, and they were talking to sixteen year old boys who all played hockey, delivered papers or worked in general stores. I was     unique in the fact that I kept bees and we spent an hour     talking about bee keeping. So later, when I went to Royal Roads and got on the train in Regina to go there, there was a loud voice coming through the car saying: "Did that hayseed get on here"; and I said: "Yes I got on  here".  And he said, "You must be Buzz Nixon". I've had the name ever since, and that individual was Adam Zimmerman, who is now the president of Noranda. Now that's, I think, why I joined the Navy; and I decided while there that I would like to be in the technical field rather than be an executive officer, and so I joined the Electrical Branch and went to the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba (while I was in the Navy, as a midshipman, and then as a sub lieutenant). I graduated from Manitoba in 1949.

 

[HILL] Was it in naval engineering?

 

[NIXON] No, it was electrical engineering. Then, when I finished that, I took a year of further studies, in the Navy, on the application of electrical engineering to naval requirements. I studied radar, communications, sonar, power drives, electrical generation, and so on, in ships.

 

[HILL] You graduated from the University of Manitoba about 1949, I believe.

 

[NIXON] That's right. Then, as I say, I took a year's service and studied in the Navy. Then I served in the dockyard on the West coast for a year. And then I spent a year in Korea in HMCS Cayuga.

 

[HILL] I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about the Korean period? Was it all entirely in that one ship?

 

[NIXON] All in the one ship, and our duties were on the West coast of Korea escorting American aircraft carriers which were attacking or sending off strikes into North Korea. At other times we would be on the East coast where we would be in shore bombardment. I lost my first command there, in fact. I was the officer in charge of a motor launch which we took ashore to bring off a liaison officer, and when I came back to the ship we tied the motor launch up astern, only to have the North Koreans start to shoot at us. So we went out of that harbour going full speed astern. We were firing forward and they were firing at us, so it was quite an odd situation, and my motor launch overturned. So I lost my first command. My first and only command, I should say.

 

[HILL] Were you involved in the Inchon landing?

 

[NIXON] No, that was over by the time I got there in 1951. That was in the early part of 1951, but I didn’t get there until later.

 

[HILL] What did you feel about the contribution of the Canadian Navy to the UN Force in Korea?

 

[NIXON] Well, I think we should take a look at the demarcation line. I believe that the late Commander James Plomer, who died a year ago, and Admiral Brock, were both keen on maintaining the Western hold on the islands off the West coast of Korea, about half way up. And those islands, I believe, were fundamental to maintaining that demarcation line between the North and the South. The reason why the Canadians were so instrumental is we had a piece of equipment which no other navy had at that time. This was a three centimetre navigation radar which you could use to go into very narrow harbours and also could pick up the small junks and fishing boats which you couldn't do with other radars of that day. Remember that's in 1950-51. It wasn't a radar we put on board for that purpose, it was a radar which the RCN put aboard just to modernize and to add more capabilities to the ships.

 

[HILL] How good were the ships in those days, by and large?

 

[NIXON] For our purposes, then, I think they were just as good as anybody's. We're talking about the Tribal class. They were all launched in the latter part of the 1940s. They had about the best radar and fire control systems, sonar systems and communication systems that were available.

 

[HILL] Have you ever been back to Korea.

 

[NIXON] No, I have not. No, I have not been back to Japan or Korea.

 

[HILL] Well, I was there a couple of years ago and there was a group of Canadian veterans there while we were there. The changes were just extraordinary since the war, they said. The whole country had evidently been in chaos at that time.

 

[NIXON] One of the most memorable parts of my Korean time was that I had, as a shipmate, the famous doctor Joe Cyr, the phony doctor.

 

[HILL] You survived him as well as the North Koreans?

 

[NIXON] Well, actually the person who really did survive him was Commander Plomer. One time when we came into Sasebo, which was our operating base, Plomer, who was then a Commander, had a bad tooth ache and he intended to get it serviced or get it out, or filled, or what ever else was needed. But we were only able to stay in just long enough to refuel and resupply and then go back out again. So when we got out, he said, "Well I must do something with this tooth, I can't put up with this for another two weeks, I will have to get it extracted". Doctors on board in those days did extractions. The tooth was taken out that afternoon. And around 8 or 9 o'clock that evening the engineering officer and I went to visit the Captain, as we did every night, to tell him what was the state of our equipment. We would be asked specifics and we would have a chat about the ship and about war and everything else. And he said that he never had had such a painless extraction in his life. He said: "That guy Cyr, he is a doctor just without parallel." Well, the reason why he had such a painless extraction is that he was damn near killed by a massive dose of codeine that Cyr used to mask his lack of dental skills.

 

[HILL] Well, at least he got the right tooth. Could you tell us something about how you and your fellow officers at that time saw the state of the world. I mean this was the period of the war in Indo-China. Was this a world which was clearly divided into two competing camps?

 

[NIXON] I think so, for two or three reasons. The older officers who had served in "The War" were quite clear about this. But it came from the war with Germany. After The War they just shifted the focus to the Soviet Union, particularly as we came to see more and more confrontation during the latter part of the 1940s, leading up to the first western defence arrangements.

 

[HILL] The Western European Union?

 

[NIXON] The Western European Union, with Britain, France and the Benelux; and then that gave rise to NATO. I believe that so many of our officers, whether it was army or navy or air force, saw that it was far better to try to deter war than to let it happen like the last one. I think that’s how they saw what was going on in Korea. Remember we are talking of the days of encirclement, containment, terms like that. There is another aspect of this that you may recall: there was an educational programme in National Defence and also I believe in External affairs, called the "Bureau of Current Affairs." Every week you had almost what we would call brain-washing or propaganda. But there was a study session on different situations in the world, and that took place not only in the ships and in the Far East but also in all of the bases in Canada. For example, I remember going to the Teacher's College for a Bureau of Current Affairs session when I first came back from Korea. The then Australian High Commissioner to Canada, who had previously been the Australian High Commissioner to Ceylon, was talking about the Colombo Plan. At that time, in 1952, we Canadians were thinking that this was one of our first real steps on the world stage as an independent country, making our own decisions, assisting Ceylon particularly in its economic development. Canada was sending locomotives, manufacturing supplies, and medical supplies to Ceylon. And he said, that's all very well, but make sure you understand what you are doing; and he pulled out of his pocket a cake of soap, saying, when you send this cake of soap to Ceylon some mid-wife is going to wash, and as a result some mother and some child will survive, whereas without the soap either one of them or both might die in childbirth. He said make sure you think about what you are making them survive for. If you haven't solved that next question, have you really solved the problem by doing this or have you created a problem? Obviously it made quite a profound effect on me. Thirty five years later I still remember that talk.

 

[HILL] You mean, it raised questions about the kind of world these children would grow up in?

 

[NIXON] That's right. I mean to say, the Bureau of Current Affairs had, as its purpose, trying to make Canadians, including people in the Armed Forces, think a little bit more broadly than just about Canada or about what they themselves were doing. It obviously had an effect on me.

 

[HILL] NATO had been established just before you were in Korea. What was the reaction to the establishment and development of NATO?

 

[NIXON] Remember, I was a young lieutenant and some of these higher policy issues didn't penetrate that far down. But this idea of containment and deterrence was pretty well planted, and very well received. We felt we should do that. We didn't want to let war happen again. You know, the Marshall Plan had already been in operation for some time, and you could already see some of the fruits. There was certainly great hope there. But there is another aspect to this question. I think that there was a sense of purpose. Whether it was the right purpose or not, we in Korea had a sense of purpose. I think the first Army Division that Canada sent to Europe at the start of NATO had the same sense of mission. You'll find that is so if you talk to the service people of that period. Also, one-third of the whole fighter aircraft in NATO were Canadians, 300 strong I think at one time. The same is true for sailors. And so there was a real sense of purpose in the Armed Forces at that time.

 

[HILL] I wonder if we could just move on a little bit to the period after you were in Korea, while you were still in the Navy. I was wondering if you would tell us what positions you held in the Navy at that time.

 

[NIXON] Well, I returned to Canada, and went into a section in National Defence Headquarters working on the design, development, testing, acceptance and purchasing of electrical generating, transforming, switching and power equipment. It was all on the power side, there was nothing to do with radar, communications or anything else, and it was primarily for our group of minesweepers, which we still had, as training vessels on the west coast. And I guess we gave about eighteen to the Turks, as Mutual Aid. They were given to the Turks in the late 1950s, I think. I was there from 1952 to 1956. In our section we were working on the minesweepers and also on the St. Laurent class and the Restigouche class of destroyer escorts.

 

[HILL]    Where was your office located?

 

[NIXON] Oh, here in Ottawa, you know in the old "C" building.

 

[HILL]    And that lasted until?

 

[NIXON] Until I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in 1956. I think that was an important period as far as my own personal development was concerned. You see, that was the period when the Nautilus, the first USN nuclear submarine, appeared. I remember the Naval Instructor Chief of the day saying: "Oh well, our great destroyer escorts would make mincemeat of the Nautilus". The fact that they could go 25 knots or 22 knots or whatever they could do at that time was irrelevant. Well, I had more than a question of doubt because when ships go fast they can't hear a thing with sonar as there is so much self-noise. So that was, you may say, the first sowing of seeds of doubt in my mind and questioning of the leadership that we had in the RCN (which I will come to subsequently).

 

[COX] What did you do at MIT?

 

[NIXON] What the Navy was doing at the time - and so were some of the other services - was to take a few of their technical officers and send them off to post-graduate work, whether in aerodynamics, in missile development, in control systems or in communications. Three officers had gone off about two years before us. It was felt that the work I had been doing in power systems was very germane, because one of the problems we had had in dealing with gun turrets and with missile systems was in moving large masses fast. To slew a turret takes a very particular type of drive. So I went down to MIT to study energy conversion systems of this type. And while I was there I saw that I had enough room in my schedules to take nuclear engineering; which I did, because I felt that before I left the Navy, we in the Canadian Navy would have to be aware of nuclear energy, nuclear reactors and nuclear propulsion. We would need to understand what it meant for ourselves, what it meant to our allies, and what it also meant to a potential enemy. So I did take some nuclear engineering.

 

[HILL] Which years were these?

 

[NIXON] From 1956 to 1958.

 

[HILL] After that, there was still another five years in the Navy.

 

[NIXON] That's right. When I came back to Canada, I was supposed to go back to sea as a Squadron Electrical Officer, but at that time the Navy was thinking seriously about nuclear submarines and they decided they needed to have a study group - which is not that different from the one that is going on right now - not as to whether the Navy should have nuclear submarines, but if it did have nuclear submarines, what would be the implications with respect to training, particularly of the technicians, and regarding the type of dockyard infrastructure that would be needed to handle nuclear submarines, as well as the type of industrial structure Canada would need to have, to produce and maintain nuclear submarines. I remember once in this process, Captain (now Rear Admiral) Davis, who was later Commandant at NDC, a man with a really good sense of humour as well as being a very confident individual, went before the Atomic Energy Control Board. And the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Control Board said to Captain Davis: "Tell me, if one of these nuclear submarines was cut in half in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by another ship, would it sink or would it float?”. And Captain Davis put his head down and thought for a while and looked up and said: "Which would you prefer?" Well, he was quite right, as in some instances it could do either; which didn't stop the Atomic Energy Control Board. But you might say that's where another period of doubt set in for me, because I was primarily interested in the nuclear reactor control system, but I also had the responsibility to look into some of the operational considerations, not on the basis of whether you should have nuclear submarines, but in terms of what does this do to your operational capabilities. Although I am not an operator, I became convinced very quickly that you really couldn't say that you were in the anti-submarine warfare field in a serious way if you didn't have hunter-killer nuclear submarines. The reason I say that is that submarines, when they are submerged and quiet, that is not moving, have tremendous passive sonar capabilities. When I say tremendous I mean a couple of hundred miles, if they are actually quiet and making no noise themselves. That's because of the odd way that sound propagates in the water. For example, look at the question of the Greenland - Iceland - UK Gap, I mean look at it as a barrier problem. If you can deal with that barrier with passive submarines as well as with SOSUS (acoustic devices laid on the bottom of the ocean to listen for submarines), then I think you can really bottle the adversaries up so they can't move without you knowing where they are. What bothered me was the impression I received that the Naval Board wasn't interested in nuclear submarines because submarines don't have much of a wardroom or a quarter deck or much of a place to hold good receptions or to "show the flag." Now I may be too hard on my superiors of the day, but as you can imagine, that impression certainly had more than a little bit of an impact on me. The operational advantages of nuclear submarines, which I felt were of paramount importance, didn't seem to enter the picture too much.

 

[HILL] I think the other comment that was made was the one of cost, wasn't it? I think Bob Sutherland, who was my chief for a while, I'm not sure if it was in a paper that he wrote or in the 1964 White Paper, argued that if you bought two or three nuclear submarines it would take up most of the defence funding by the time you put in the infrastructure and back-up. That's an exaggeration, I'm sure, but there was that sort of consideration.

 

[NIXON] There certainly was the financial consideration; but one of the things you get with submarines is that they have very small crews. At that time, I believe, the difference between the cost of a nuclear submarine and the true cost of a frigate wasn't very great. Now that you mention Sutherland, I was probably one of the individuals who caused Hellyer to ask Sutherland to do that study just after Hellyer became the Minister of National Defence in 1963.

 

After I moved from the nuclear submarine survey team I spent a year at Chalk River to acquire some practical experience with nuclear reactors. Then I came back, and I became in due course the Director of System Engineering - a new slot in the Directorate General of Fighting Equipment. I had the responsibility to make a total ship system out of the individual pieces of radar, sonar, communications, weaponry, guns, torpedoes. When I say that, I mean to work out the weights of them, the spaces they would need, the air conditioning they'd need, the wiring that they'd all need; and get all the wiring done. I don't mean to say for a moment that I had the responsibility for the accuracy of the radar or the appropriateness; we had radar specialists for that. Also involved in this job was putting together the total funding and working out the total estimates for fighting equipment. The way that the estimates were handled in those days, and it is not so different now, is that my boss, the Director General of Fighting Equipment, had the responsibility to go before the Estimates Committee and defend the prices and cost estimates.

 

What happened when they costed the Canadian General Purpose Frigate, between 1960 and 1963, was that they put the cheapest price on each piece of equipment, obtained from the US Navy data that was used as the estimate. This added up, for a GPF, to 33 million dollars per ship. And 8 of them obviously came to $264 million — the figure that’s on the record. However, that price did not allow for any spare parts, any logistic stores, any training equipment, any Canadianization, any training of the people; and so when you put this all together, the true cost was practically double. I therefore went to my boss and I said: "Look, you are responsible for the total job that is being done here, and you have the responsibility to go forward and defend these estimates, but you can't defend these estimates without adding on all the other items". He said: "You are absolutely right". So very quickly the price of the group of ships went from $264 million to $520 million, at which time Douglas Harkness, then the Minister of National Defence, wrote across the document: "Don't go any further with this until we get to the bottom of it."

 

You may remember, if you were working with Bob Sutherland, that what had happened during that period and the latter part of the fifties and the early part of the sixties, is that the Cold War wasn't quite as cold as it had been. The national concern for defence was not very great, compared with social programmes, and the defence budget as a percentage of the total federal budget started to slip bit by bit. I understand from Bob Bryce that when he was Secretary of the Treasury Board and when Elgin Armstrong first became Deputy Minister of National Defence, defence was about 33% of Federal Government outlays. That would be around 1958. But then it slipped and it slipped very quickly. So what Mr. Hellyer tried to do with his ideas of integration, and then unification, was to reduce duplication and reduce double functioning and so on; and to be able to put more money into capital equipment and into operations. But he wasn't successful in doing so. He may have been successful in stopping some duplication, but as far as putting more money into capital was concerned, he wasn't successful, because the defence budget kept being cut more and more.

 

[COX] Could you tell us more about the comparability of submarines and frigates?

 

[NIXON] Well, there are many factors to consider. There are many things that naturally you can't do with a submarine. On the other hand, people nowadays are suggesting: "Well, we will either buy more frigates or we will buy more submarines." I personally believe that there is kind of a minimum number of frigates that you're going to have to have. We hear people say: "Well, let's pick a cheaper, lighter ship." But if you want to have a ship that will go into the North Atlantic and face heavy sea states and carry a heavy helicopter, then it's got to be 4000 tons and it's going to cost a good deal. As soon as you put those stipulations on, that you are going to be in the North Atlantic, in sea state 5, at 27 knots or 25 knots, carrying a heavy helicopter, that defines the ship, regardless of the weapon. I think that the requirement is the same in the Pacific.

 

[Hill] What about the 1960s?

 

[NIXON] If you just talk about submarines in the anti-submarine role, and in containing Soviet submarines, and about cost effectiveness as it applied in those days, I could have made a better argument for nuclear submarines than I could for surface vessels. The problem we have had with the frigate is that it was almost duplicitous, in my judgment, for the Navy to be trying to go through with the programme for $264 million per batch when many people such as myself realized that $500 plus was more the real price. It reminds me of a little story about the fifties, I think it was: the Navy bought a new telephone exchange for Halifax CFB, and then they realized that they didn't have a building to put it in. They went back to Treasury Board for a building to put it in and the building was going to cost five times what the telephone exchange cost, something like that. A letter came back from Treasury Board, it was almost like the old classic letters you used to read about from the Naval Board in Britain, which would say: "My Lords of the Admiralty view with growing concern". This is what our people said: "Members of the Treasury Board do not appreciate being asked to provide a building for so many million dollars to house a telephone exchange, given that the Navy has already committed itself to a telephone exchange at about a quarter of the price. In the future make sure that the total implications of a programme are brought forward."

 

[HILL] What was the frigate type you were talking about?

 

[NIXON] It's called a General Purpose Frigate. Another point of interest here is the weapons system, the Tartar missile system. The Tartar missile system was pretty large for that size of ship. The US Navy had them, using them as part of a total, structured, layered approach. The top of the layer was the aircraft flying off an aircraft carrier; the next layer down was the Talos, which was a very big missile with a very long range; then there was the Terrier; and finally we come to the Tartar. It formed part of a total carrier task force. But I had very great doubts as to where it fitted into the Canadian Navy, because it determined the layout of your ship, the layout of your operations room, the size of the magazines. It just became the controlling element. So I asked the question: "Under what circumstance is the Canadian Navy going to be in the situation where that type of system would be of fundamental use?" And I didn't get very good answers, because if you want to protect the ship, you use defence weapons, which are much smaller things; and you also use ECM (Electronic Counter Measures). So I actually developed the impression that this was more of a prestige thing, that it wasn't really justified; and so again I had elements of doubt. And finally I decided that the best thing I could do for my peace of mind was to leave the Navy, because I thought that there were other serious national problems to be tackled. This was the time of the Coyne Affair, and a time of real economic problems in the nation. I thought that such talent as I had could be applied as well elsewhere as it was being applied in the Navy, and I decided to leave.

 

[HILL] I still have one question, and I think Nancy probably has another, on your period of naval service. It's really a continuation of what we were just talking about. What I was wondering was: how close were the relations with the US Navy and its anti-submarine warfare operations at this time?

 

[NIXON] They were extremely close, for several reasons. Firstly, at that time, if you go and look at the tables, Canada was more than pulling its weight in its defence budget, and most of its capability was available to be used for NATO if that was required. Secondly, because of our location in the North Atlantic and the legacies, the lessons, of the Second World War, in anti-submarine tactics and in anti-submarine equipment we were as good as anyone. Thirdly, we were the ones who introduced the shipboard helicopter. The Americans thought we were absolutely mad, and so did the British, because we suggested flying rather large helicopters off these small ships.

 

[COX] Using the bear trap?* [1]

 

[NIXON] The bear trap. That was a completely Canadian invention. So we were very highly regarded. Also keep in mind that variable depth sonar, which you drop over the stern, was again a completely Canadian invention. We had to figure out such things as how to recover it and what domes to put it in and how to keep it on the end of a wire so that it was always pointing ahead and not just twisting around. A very good friend of mine was the main inventor of that. So we were very highly regarded because we were putting our money where our mouth was, you might say, and we had some capabilities which the US Navy didn’t have. So the relationship was very good. And there was an extremely good exchange of information, practically no-holds-barred, which I can't say applies today.

 

[HILL] In regards to the relations between the Canadian Navy and the US Navy, and ASW, in this period, were we linked into things like SOSUS and so on or did that come later on? Is the link between Canadian and US ASW operations so intensive that it would be hard to separate them one from the other?

 

[NIXON] I would say that we probably were in that state of affairs; but as I did not have a "need to know", I did not know at that time. I'm just saying that I believe we probably were.

 

[PAWELEK] I have one general question. It may be going back a bit to your comments about the budgets in the late fifties. The Fifties have been seen as sort of a "Golden Age", both in Canadian foreign policy in general and also for Canadian involvement in NATO. There was strong support for NATO, Canada had some of the best trained military forces and best equipment in the Alliance; also Canada had considerable influence on the diplomatic front. I mean, we were certainly influential in the 1956 Suez Crisis.

 

[NIXON] And also in the origination of NATO itself.

 

[PAWELEK] Do you agree with that kind of assessment, first of all? And secondly, do you think that we should try to get back to that kind of a situation again?

 

[NIXON] Why would we want to get back to that? If you had asked the question slightly differently, if you said, do I believe that Canada should be trying to share a proportionate load in world affairs, I'd say: "Very definitely". But circumstances have changed since the 1950s. In the 1950s Europe was destitute. For example, in Korea the British got along with unbelievably worn- out equipment. That country was just as destitute as Germany was, if not more so, because they didn't have the Marshall Plan in Britain. The Germans at least had the Marshall Plan. But as Germany and the Benelux countries and France got up off their knees, obviously we couldn't play, we'd be naive to expect we'd still have to play, the same part. Keep in mind that at the end of The War we had the third largest navy in the world, and that was obviously overtaken by all kinds of events. It was the same thing at first in NATO; we had 300 Sabre aircraft over there because nobody else had them then. The Brits could not afford them. So I think that we would be out of line to think that we could ever come back into the same position we had in world affairs at that time. That doesn't imply that we shouldn't produce or contribute more in various ways, not only in the defence field, but also in terms of economic aid, for example. In the aid field we're certainly doing a hell of a lot more, per capita and per GNP, than many other countries are, so we've shifted our emphasis. My concern is that I look on the deterrence/defence contribution as a pre-requisite to achieving some of the other things. I don't think you are going to solve some of the North/South problems until you have a reasonable degree of stability in the East/West dimension.

 

[HILL] In other words we should be doing what is a sound role, commensurate with our size?

 

[NIXON] Roger, I coined this expression before Carter used it. I used to get so furious with the Treasury Board, about "guns or butter" - "Can't afford it and so on." I said: "Look, you talk about defence as though it is a free choice, you can have it or not have it."

 

"The most important social programme you have is the programme which allows you to have freedom of choice in social programmes. And that is your defence and deterrence." That may sound like a hard line, but that is where I come from. To put it another way, what would be the result in NATO if they all took the same attitude Canada does? Secondly, can you protect the institutions, processes and values of free countries? Can you protect that separately? No, you have got to do it jointly. We tend to forget that occasionally.

 

The point here is that the first responsibility of government is the preservation of the state, and we should never forget that political science fundamental. Defence is not a free choice. In our case, faced with a deterrence/defence requirement within the Western Alliance, we do not have a free choice for ourselves. It is largely reactive to what the other countries are doing. That is what caused the formation of NATO. We were reacting to the fact that the Soviet Union did not follow through with the Yalta accord. It did not allow free elections in Eastern Europe, it overthrew what leadership or what freedom there was in Czechoslovakia. Finally we said: "Look, we have a problem on our hands".

 

[COX] You have made a very powerful case pointing to the relative decline of Canadian military capabilities, and perhaps this is just. But if you take that period, the early Sixties, is there some way to measure the absolute decline in, let's say, our naval capabilities, or indeed is there an absolute decline?

 

[NIXON] The technology and the capability of the potential opposition has moved ahead, so there is certainly a relative decline. The absolute number of ships hasn't changed. As I said publicly just last week at the University of Manitoba, even these old ships that we have, when it comes to action or anti-submarine capability, don't knock them. They may be awfully old, but there are few ships that as surface vessels will do much better in anti-submarine warfare than they will, even today. So I am really talking about very much a relative decline. But a point that is important here, referring to that period we have just talked about, is that we were, I think, going through a transition towards a new sense of being a nation. We became much more concerned about our own affairs and about our own development, for example in the economic field. I believe we gained a sense of national maturity in that period; and that came because of what we were doing in the Colombo Plan, in NATO, and in tackling the work of national development - economic development, and so on. All that started to come into play in the latter part of the Fifties, because the Cold War had cooled off a certain amount and the Soviets didn't look quite as forbidding as they had during the Berlin Crisis period. Things certainly heated up again with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but that was a momentary blip, really, as far as public sentiment for defence was concerned. So I think that the national feeling was that we had other problems that needed to be addressed.

 

[COX] Am I correct in thinking that, at that time, we still had the Bonaventure?

 

[NIXON] Yes.

 

[COX] For ASW? I mean primarily convoy defence?

 

[NIXON] Yes.

 

[COX] Not so much for chasing down their SSBN submarines?

 

[NIXON] That's correct.

 

[COX] So basically it is a convoy defence. We were thinking of the lines of communication, of reinforcement.

 

[NIXON] That's right. There are two things here that I'd like to get on the record, in this matter of SSBNs. I am not aware that it has ever been policy, either ours or NATO's, to even think about deliberately attacking SSBNs. I mean, think if one of ours went missing, we might be tempted to say: ''Well, let's use the others before they go missing too." So I think that the idea of attacking an SSBN would be absolutely folly from a stability viewpoint. That doesn't mean you don't keep track of where they are, but you do as well as you can by SOSUS and with sonobuoys, etc. (If for no other reasons than for training purposes. There is nothing better to train with than a real live object. That goes on all the time).

 

[COX] What about the Bonaventure in particular?

 

[NIXON] I am glad you mentioned the Bonaventure, another cause of disillusionment and another piece of concern on my part. That one aircraft carrier, plus the aircraft, plus the naval air schools that we had to run, was eating up something like 40% of the total naval budget. Then you had to ask yourself what were you getting for this? You weren't getting a hell of a lot of capability, and particularly when we came to the time of helicopters operating from small ships. The helicopter changed the whole role of the destroyer escort in anti-submarine warfare. The most pointed, the most effective, fighting part of a DE is the helicopter. The DE itself is now just a small aircraft carrier for that helicopter. So I didn't think it was all that disastrous when we decided to do away with the aircraft carrier. That happened after I left, though.

 

[COX] Has the role changed? Did we shift away from using the maritime forces to protect sea lines of communication? Have we shifted from that to some form of coastal or Canadian waters patrol?

 

[NIXON] I'm glad you brought me back to that, because I am a strong believer in the concept of integration. I am not sure that, originally, I would have gone to full unification, or done away with the uniforms, but having done away with them I surely wouldn't go back to them. Now, on the strategic question, I cannot see how it would be at all that likely that the Soviet Union would deliberately contemplate, and plan for, and execute, any type of attack in Europe, a conventional attack, without some confidence that they could either break the sea lines of communication or that they could overcome NATO before the sea lines of communication could come into play. And it is for that reason that I feel that Northern Norway and the Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea are the most important part of NATO territory, except Germany, as far as strictly deterrent capability is concerned. If we hold those areas and can control them, then I'd say the other side would think very seriously before attacking us. So to come back to your question, what is the approach now? The approach is still to maintain the sea lines of communication; but the methods of doing so have changed, that is to say there may not be convoys, there may be sanitized corridors. It may be very much hunt and kill, because if you take the combination of barriers and SOSUS and Tartars and the long distance listening devices they are towing behind ships now - and you put them all together and then tie that in with shore patrol aircraft, with sonar buoys and the helicopters, I'm not too sure that I'd feel too comfortable being a Soviet submarine commander. In fact, you know, I think that they could run the risk of losing five to seven submarines a week. You can't do that for very long even if you've got 300 of them. So I think that the idea of protecting the sea lines of communication is still fundamental to the strategy of deterrence.

 

[COX] Well, I wonder, just as we finish this period, coming up to 1963, if you could look back and tell us how you felt about the Khruschev period? Did you see it as a period of reform, as it is now being categorized?

 

[NIXON] I am glad you asked that question. It brings back something which is, from a personal point of view I think, important in relation to some of the things I have said, some of the attitudes I have developed over the years. As early as 1946, I can remember going to a football game in London, Ontario (when I was attending the University of Toronto for a year). And I remember talking to a group of my fellow students. You know, this was the kind of thing a bunch of engineers were talking about in 1946. We talked about the Soviet Union. I had read my first book about the nature of Soviet society and there was something in it about the NKVD. I was absolutely horrified. You know I am not a history student, so I had no perception of Soviet Russia or what historic Russia under the Czars was like. But I came to the conclusion then - and this may now sound simple, obvious, a cliche - that the longer we live with the Soviets and learn to understand them, the better we will get on in the future. That has influenced me over the years, and that is why I've always felt that the more relations we have with the Soviet Union, the better our prospects will be, providing we do it on terms and conditions which we find acceptable. It seems to me, however, that in practice we very often conduct our relations with them in a manner which is completely in their favour. Now as far as the Khruschev period was concerned, I was not conscious of his attempt to reform the Soviet system, and I am not sure how many other people were conscious, in the West, of his attempt at reform, except those who are true Sovietologists. So I would say that it didn't have any impact on me at all at the time.

 

Part II - Department of Industry, 1963-1966

 

 [HILL] Well, we are now moving on to Part Two, which is your period at the Department of Industry from 1963 to 1966. Mr. Nixon, you presumably held a number of different positions in that time. Could you tell us what they were, what your work involved, and whether you were working on defence questions, foreign affairs, NATO, any of those kinds of issues?

 

[NIXON] Well, when I left the Navy, I left because I had rather lost confidence, or faith, in the leadership. I had not lost my concern about deterrence and defence, but I felt that the way that they were being approached was not very productive. The country was going through a very difficult period of economic development - as I said, it was the time of the Coyne Affair and so on - and I felt that I might be able to contribute more in the economic development field than I was able to do in defence. So I went to the Department of Industry and worked on the development of the electronics industry. That involved examining different proposals with various companies and trying to convince industry to do foreign marketing. For example, one of your biggest and most promising companies at the time had practically no offshore business, and we did our best to try to get them involved and to convince them they should have a strong international operation. That company has subsequently become one of Canada’s greatest exporters of high-tech products. I was in the development of new products and so on. True, some of these did have a defence application.

 

Now, as far as the defence side in general was concerned - and this even applies to the PCD - when I left the Forces I made a very definite decision and commitment to myself that I would not be involved in anything to do with defence policy or defence matters, because I felt so seriously and so deeply about it. I seemed to have different views from those who were running it, and many of those who were still in the Navy were my friends and former cohorts, whose opinions I respected. For example, when I went to the PCO I had nothing to do with defence matters all during the debates on unification, integration, and defence budget cuts, leading up to the 1971 white paper. I had nothing to do with those whatsoever.

 

[HILL] I think we will come onto that shortly, but I did want to ask your own personal views on the 1964 White Paper, because that had quite a lot of implications. You already touched on it a little bit earlier. It maintained Canada's commitments to NATO, but in fact there was already a shift going on where there was talk about buying light tanks and having greater mobility and airmobile materiel and so forth. So what was your own personal view of it?

 

[NIXON] I do not recall actually having read the 1964 White Paper when it came out. I did read the 1971 one.

 

[HILL] You didn't think enough of it to read it?

 

[NIXON] No, there were two things. One is that I had to make a very conscious and a very hard decision to stand clear of defence, and the second thing is that, at that point in my personal development, things like White Papers were still unreal documents. In this town you want to buy a White Paper, you've got to know where to get it. You just can't go down to any book store, you've got to ferret the thing out. Like right now: how many people in the Government of Canada know where to go to get a set of the Estimates?

 

[HILL] I think it is easier now than it was.

 

[NIXON] Sure as hell is, but at that time White Papers and even Speeches from the Throne - even now try to get the Speech from the Throne - and I am talking about the rank and file. I am not saying that it is secretive, but I am just saying that it is not just there. And, at that time, I don't think even in the Forces they made a habit of passing them around and making sure that everyone read them.

 

[HILL] Funilly enough, I was in Montreal at the time, just before coming to Ottawa, and I think they were almost best sellers in Montreal. You could buy them in the old government book store which they had at that time down on St. Catherine Street, and I remember people really were interested at that time.

 

[COX] But you indicate that this was quite a dramatic shift in your career, and you were, in effect, at least temporarily, putting behind you defence policy.

 

[NIXON] There were so many of my friends and colleagues who were working hard, who believed in what they were doing, and I respected their opinions, but at the same time I found myself over here, and to have peace of mind with myself, I said, well, I have to shut that out. It was quite a conscious and deliberate attempt to put it behind me, never expecting I'd end up back in defence, not for a moment.

 

[COX] So the problems you had with defence were not about overall policy but about specific policies?

 

[NIXON] That's right, about how to use resources and what is the most effective way to do various tasks. I mean, should we have a General Purpose Frigate with a missile on it, which so far as I could see would never be used, or could never be used in an active environment. Think of it, in 1960, where would the Canadian Navy use the Tartar missile, and why would you construct a ship which is completely determined in its shape, size and configuration by that one device? At the same time, having gone through hearing that nuclear submarines may be not too good because they don't have a wardroom and don't have a quarter deck in which you can have receptions. You can't show the flag. I am not kidding you, that's the type of discussion that I actually heard from senior officers. The reason we had the Tartar missile was to deal with the Soviets Bear Delta aircraft that were going to come out to attack us after a nuclear exchange. I looked at the Commadore when he told me that, and said: "My goodness, this man is mad".

 

[HILL] What did you think of the MLF concept. I mean, you must have had some interest in that?

 

[NIXON] I had not thought enough about the question of nuclear weapons control to have had any feelings. I think that, at the time, I probably thought that this is not a bad idea. More recently, when I got to know more about the problems of control of nuclear weapons, I may have had different thoughts.

 

[COX] Just a last question on that issue of resources. We all have opinions; and we don't always win. But did you feel there were opportunities, for restructuring, which would have permitted a more logical process?

 

[NIXON] Even at that time the answer is yes. What I would have done is this: I would have looked for a way — and keep in mind you are talking about a pretty young commander, who did not know his way around the higher echelons — I would have put the controllers of the three services in the Deputy Minister's office. But the problem was the Army didn't have a controller yet, and the Naval Controller Office was not that well developed, in other words it was just an extension of an accountant. You see it is only in the last, say, fifteen years, that the financial managers, the accountants, have developed the ability and the willingness and the necessity to look ahead as well as back. Now that brings you into one of the things which I think is extremely important, and you might find it interesting in your work, to look at the evolution .of the management of defence in Canada. Historically, you see, you didn't have a Deputy Minister; all you had was the heads of the three services, and when they first had a Deputy Minister, it was made very very clear that his only responsibility was a financial one, just bean counting. Even after the war you had the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, who did all of the policy side, and then there was the Deputy Minister's Estimates Review Committee. And the Estimates Review Committee just dealt with the appropriateness and the thoroughness of the Estimates and the requirements. It had nothing to do with the substantiation of policy; and that persisted, I would say, even up to my time. I think that I was the first Deputy Minister who really interjected himself into policy, and I did it for a variety of reasons. One is because defence policy ties the Department of National Defence, and the Canadian Forces as part of that department, to the external affairs policy. You can’t develop defence policies strictly with military objectives. You have got to do it with total policy planners. And I'd say that the Forces, after some kicking and screaming, have accepted that.

 

Part III - Privy Council Office, 1966-75

 

[HILL] I think that we will now go on to Part Three, which was your period at the Privy Council Office, from 1966 to 1975. I think you have already mentioned that in that period you were working mainly outside of defence issues. But could you tell us how your work at the PCO evolved, which positions you held at that time?

 

[NIXON] Yes, when I first arrived in the PCO, I was seconded from the Department of Industry because Gordon Robertson and Gerry Stoner, who was Assistant Secretary, and Michael Pitfield, were working to build up a better PCO, that would be able to provide a more complete link and interface between the bureaucracy in total and the Cabinet, as well as to provide that linkage inter-departmentally. I don't think that any of those people, particularly Gordon, wanted the PCO to start calling the tune. It was just a matter of seeing that the necessary interfaces were provided, and that, when issues came to Cabinet, they had been thoroughly looked at from all dimensions inter-departmentally. When something arrived for Ministers' consideration, they shouldn't have only the views, for example, of the Department of External Affairs, or Energy, Mines & Resources. Each had to think about other aspects and about the national, Canadian perspective.

 

To do this, they felt they needed people with pretty broad perceptions and not necessarily experts, in every field they could imagine. I mean sufficiently broad that they could understand and communicate with the various departments.

 

I was initially brought in on economic, resources issues, but then two or three things happened. At that time all of the staff officers, or whatever we were called, took their own minutes, and they were all typed up by our secretaries in our own personal format. We all put out our own personal form of the agenda for cabinet committee meetings, and we all wrote the decisions in our own particular style. I looked at this, and I said this is absolutely ludicrous, this is really antediluvian. So I went to the document section, to the individual who looked after the Orders in Council and was called Chief of Documents or something like that. So I talked to him and said: ’’Look now, let's establish some order for Cabinet committees”; and he said: "Well, I haven't got approval to do it". I said, "Well, let's just do it, for me". So we started doing this, and putting out the agenda for all of my committees, Cabinet committee meetings, just exactly as though they were a Cabinet meeting, but they were on blue letterhead and blue headings, not red like the Cabinet; and the same thing with the minutes, and the same thing with the decisions. Well, this went on for a few months and Gordon finally one day looked at all this, and liked what he saw, and said, "Why aren't we doing this everywhere?". And I said, "Well, that's a good question". So the direction came down to get it organized. Some of my fellow officers weren't too happy that I had kind of preempted them, but it was just that I thought the system needed a bit of order. We had had ridiculous things; for example, my secretary would have to take all of the documents for a Cabinet committee and sort them out on her desk and put them all in envelopes. Yet we had a documents section at the top on the next floor that could have done it.

 

The next development that came up was starting to do some analysis, for example for Mr. Pearson. Now I think he only gave one speech on economic or financial matters in all the time he was Prime Minister. And he had asked a question: "How come during my tenure as Prime Minister the budget — you know you're going to faint when you hear this — has risen from 6 billion to 9 billion". Think what it is today! Six billion to nine billion from 1963 to 1968. So he asked this question, and I asked the boys at Treasury Board, and to my astonishment they couldn't tell me. So I took the Estimates of the day, and you know it's not that difficult, even though they were in quite a different form from what they are now. I was able to take the differences and say, well, now this programme and this programme and so on. So I relatively quickly established an ability as an analyst, that nobody else in the PCO really had, a numerical analyst as well as a factual analyst.

 

A constant problem in the PCO in those days, and I don't think it's changed now, is that something will hit the newspapers or there will be a document come in to the Deputy Minister of Finance and he will want to talk to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs and the Secretary of the Cabinet, two or three other Deputies. Or the Ministers want to talk. But they've only got one document. And I had enough background in computering to say this is really ridiculous. In this day and age there's no reason why you shouldn't just be able to put that in a machine that we now call a FAX machine, and quickly have the material propagated around town so you could then have a telephone conference, with everybody knowing what they were talking about instead of the way they were doing it then. So some of these radical ideas came into the system, as a revelation.

 

When Mr. Trudeau became Prime Minister, Michael Pitfield and Marc Lalonde felt that they should have some type of analytical capability in the PCO, not to second-guess the departments, but to look at either large things that embrace many departments or for putting together alternative approaches. A second need was to try to find a new way or different way, as compared with Cabinet documents, for getting the broad picture across to ministers. I don't know how many people realize what an impossible task we throw at ministers, when you ask them to go to a meeting and you give them a pile of documents about a mile thick and you really expect them to go and talk about them. Then you think about the departments, about the effort that goes into producing those documents, when nobody is going to read them except the one who wrote them, and even he doesn't read them any more than he has to. Its just appalling. So we established a Briefing Team, with the most innocuous name we could think of; not so much a multi-disciplinary team, but a team of curious people, drawing on individuals who had shown a high degree of curiosity either in their jobs or in the variety of education they had. We would analyze such problems as the Indian problem and the wheat problem. Remember Joe Greene established a task force around about 1968, with a professor from MacDonald College.

 

Well, we did some of this analysis, and we were using visual presentations. We had, in the East Block, a whole wall of six view graph projectors. The screens were about 8' x 4' and there were six of them, so that the whole width was about 24' wide and about 8' high. They were stacked in two rows of three. There had obviously to be two operators, one on the upper level and one on the lower level. You put together a whole presentation using view graph slides and you wouldn't just do 1,2,3,4,5,6 and then repeat 1,2,3,4,5,6; you would interpose and not just juggle them, but you were constantly wanting each new pictorial to be looked at in the juxtaposition of all the others. Some of these would be graphs, some of them would be pictures, some of them would propositions, some of it was like — you probably have seen some of the material Herman Kahn put out at the Hudson Institute — some of it would be like that. But the whole approach was to try to get the audience to think about this issue more broadly.

 

The wheat problem is a good example. The reason why Gordon asked me to tackle this was because there's no issue which takes more Cabinet time and is more confusing than Western grains. You see, Canada only produces about 4% of the world's grain and the rest comes from other sources. That comes as a real shock to some Canadians. That fact never got through in Cabinet decisions or Cabinet discussions. From what we produce, only half do we export. The second thing is that a good week's weather in China is worth more than our whole Canadian crop. The third thing is that the Canadian crop is less than one standard deviation of the world's grain supply. Only about 10% of the world's grain is traded, and only about 10% of the grain is stored. All of this involves cost, and the problem of either glut or shortage, and that's what you've got to work against in trying to form the wheat policies. We went through many other aspects. But when we put this to the professor from MacDonald College, he saw this, and he was absolutely stunned. He said, "My God"; he said, "We've worked two years with a whole group of experts on this and we've come up with a report about a mile thick and yet you, and 64 slides, have got a picture that we just can't touch as far as comprehensiveness is concerned". However, in the end most people didn't really take to our way of dealing with things. They really love to have classic hard copy to read. You see, there are not that many people who can use graphs and who can think with graphs.

 

[HILL] You were head of the Briefing Team at that time? Where did you fit into the higher governmental structure?

 

[NIXON] Well, I was working directly for Michael Pitfield. But when it appeared for a variety of reasons that the idea of an information analysis and presentation group in the PCO wasn't going to work as well as we'd hoped, Michael made the decision to move me to what he called Coordinator of Legislation and House Planning, and Priorities and Planning, which are the two main planning committees in the Cabinet. At the same time he made Michael Butler the Coordinator of the Operational Committees. You see, at that time, he was acting as Deputy Secretary of Planning, and Michael went off to Consumer and Corporate Affairs. Gordon asked me if I would be Deputy Secretary Planning.

 

[HILL] Didn’t Michael Pitfield come back again?

 

[NIXON] Yes, he did, but that was in early 1975, March maybe. He came back as Secretary of the Cabinet, when Gordon moved to Secretary of Federal-Provincial Affairs.

 

[HILL] So it was Gordon Robertson during the early 70s?

 

[NIXON] That's right. I was still working for Gordon when I went back into dealing with defence issues. But, before we turn to that, one of the things I'd like to mention is the idea of the PCO doing planning. I don't mean a partisan type of planning. What we took on was the idea of listening to what the ministers were saying and then deciding what it all added up to. We said to them: if these are all the things that you've been saying during the election, here's how you could put them together in a programme which might do what you want. So that, when the ministers wanted a Bill, or when the government wanted a Bill, they had a Bill. I just said earlier today on another occasion that the shortest resource that you have in Parliament is parliamentary time. And yet it is the one resource which is not planned. For example, if the Quebec Crisis hadn't occurred, they might have had to close down Parliament because they had no legislation to put in front of it. What you have to try to do — it might take you two parliamentary sessions to draft a piece of legislation — is to get the policy worked out first and then to draft the legislation to implement the policy. So if you want to have it in this session, you may have had to start two years before to do that, and that means you have got to decide about two sessions ahead, not specifically which ones you're going to have, but which ones you should be working on; and naturally, as time gets closer and closer, you say, well, put more emphasis on that one, so it becomes more urgent. You see this is why I have so much difficulty with Mr. Wilson and his tax reform. Think about the last time we had tax reform. It took them two years to rewrite the Income Tax Act, ask Don Thorson. Can anyone tell me that they're going to rewrite that whole Income Tax Act between now and June, to say nothing about all the policy considerations that they're going to have to consider on that issue? That's a digression, but to come back to the point, I do think that that was a major part of my contribution in the 1972-74 period.

 

[HILL] Could I interrupt for a few minutes? 1972 was the minority government, wasn't it?

 

[NIXON] That's right. I was Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet in that period.

 

[HILL] So, it was that two year period then. And there was a period when the PCO was reduced, if I'm not mistaken. But afterwards there was a period of rapid growth, wasn't there?

 

[NIXON] That followed after that, really. I guess from 1966 to 1968 there was a little bit of growth, and there was probably a fair amount of growth after 1968 because the PCO expanded to acquire a pretty good capability as an economic secretariat, a legislation planning office, a House-planning secretariat, a social policy secretariat, and a priorities and planning secretariat.

 

[COX]     And was there a foreign and defence policy secretariat?

 

[NIXON] Yes, there was. But it wasn't very big. I think there were only two people in that. But at the same time, while I was distancing myself, or trying to stay clear of defence, they went through the whole matter of integration, unification, and then the refocussing of defence in the latter part of the 1960s, in 1968 in particular, followed by the three year freeze in the budget, the cutting of the Forces from about 120,000 to 90,000 or 80,000 (I think the official number was about 82,000, but the actual number was about 78,000). And then the unfortunate thing is that when they started to get out of the "freeze”, they were hit by inflation of unprecedented size. And an arrangement had been made with the Treasury Board that National Defence should be given 7% growth, which was supposed to give them 4% for inflation and 3% for real growth, to try and get back on the re-equipment track, because at that time the equipment portion of the budget had shrunk to about 9% of the total budget. To keep Defence going and keep replacing equipment as it wears out or becomes obsolete, you need something like about 25 or 26%. In fact, now it may be as high as 30%. Anyway, it's a long way from 9%. Unfortunately, in 1974, if you go back, inflation just took off like a rocket.

 

[HILL] Now that was in 1974, just after the Energy Crisis?

 

[NIXON] That's right. So this undertaking with the Treasury Board was just completely inadequate. In the summer of 1974, in May, just when the fiscal year had hardly started, Defence knew they were in trouble. They went back to the Treasury Board, and the Board said there was no way they'd provide more money. DND would have to go to Cabinet. That decision was made in June, just before they packed up for the summer. And so they went off for the summer holidays. And then an interesting thing happened. I had on my staff Gordon Smith, who had written the White Paper, you probably know him, he's at NATO now. I also had Bill Teske who became Deputy of DRIE, and he was at that time Assistant Secretary of Priorities and Planning, and he had on his staff Bill Snarr. Now Bill had been in the Deputy Minister's office in National Defence and I think he had been in DRB, and then in Operations Research. These three individuals came to see me, separately, though I really think there was a certain amount of collusion; I never asked them this, they're all good friends. I admire them for it and for what they did. And they said to me, words along the lines: "We know what your personal views are about National Defence and that you personally will want to steer clear of it, but you happen to be Deputy Secretary of Planning for the Cabinet, and one of the most pressing issues that the Cabinet must address in its planning next fall, when they come back, is National Defence, because of this crisis in their resources".

[HILL] This being 1974 now?

 

[NIXON] Yes 1974. They said: "So whether you like it or not, your obligations in your current job require that you look at this". Anyway, I think it's wonderful to have staff to tell you what your responsibilities are, and at the same time do it well. I had to agree with them. Yes, you're absolutely quite right, and as I say the three of them approached me. So I dug into this problem. And that caused me to come to Gordon Robertson with the idea that the only way to solve this problem was to have what would be known as the Defence Structure Review.

 

Gordon Robertson looked at what was involved. National Defence was faced with an almost catastrophic financial problem, both in the short run and more particularly in the long run. So this question came to Cabinet that Fall, and it was proposed to do a Defence Structure Review to see if we couldn't structure defence so that DND could do the job with fewer resources, and to look at what equipment there was and what could be done about commitments. I was directed to chair this Review, along with the Deputy Minister of National Defence, Syl Cloutier. That Review went on through the winter of 1974. Then in the spring of 1975, Cloutier went off to be Deputy Minister of Transport, and I was asked if I would be Deputy Minister of National Defence. Having left the place because I had lost a certain amount of confidence in the management, I felt that if I had any backbone or integrity I would have to accept it. So that's how I became Deputy Minister of National Defence.

 

[COX] So you became "The Management"?

 

[NIXON] Exactly. If you're given the opportunity, you haven't got much personal integrity if you turn it down.

 

[HILL]    Do you have some further comments on this period?

 

[NIXON] I would like to pick up on at least one other point, because there were a couple of other events that were extremely important to the discussions at that time. The first one was that it was in the summer of 1975, I believe, that the Prime Minister visited Chancellor Schmidt. I have it both impressionistically from my own assessment, from the way that the dialogue went after that, as well as from some of the people from External who were personally involved with the meeting, that indeed Schmidt did lay it on the line, not in a threatening manner, but saying: "Look, Mr. Prime Minister, my friend Trudeau, if you want to have influence in Europe, and you want Europeans to listen to you, you had better recognize that, to Europeans, NATO and security and defence are of fundamental importance, even though they might not be to Canada". Point number one. And the second point is that until that time — and this requires an awful lot more discussion which we will pick up next time — there had been a tendency in National Defence to look at deterrence and defence or deterrence and war-fighting as one and the same thing, and to get sucked into the argument of short war and long war. Trudeau would ask repeatedly: "Is this going to be a short war or a long war?" Immediately you respond to that question, you are lost because you accept war as being inevitable. As soon as I perceived this, when I was in the PCD, I advised the Prime Minister: "You're asking the wrong question. If we get into any war, we have failed in the most important thing, and that’s to deter it. So your question should be: "What posture should we have to deter war?" And that was, I think, a real turning point.

 

[COX] Just a quick clarification. Was the problem that, if you said it was going to be a short war, then the answer was that in that case you don't need very much in the way of defence. If you said it's going to be a long war, then that's hopelessly unrealistic, we'll never do that.

 

[NIXON] That's it. It was a Catch 22 type of question. You couldn't win on that one.

 

[HILL] I'd just like to ask one final question for today. From what you say, I have the impression that Mr. Trudeau, at the time of the FLQ crisis, saw the need for the Armed Forces in a way that perhaps he hadn't seen it before. But then after that other problems came along, like inflation and so on. Then there was the impact of Chancellor Schmidt. What was Mr. Trudeau's general attitude to the Armed Forces?

 

[NIXON] I think the FLQ crisis bothered him. It bothered all of us. I mean the fact that our country got to the point of having to use things like the War Measures Act, and to turn out the troops. And incidentally, based on the information which we had at the time, and information that has come forward subsequently, if we'd had it to do again I'd say do it exactly the same way. All this hindsight, you know, about you didn't need that, you didn't need this, that may be so. But go back and look at the newspapers, and go back and listen to the radio and watch the television of the day, and then ask yourself what you would do if you'd been confronted with that situation. The major wrong-doing, or bad turn of events, was the holus-bolus arresting that was done by the Quebec Provincial Police. But the interesting thing to me is that there were no law suits. People like Pauline Julienne and Claude Lemelin — I'm not sure about Claude Lemelin — but Pauline Julienne, I'm certain, was taken in. None of these people launched counter suits, they never even, as far as I know, went to the Ombudsman. It's beyond me why. They may have gone to see their lawyers and their lawyers may have said: "Look, you haven't got a chance". But I would have thought they would have gone through the motions, just to go through the motions, even if it was a lost cause. That's to me the one real unanswered question. I expected there would be 400 counter suits, that the government would be paying damages for these, you know these false arrests or whatever you want to call them, or unnecessary arrests, and that people would have just launched them if only to get public sympathy. If you look at some of the books about the period, by God we sure did the right thing.

 

Again, its completely impressionistic, but my feeling is that Mr. Trudeau just found it anathema to use force to solve his problems. I think he wouldn't feel that way about dealing with common criminals, or common crimes. I just think that he found it kind of appalling that you had to use force at home. But what was his quote? It was: "Just watch me", something like that; and that's the way he was, we saw that repeatedly. When he saw that something had to be done, if he couldn't see any other way of doing it, then by gosh he'd do it.

 

[HILL] Did he lose interest again in the Armed Forces, I mean after 1971?

 

[NIXON] I think that I would put as much blame on the Department of National Defence and to a degree on the Minister, for not addressing this issue in a way which would appeal to, or would be understood by, Mr. Trudeau. I'm thinking of the point I have just mentioned, about short war or long war, for example. They'd get sucked into that kind of thing, and they'd argue about it. They would talk about commitments to NATO as though these were something that were thrust upon us, as though they weren't Canada's commitments, as though they weren't Canada's undertakings. Even when I got there, the Cabinet hadn't been informed that there were two Soviet Yankee-class submarines sitting between Bermuda and New York, parked there all the time, with their missiles aimed at the continental United States, and perhaps eastern Canada. There was no constant Cabinet awareness, as there is today (you see it in the newspaper), about the Soviet Bear Deltas flying down the East Coast. Some of this, in my mind, was due to very narrow-mindedness on the part of National Defence, saying to themselves: "Oh, we can't let on we have this intelligence”. It's asinine to take that approach. A Bear Delta crashed off southern Newfoundland on a Friday afternoon. I got a call from my information people, saying: "Look, this thing has crashed; we want to put out a press release on it but the security and intelligence people say, 'No, don't, because we might give away the fact that we knew it was there'." And I said, "For God sakes put it out, because, if you don't, some fisherman is going to do it and then you're really going to look like idiots”. So that was done. But the attitude inside the Department about public awareness is sometimes remarkable. I went down to the East Coast after that Bear Delta had crashed and went aboard one of the ships; and Admiral Boyle made a hell of a good decision —that a Canadian ship should be in the search area all the time that the Soviets were searching for that plane and trying to recover it. I went aboard one of the ships for lunch and the young officers in the wardroom were complaining about this — it was interrupting their training sessions, and it was playing havoc with their scheduled operations. I said: "You guys have to realize that for the first time in years you're on the front page of The Gazette and The Globe and Mail every day. It's the first time for ages that the Canadian people have had a reason to think about the Canadian Forces; and you're going to throw it away?" The same thing with search and rescue. Search and rescue has been a responsibility of National Defence for years, and yet when I first got there, all they did was bitch and complain about it; and I said: "Look, these are human interest stories here. Every time somebody goes down, make sure that's written about. You don't write it, but make it possible for the press to write it". And they started to do that. Barney Danson, in his tenure, mentioned that his people were counting, for him, the publicity that National Defence was getting; and it was raised something like three-fold during the time he was Minister. Well, that's not a hell of a lot when there was nothing to start with. But that's the type of thing that I tried to do. We also decided to do an annual defence overview, to put out an appreciation of what had happened in the past year in the field of defence and security, in deterrence, including what had happened and the trends that had been perceived. Also we wanted to say what we should be doing about such developments. If you take a look — you probably saw it when you were in NATO — the British do a White Paper every year, the West Germans do a White Paper every year, the Secretary of Defense in the United States makes an annual report. That's what we started gradually to build up to doing from the time Mr. Lamontagne became Minister. The press never cottoned on to it. If you go back through Lamontagne's first year as Minister, there was a statement. It was the first time there was a statement of policy made through the House of Commons Standing Committee. And the next year it was a bit more comprehensive. And finally Jean-Jacques Blais put out that little golden book which you're probably familiar with. Well, that's the first time you had some kind of a bound volume since 1957.

 

[COX] Which document are we discussing?

 

[NIXON] I'm talking about the Minister's statement to the Standing Committee. There was a little gold book which you will probably find in this library. It was by Jean-Jacques Blais. It described what had happened in NATO, in East-West relations in the past year, what Canada's forces were doing about it, and so on. That's what had been lacking. The people in Defence were sitting around as if they had a God-given right to have a certain percentage of the budget, and to get it without having to explain why. Now, when I was in the PCO, Michael Pitfield and I and two or three others worked out a scheme, which was eventually implemented, for a Multi-Year Operational Plan (MYOP) and a Strategic Overview. The strategic overview was a vehicle requiring each department to make an annual report, through the Minister, to the Cabinet committees, on what had happened to agriculture, in the past year, both in Canada and abroad, and what did that mean for the Canadian Department of Agriculture; and what should we be doing about it; and so on. I think this is a fundamental requirement for rational planning. Now this government has put it aside, but I believe that, if they're in office long enough, they'll realize they need it.

 

[COX] Were these private documents, or are they public documents?

 

[NIXON] They're Cabinet documents, so they're private in that respect. I don't know how they stand with respect to the Access to Information situation. I think they would probably remain private, being Cabinet documents.

 

Part IV - Deputy Minister. National Defence, 1975-82

 

[HILL] Mr. Nixon, in 1975 you were appointed Deputy Minister of National Defence, a position you held for the next seven years. I have the impression that this must have been a great satisfaction to you because of your previous service career and because 1975, it seems to me, was in many ways a turning point in the country's defence affairs, when Canada put aside some of its earlier doubts and hesitations about its Alliance commitments, took a new interest in NATO and NORAD, stopped cutting the manpower of the Armed Forces, lifted the freeze on the defence budget, and began the re-equipping of the Armed Forces. That’s a bit the way I, looking at it from a distance, saw the situation. I wonder if you would have any comments on that?

 

[NIXON] Well, I think it’s kind of stretching it to say it was a great satisfaction to me to become Deputy Minister of National Defence. I'd say it was a challenge, and when I use the word challenge, I don't mean in the usual cliche manner. I mean it truly. Because, as I indicated previously, I did have some serious reservations about the management of the Navy, at the time I left the Navy. And also I wondered whether I could really bring about change, or contribute to significant change, in the defence posture of the country. Also at the time I was appointed, the decisions which you mentioned had not yet been made. There hadn't been a real decision about a turn-around in Canada's defence efforts. There hadn't been a decision to put aside earlier doubts and hesitations, and stop cutting. The only decision that had been made was to have a Defence Structure Review. We were still in the middle of the Defence Structure Review, but almost every review we've had in Canada was not set up to solve the defence problem by putting more resources into it. The purpose of government reviews is usually to find a way to spend less on the subject, and this was still the case when I became Deputy Minister in 1975. In the Defence Structure Review, it was not a question of a short war or a long war, it was deterrence, and what Canada could contribute to deterrence, and that was the primary point. The other point which started to emerge at that time is that we are not just protecting the geographic entity known as Canada, and we are not just assisting the European NATO allies to look after the geographic entity known as Europe; we are defending and protecting the values, processes, and institutions that we have as free nations, which are not at all admired, really, by the Soviet Union. And that we can't do alone; no nation can do it; no free nation can do that alone. We must do that in concert. Well, that feeling started to come through more, I think, in the 1975 era, with the Defence Structure Review; and the Defence Structure Review really came down to discussing with the allies such ideas as specialized forces, I mean just having land forces or maritime forces or air forces. And the NATO response was: "Don't change anything, just keep on doing what your doing, but do more of it". And that's essentially, I think, the response that Mr. Beatty has had from his NATO allies, until he pressed the point and came up with his White Paper and moved us out of northern Norway. Well, he's obviously convinced, because he's just told his NATO allies that it's going to happen.

 

[HILL] But the Defence Structure Review, was this a regular process or was this a sort of one-shot affair?

 

[NIXON] It was a one-shot affair. And, as I indicated, it was introduced because in 1974 inflation overtook the defence budget so dramatically that the Department of National Defence had to make some urgent moves even within the year. We closed a whole string of radar stations, and stopped the procurement programme. At that time the procurement programme only amounted to 8.9% of the total defence budget. If you look at Britain, West Germany, the United States, putting aside their nuclear weapons, their expenditures on their equipment programmes at that time were probably running in the order of about 25-26%; and they're now probably running around about 30%, because of the escalation in technology.

 

[HILL] But, as you indicated just now, the Defence Structure Review was initially intended as a means of finding ways of cutting costs.

 

[NIXON] It didn't work out that way primarily because we showed that, if we were to have Forces at all, we really couldn't have less than what we had. And incidentally, when I said that, I don't mean just from a NATO point of view, I mean even from a Canadian point of view. We had just three brigades in the whole length and breath of the country, and about 24 destroyer escorts, and, I believe, about 175 first line aircraft (or it may have been as much as 225). It would have been pretty hard to propose smaller numbers. So first we established the numbers of operational units, and then the next question was to look at the capital equipment; and all of this was put to Cabinet in the response to the Defence Structure Review, as a Cabinet decision in this case; and this came after I became Deputy Minister. The decision was that the Forces would maintain their activities at the prevailing level. They were to be funded "clear of inflation." This is important, because it is a matter of the way inflation was defined. And it was also agreed that the capital equipment programme would be increased by 12% per year. Keep in mind that the capital budget was very, very small, it was only about $300 million at that time, whereas today it is around about $2 1/2 billion, even allowing for inflation. And so, when you put the 12% on the $300 million in real terms, you're only talking, the first year, obviously, about $36 million of growth, which wasn't very much.

 

[COX] Just to get that straight — the formula was inflation for the other items, and 12% real on equipment.

 

[NIXON] That's right. Just before I arrived at National Defence, they had developed what they called an Economic Model, with a comparable thing to the "consumer basket of goods" - the "defence basket of goods". They had developed the Model to estimate it, both estimate it and also measure it retrospectively. They looked at the inflation on the defence product, and it came out to, and has consistently been, about 1.2% higher than the GNE deflator. And the way the Cabinet decision was interpreted, which is the only way it could have been interpreted, was that the defence economic model deflator was the one that you would use. And that was used for four years. Its a bit of a digression from your point, but while I'm on it let's finish it. The process that was followed because of that Cabinet decision, which came in 1975, and it was followed until 1979, was that every year we would work out the inflation for the year and that would be applied and the real growth would be allowed for, and so on. (Incidentally, this economic model was reviewed by the Treasury Board, by Stats Canada and by the Department of Finance, and they accepted it as a valid method, so it did have some credibility. So for those years I mentioned, we would do our estimates — and the Treasury Board Secretariat, naturally would check it out). If, during the course of the year, inflation turned out to be less than what we had forecast, we would voluntarily let lapse the amount of funds difference; and equally well, if it was more, then at the end, in the Supplementary Estimates, the difference would be made up. That worked very well until 1979. And in 1979 there was a move afoot, primarily from the Department of Finance, that National Defence should not have that defence deflator, they should use the CPI or GNE deflator. A proposal to make that change was tried in 1979, but it didn't stick. Then they then came back again, after I left, and the GNE deflator has been used in recent years. So when you see the figures in the Budget or the Estimates, and the Minister of Finance saying that the real growth for National Defence will be 2%, and inflation is let's say 4% by the GNE, he really means that the real growth in the defence capability will only be 1%, because the defence deflator will in fact be 5%, that is 4 plus 1.2%. So what has happened, in my view, is a real, insidious attack on the defence budget, through this twisting of the decisions. But you get some people who will say that a decision of 1975 no longer applies. Well, maybe it doesn't apply. But don't call it real growth in the defence budget. If it's real growth in dollar terms on the GNE, yes. But is it real growth in capability? No, it's not.

 

[HILL] On the Defence Structure Review, who was involved, and how long did it take?

 

[NIXON] It started, actually, I'd say in the fall of 1974, and it persisted through to about July or so 1975; and I was appointed Deputy Minister in May of 1975. It was chaired jointly by the then Deputy Minister Sylvain Cloutier, and myself, as a Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet. The type of things we got into were: should we or should we not have tanks? Now I can't pinpoint the document, but there was a position of the government, in about 1968-69, that the Canadian Forces should not be equipped with any big weapons or devices which would not be utilized in Canada for the defence of Canada or for aid to the civil power or similar. Well, as the only threat to Canada is the threat from strategic weapons, the question raised was: should we have tanks? You surely wouldn't need tanks in Canada for insurrections or anything like that, or for aid to the civil power. And the Centurions were getting very, very old. So the question arose: should we or should we not have tanks? During one of these discussions of the Defence Structure Review, someone said, in exasperation: "I don't give a damn whether we have tanks or don't have tanks, but what I want is a decision"; and my response was: "If you keep that up, then you'll probably get a reply that you won't like, and that is no tanks". But it went through this, the whole matter of tanks, and in the end it came out: "Look, with the commitments we've got, we can't really change the formations that we have"; and then it went into the number of operational units, but not extensively into costing. The Department was given the 12% real growth in the capital programme to start to overcome deficiencies. Incidentally, there were people who felt we should have had a lump sum increase to get on with tanks and the LRPA, ships, and new fighter aircraft, everything, all at once. You just can't do that, though.

 

[HILL] No. I guess not.

 

[NIXON] There is one other point about the Defence Structure Review which I neglected to make. The Cabinet, in deciding on the capital budget, also directed us to come back with a paper on the size of the Forces, on the number of personnel, because the Forces felt at that time that they were not only over-tasked, but also suffering because the units that they had were extremely lean and sparse. For example, in the air group, particularly in the technical fields, they had holes in their establishment which needed to be filled. So the Cabinet told us to come back with a personnel review, and I don't think we got back with that until 1976. But when we, the Department, looked at this question in depth, we found that, aside from holes in the operational units, there were also problems in all the support units and so on. By the time we finished, it looked as though we needed about 5,400 more people. Keep in mind that at that time there were only 78,300. So we made the case for 5,400. It was cut back to 4,700, and the decision was then made that we would increase by 400 per year. That's why, over these intervening ten years, you've seen the strength of the Forces rise from 79,300 to about 85,000. When the Conservatives came in, they increased the numbers by another 1,600 over the 85,000.

 

[HILL] Presumably it was mainly the policy planning staffs in DND and other government departments like Treasury Board and so on who would be involved in this review?

 

[NIXON] Yes, it was. On the Defence Structure Review, it was Defence, PCO, Treasury Board and External, primarily.

 

[HILL] I would like to go on and relate this to another point, because what I'm looking for are the factors leading to the turnaround. Obviously the Review played a significant role in it. But also there's the question of Mr. Trudeau's visit to Europe that summer, in 1975, or perhaps the spring, to see about promoting the Third Option and the Framework Agreement with the Europeans. And then there was this famous conversation with Chancellor Schmidt, and I believe with some other people. I wonder if you could tell us something more about that?

 

[NIXON] Well, I only know of that from second hand, from the people that were on the scene. Yes, the conversation did take place. It certainly seems to have had an effect. As I understand it, it was along the lines that Europe's relationships with Canada have a very large military dimension to them. So, if Canada wanted to maintain good relations on the trade side, we had better think very much about the total relationship. That's simply the European reality; the military situation has been so much a part of their history, they were born with it, raised with it, educated with it, they lived with it every day. And I found, certainly to my astonishment, in 1975, when I visited Holland and especially North Holland, that the Dutch were far more aware of what the Canadians had done in the Second World War than most Canadians are.

 

[HILL] Well, I know that, living in Belgium for a few years, we found that too. The Second World War is still very alive there in a way that it isn't here.

 

[NIXON] Have you been to Bruges and seen the big buffalo, at the eastern gate to Bruges? I have to confess I haven't been there. I've seen pictures of it. There's a huge Manitoba buffalo. That's because Bruges was liberated by the 12th Manitoba Dragoons. That's where I started my military career, in the militia with the 12th Manitoba Dragoons, and their badge is this great, huge buffalo.

 

[HILL]    When did that come, roughly, do you remember, that

conversation between Schmidt and Trudeau?

 

[NIXON] It was either shortly before, or it could have been after, the Cabinet made these decisions.

 

[HILL]    So it wasn't a fundamental thing in getting the Cabinet to change its thinking about where defence was going. Or was it?

 

[NIXON] I don't think so. But what it did do, I guess, it made the Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau, more receptive and more understanding when we came forward with individual papers, subsequently, on the LRPA, and on personnel, and so on. Because I think that the decision following the Defence Structure Review wasn't that onerous, or wasn't that monumental. What they said was: "You just keep on doing what you're doing and we'll find you the money, free of inflation. And we'll give you 12% for the equipment". And 12% on the equipment, as I had just mentioned, is only $36 million.

 

Incidentally — another little digression — that method of handling inflation in the Canadian defence budget, in my judgment, is far superior to the way the Americans handle it, or the way the rest of the Government of Canada handles it. They didn't have things like economic models, and I believe they suffered badly and had their real capability reduced because of inflation and not having adequate provision for it. I should mention how some of these things are handled. I remember the fights that I used to have with the Treasury Board and the Secretary of the Treasury Board. They were monumental. I guess the problem I had was that I knew from my economic studies that the revenues of the Department of Finance have an elasticity greater than one, with inflation. That is, the Department of Finance is better off with inflation higher than forecast; and yet the nonsense and the hypocrisy I used to get from the Secretaries of the Treasury Board was that we couldn't afford this and we couldn't afford that, because of inflation." And I said: "That's bloody nonsense, you can more than afford it; in fact you can afford it better with inflation higher than forecast, than you can with inflation as forecast." It's absolutely dishonest not to be compensating the departments for inflation, so that they can maintain their purchasing. But that myth got spread to the public of Canada, though it was bloody nonsense. We could afford it. If you want to reduce budgets because of expenditure restraint, that's a different matter. If you want to reduce expenditures so as to contain the forces of inflation, that's a different matter. But it's not that you can't afford it because of inflation. And that's the type of argument that I used to run into. I used to argue with the Treasury Board on this matter; whether we should use the defence deflator or the GNE deflator.

 

[COX] Could I just ask a supplementary question here that concerns the tank. Prior to the Trudeau trip to Germany, was that issue of whether or not to have the tank still an open one?

 

[NIXON] Yes. I think it was, because the decision to replace the tank wasn't taken until into 1976. That's a very interesting story. We got into this ridiculous situation where the Canadian Forces — supposing they didn't have tanks — could have been fighting alongside troops that have tanks, and could have been fighting against troops that have tanks. The only way you could train to work in that environment would be to have some tanks yourself, for training. So we could have gotten into the ridiculous situation of having to have tanks at Gagetown to train the Canadian Forces, but not having any tanks in Europe, which would just be ludicrous. Anti-tank weapons are a great thing — if you're going to be in a tank battle — but one of the best antitank vehicles is another tank. One of the problems that we had here was trying to overcome this 1968-69 idea that you wouldn't have any equipment in Canada that you wouldn't have elsewhere. General Dextraze and I talked about the problem of trying to get this across to the Prime Minister. General Dextraze is a very persuasive individual and I thought he could present his case well, so I suggested to him: "Why don't you write the Prime Minister a personal letter, you're the Chief of the Defence Staff, and I think it's not a real violation of the mandate of the Minister of National Defence”. And he said: "Yes, but how am I going to get it there?” I said: "I suggest to you that on Friday evening, in your staff car, you drive up to the gates of 24 Sussex Drive, and I can assure you you'll be allowed in. You get out of the car and you ring the door bell, and when the butler arrives, give him the letter and tell him you want the Prime Minister to read it". He did that; and I believe he got an acknowledgment from the Prime Minister the following week; and we subsequently acquired tanks.

 

[COX] Do you mind if I ask a further question on that? I recall that, around that time, I had just begun taking an interest in defence policies, talking to people who were very keen on the armoured cavalry concept in Vietnam, the helicopter troops, and so on. And I had the impression that, at least for a while, that was something that was being discussed actively within DND, at least until you tried to put a price tag on it?

 

[NIXON] The whole idea of armed helicopters never, to my knowledge, had any intensive examination in National Defence, which just astounds me, because I find that in 1987, not to be thinking about armed helicopters, was a bit archaic. In any of these fields there is a time when concepts play themselves out and its a particular thing with cavalry. Look at the cavalry regiments that stood at the ready all during the First World War and never had a cavalry charge as far as I know. And look at these large battleships that the Americans have just recommissioned. That is not by the will of the United States Navy, that’s by the direction of Congress. And if you look at what they're doing with them, and the cost of running them, that's a hell of an expensive thing. I would also suggest that the F-15 Eagle may be the end of the big fighters. I also think that the tank, maybe, is coming to an end, partly because of the anti-tank weapons, which are precision munitions, guided munitions, laser guided, and so on. When you get to the point when you can pin-point a tank with a laser and have munitions follow that laser beam down, then the tanks, considering the price of them, are pretty vulnerable things.

 

And, of course, armed helicopters can be very potent tank destroyers. Now that's a two way street, even with things like the ADATS weapons system. I’m not sure that I’d want to be piloting an armed helicopter myself, but if you could take a helicopter and put a fire control system on it, allowing you to fire CRV7 rockets, then my God you'd really have a potent thing.

 

[COX] Was DND shy about helicopters because they are too expensive?

 

[NIXON] Well, I think there were a variety of reasons. One was the problem of priorities. National Defence has trimmed procurements to the bone. I don't know whether I mentioned this the other day, but the way of procuring or allocating so much money to a system and then getting as many units as possible, whether they be aircraft or tanks, for that amount of money, has been a very beneficial thing. But what came out of this shortage of funds and shortage of tanks is the AVGP, which is the armored vehicle general purpose. We started off by allocating $150 million to that, and expected to get around 350 vehicles; but we ended up getting 490, which was all to the good. When you say what did you do with the extra money, well, there really wasn't any extra, because the Canadian militia regiments hadn't had any tanks since the Shermans. The last time the Calgary Regiment — which is the oldest tank regiment in Canada — fired anything, was from Shermans in 1966. And so they were in dire straits, they just didn't have anything to train with. But in 1981 they were provided with some of these Grizzlies, which are the AVGP with the 76 millimetre gun on it, and that’s the first time they had any real tank training and tank firing since 1966, almost 15 years. And the reason for the AVGP? There are a variety of reasons. One is that it costs so much less than a tank, it costs about a third of the price of a tank, and the second was that the operating costs are, equally, very, very low — because of the tank tracks. A tank doesn't go very many miles before you need a new set of tracks. And the third reason is that many people, including General Dextraze, said that the situation in Europe had changed so profoundly in 1980, compared to the way it was in 1944. There weren't the number of hedge rows, there weren’t the number of stone walls, there were far far greater numbers of roads. So that there wasn't the overall, overwhelming demand for tracks that there had been. I mean there was more place for wheeled vehicles. War had also moved to the point where you needed to have more and faster mobility, which requires wheels, and also the technology of wheeled vehicles had advanced so far. He thought that we should have a good try at wheeled vehicles, and so that's the reason why the AVGP was selected. Maybe I have stressed this a bit here because the Auditor General took a real good swipe at the AVGP in his 1983 report. But he never considered all of these factors, as to why, I think, it was a very good purchase.

 

[HILL] Could I go then to the equipment situation? By 1976 things had moved around. Anyway, the fact is that by then it was clear that the Armed Forces were going to be rebuilt. Now the problem was that there was a backlog of demands and the prospect of block obsolescence down the way. You were there in the Department, you had to look at the five year period, the fifteen year period and so on. Then you got into these re-equipment programmes, starting mainly with the long-range patrol aircraft (LRPA) and the Leopard tank. What I am wondering is: why did you choose these two items to start off with, and what kind of long term plans did you develop in this period?

 

[NIXON] The LRPA project was already under way. It was actually started, I think, around 1972. And, when I arrived as Deputy Minister, it was practically ready for going to contract. And that's when they found that they couldn't fit it in within the annual cash flow, it just couldn't be fitted within the envelope which we had for defence equipment. Whatever we did we had to fit it in within our equipment budget envelope, and we just couldn't do that. And then we ran into all the ruckus, which you recall, of Mr. Goyer and Mr. Richardson, whether we're going to borrow money to buy the aircraft, or whether we're going to print promissory notes or whatever. Which is rather interesting, I think. Not only interesting, but extremely important with respect to where we are now, or where defence is at now. I took the position very early, in that episode of the LRPA, that if that project, which was a meritorious project, wasn't sustained, the possibility of sustaining any other one would be practically nil. We had to make the case with that one and get it established, because if the combined efforts of Treasury Board, Finance and all the counter forces could stop that, then they would stop any other one.

 

I also established the principle in National Defence that whatever we did, and whatever papers we wrote, we must be prepared to stand by those papers - 5, 10 years later. In other words, what I was fed up with was what I'd seen in other departments, and also from National Defence, that is to say superficial arguments being used to substantiate a project, and then two weeks later people writing another paper which used almost counter-arguments to support another conclusion. And I said: "Well, look, we've got to be consistent!". And I also established a principle, which I think has certainly served me personally very well, that if we make a mistake in what we're doing, for goodness sakes don't make a second mistake by persisting in the first. And I found I made it very easy, not only for myself, but for the staff, when they realized that the people who were leading them weren't going to jump down their throats. They didn't have to defend, constantly, ridiculous positions, once they realized they were ridiculous.

 

But to come back to the LRPA, there are several dimensions to that fight. One was a proposal that we should not be trying to develop our own aircraft, that we should be buying the American aircraft, the P3C, update 3, which was not yet available, and that we should be buying it through foreign military sales. If you buy that equipment through foreign military sales, you go to the United States Navy and you say: "You act as our agent and you buy it from Lockheed". And they would say: "Yes, we’ll do that, but if we do that you have to take all the modifications that we take and you have to take any increases in price that might come about in our negotiations with Lockheed". Because, keep in mind, the United States Navy does not order things on a multi-year basis, they order them one year at a time. We didn't particularly want the P3C, update 3. We had our own configuration which we also felt was better, and in fact I think the Americans who work in the field will say, yes, it was, and still is, better than the configuration that they have. So we were negotiating directly with Lockheed. Well, this turned out to be a little bit of a hair pulling contest between the Department of National Defence and the Treasury Board, and it was finally resolved between Michael Pitfield as Secretary to the Cabinet, Gordon Osbaldeston as Secretary to the Treasury Board, and myself, on the basis of saying: "Well, look, this is a departmental responsibility not a Treasury Board Secretariat responsibility." The Treasury Board Secretariat had made their case, the Department had shown why that case should not be followed, and so we chose the LRPA.

 

There was a cost-effectiveness issue here, I recall; Treasury Board argued that what we were doing wasn't the best use of funds, that the project office was biased, that it wasn't being objective, and so on. So I, with the advice of General MacLaughlin, instituted a second review group, including a number of very competent people from the operations research group and from the operators. And they came out and said: "Hey, you're going in the right direction". I think that was tremendous, because, if I had a billion dollars to spare, as Deputy Minister I would immediately go out and buy more long range patrol aircraft. That's because of the importance of the sea lines of communication with Europe. We have to keep those secure. And two of the main contributors to maintaining those sea lines of communication, I think, are the long range patrol aircraft and the SOSUS. Not so much now as then. Today there is the long range surveillance TACTAS detection equipment that you tow with ships. Maybe that is just as important now as the long range patrol aircraft back then, maybe a lot more important and maybe even more important than SOSUS, because SOSUS is a vulnerable system.

 

Anyway, that issue was solved. Then we ran into this problem of trying to go to contract, and there wasn't enough money. The issue went to Cabinet and after a lot of toing and froing they came up with the idea that, well, maybe we should get the banks to finance it. And I though this was absolutely ludicrous. I felt that, not being an economist, or a financier, the government of Canada should not go that kind of route. It should use its bonds and its treasury bills, and that's it. What they were really talking about was promissory notes, and I talked to Tommy Shoyama, who shared my feelings, as Deputy Minister of Finance, that we shouldn't do that. Anyway we did manage to get the Canadian banks involved and they looked at this situation and they decided in fact that they would be prepared to finance this acquisition. But they had one stumbling block, and that is, under the Financial Administration Act, I'm not sure exactly what the words are, but it's something along the following lines: "A contract is not deemed to exist unless it is covered by funds which have been appropriated by Parliament or is covered by an Estimate which has been presented to Parliament". Well, that would mean that any contract is not deemed to exist, has no legal status, except in the current year. The last time, and I think the only time, it has ever been invoked in Canada, was in 1929 in the Beauharnois scandal. I have argued that the Government certainly should be writing multi-year contracts. If they want to get out of one, then it should be by a negative legislative act, by actually voting in the Estimates that this contract will be discontinued, rather than the other way around i.e., that it doesn't continue unless it's covered in the Estimates. Even that is pretty woolly because none of these things, our contracts, are specifically listed in the Estimates; and I'm talking about the Estimates which form the basis of the Vote.

 

[HILL] Parliamentary Estimates?

 

[NIXON] I'm talking about the Vote wording. The Estimates placed before the House are the document I'm talking about, Part 3, which for the Defence Department is a document 1/2" thick, but there’s only one page in it that is legally binding, and that's the wording of the vote. The other is only explanatory information for the parliamentarians. So this ridiculous law that we have, in the Financial Administration Act, makes it extremely difficult to deal with these things. Incidentally, that clause also connects up with the tank, which I'll discuss in a moment.

 

But the Chairman of all the Canadian banks met with Donald MacDonald who was Minister of Finance and Peter Troop from the Department of Justice and myself, and they made the pitch to Mr. MacDonald that they could in fact do this financing providing that this clause was moved. Peter Troop made the case along the lines that Tommy Shoyama and I had spoken about, that while it was not particularly prohibited in the law of the land, it certainly did not seem to be within the intent of the law to have this promissory note approach to government financing, in other words another quality of paper as a financier would term it. Mr. MacDonald used a word which at that time I had not encountered; he said the government must be "punctilious" in the application of the law to itself, and I admired that man at the time, and I've admired him ever since, because by God that's a principle I'd like to see applied more assiduously than it is applied. It's not really part of this question here but it is germane to the point in general. So, with Mr. MacDonald saying that, the bankers went away to think things over. I reckon at that point you might say that the Department had Mr. MacDonald's support for the fact that we had to find a way out of this situation. Anyway, after a number of hitches, we finally got the contract with Lockheed, and I feel that it's a case of persistence paying off. And having won that, we then went forward to other ones, like the tank, and so on.

 

[HILL] So, in effect, having won that battle, having broken the log jam, then there were more funds coming available. Or, at least, the review having gone through, then it was easier to bring in the other projects and more a matter of scheduling than anything else, from then on?

 

[NIXON] Well, on the question of scheduling, you know we had to make some dreadful decisions. For example: why the tank? Well the tank came in with high priority because the Centurions were so badly used and worn out, that, whenever they went out on an exercise, the army was lucky if half of them could complete the exercise. This was constantly happening, and the options available were naturally costly. One was to rebuild the Centurions. Both the Israelis and the Swedes have done excellent jobs of rebuilding them. Or to go with something new like the Leopard. Well, the time-frame of rebuilding them would have been so protracted; and there was no one actually set up to do that type of work. We just felt that the thing to do was to go to a minimum number of Leopards. Incidentally, those first Leopards, they were leased from the Germans, and they came to the Canadian forces with all of the German markings on them. I'm talking about all the dials and gauges and all the instructions. They were in German. The first handbooks we had for the Leopards were actually Australian handbooks, because the Australians had bought Leopards and so they were available in English. So we got them from the Australian Army and not from Krauss Maffei who produced the tanks. Now again, when we went to buy those Leopards, we ran into this clause about no contract being deemed to exist, so the Germans had no insurance that we would continue with the deal. I mean no legal insurance. All they had was the word, the integrity of the Canadian Department of National Defence and the Government of Canada, that the contract would be allowed. That didn't really help Krauss Maffei to go to their bank. The bankers naturally want to have a legal document.

 

[HILL]    Was that process changed afterwards?

 

[NIXON] No, it's still there.

 

[COX] When you bought the CF-18s, was the contract only for one year at a time?

 

[NIXON] No, we signed with McDonnell Douglas a multi-year contract; and McDonnell Douglas accepted it, that clause notwithstanding. They said, "Okay, Canada will honour this". You see, in McDonnell Douglas’s case there may not have been a problem. They may never have got into a backlog of over-expenditure. I mean, as fast as they spent money, they claimed it from us, and we paid. So there was never a great financing requirement on their contract.

 

[HILL] In this period, it was not only the LRPA; you had a whole range of other things that were needed. Who decided and how did you schedule them in?

 

[NIXON] Let’s talk about the what and then the how. The general principle that we used was to deal first with things that would not only stop functioning but could have catastrophic consequences. Tank stopping doesn't really cause any great harm, it just means that you haven't got the capability. But an aircraft stopping in mid-air tends to come down awful fast. And what we were running into with the 104s, and the Voodoos, was what we called fleet-wide faults. That is that one aircraft was found to have a problem such as a wing-flap problem (like we had on the 104s). So they found a fracture on a hinge. And, when they went and inspected four or five other aircraft, they found other fractures. And as soon as you find that, the air force has a fleet-wide grounding until they figure out: A) how bad it is or serious it is, and B) which aircraft are affected, and C) what are they going to do about it. And, if they can't solve the problem immediately, the aircraft might be grounded for a hell of a long time. With the Voodoo, we had just seen it going from one complete grounding to another. So you've got to say: "Hey, not only are we losing our capability, but these things can be bloody dangerous if you're going to fly them". So the NFA (new Fighter Aircraft) came very high on our list of priorities, despite the fact that we knew the ships, too, were in bad shape (although, as ASW ships, they are still quite capable) . But what happens to a ship if its engines stop, well it just sits in the water as an embarrassment. It doesn't sink, but you tow it home or it goes home on one engine. Everybody gets all excited because the boiler tubes are all burnt out, but you put new boiler tubes in and the ship goes back out. This is 1987, and when did we start hearing all those horrible stories about the state of the ships? About 1977. But they're still operating. I'm not suggesting that I condone their condition, but I'm saying that it has not been catastrophic. I'm talking about the principle, big things; but for every one of those there are ten minor things, lets say auxiliary power units. You may have some aircraft, but you can't run them because you haven't got any auxiliary power units; so you've got to get those. Just before I arrived in the Department, the old 1 1/4 ton trucks, the first cargo-carrying vehicle bigger than a jeep, were just absolutely beat out, and so DND made the decision to see what would happen if it just took a commercial 1 1/4 ton truck and beefed it up by putting in a bigger radiator and bigger alternators and a few things like that. And General Motors did stop their production line when they were between models one summer, and DND ran through several hundred of these trucks to see how they would pay off, because that's all they could afford. Well, it turned out that they certainly have filled a role. But it was also demonstrated that, even when you take a really good commercial product, if you start doing an awful lot of cross country work, and combat-type exercises, they don't stand up very well. They have their shortcomings.

 

The process is this: the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff has primary responsibility for creating, maintaining and looking after the force development plan of the Canadian Forces. That means bringing forth all of the equipment requirements and gradually putting those into an order of priority. One of the biggest problems that I had in the Department was first to get a list of the things they need and second to have some consistency in that list, so that the lists would be the same this year, next year, and the following year, except for the items that are replaced. What tends to happen is that every time a new, senior person comes on board, the list is changed, which just destroys the validity of it; and that's particularly the case with the Army. The Army has got a real problem because they have such a proliferation of equipment, except for the tanks and howitzers and a few major items (and even for those, they don't have the total programme cost as for a new fighter aircraft or a number of ships) . So then the Armed Forces put down the list of requirements, and then put in there an order of priority, and then work that into a Foreseen Expenditure Envelope. Within the Army there's a combat equipment development group, that brings together the Mobile Commander in St. Hubert and the Chief of Land Doctrine and Operations here in Ottawa, and they come up with the Land list. And then there is an Air equivalent and Naval equivalent of that, although they are produced in different ways. Then the Deputy Chief takes those lists, he does his own review of them, and then he takes them to a Programme Control Board subcommittee, including not only operators but also the financial people and policy people, and also the engineering and procurement people. What they're trying to do at this stage is to establish priorities. Then the list goes to the Programme Control Board. The first thing is to get the list sorted out, and to place items within the programme, so that one can see how required equipment will be financed sometime in the foreseeable future (within the dollars that seem likely to be forthcoming). You see, that was relatively easy to do in the mid 1970s and in the early 1980s, when we knew what the forecast was going to be. But since the government has changed, things are not so clear. Some of their plans for defence expenditure seem to be pure Alice in Wonderland — the current capital budget of $2.5 billion is somehow or another going to shoot up to about $4 billion within two years. You just can't do that. You have to have programmed expenditures, allowing for slippage, for programmes which don't go as fast as they should, and so on.

 

And after that first step, of setting up the lists, there are a lot of others, assigning personnel, developing cost estimates, fitting DND requirements within a total fiscal framework, and so on. And DND's requirements are also tailored to a Strategic Overview or a Policy Overview.

 

[COX] When you talk about a Strategic Overview or any kind of Policy Overview, where does that come from? How do they start to mesh?

 

[NIXON] They do mesh; and I'm glad you asked that question. The Strategic Overview starts from what has happened in the past year as well as from what the government has said about its policy in the relevant area. It also discusses what we should be doing in the future. You take that as your mandate and you say: "Okay, here is the perception of what's happening in the world or what's happening in our area — what has happened in NATO and what has happened to the Warsaw Pact — including not only the military side but also in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, in the MBFR talks, and in the Stockholm conference on Confidence Building Measures." And you factor that in and say: "Okay, then, from the Canadian perspective, this is what we think that we should be doing". And that goes to the Minister. And the Minister is naturally the first person who inputs his ideas and says: "Look, that's not my perception. Go back and do it again." So what we constantly tried to do, year by year, was to point out to Ministers, what happened here, what is the situation, what are their options, and what are the consequences of the options. To be brutal, I was constantly trying to put them between a rock and a hard place. And the Minister agreed. Now, that was why, year by year by year, throughout all that period, the budget grew the way that it did grow in defence, and more so than in almost any other department. Mind you, if you take a look at the figures, though we started off in 1975 at about 1.8% of the GNP; we are still maybe at only 2.1%.

 

So, I'll just finish now on the question of the Strategic Overview. As you know, Canada's defence position is based on a 1971 White Paper. But a lot has happened since then, and as I've just outlined, every year the government looked at those developments in the Strategic Overview. True, there was not a public debate as such, but it wasn't as though they were just continuing with things as they were. The emphasis of defence policy changed over that period also. So it's not really true that our defence effort is all based on a 1971 White Paper. It isn't, it's based on a fundamental proposition, that every nation has to see to its own self-preservation: internal to the country; to the protection of its own geographic area; to the protection of its ideals and values; and to its contribution to the world's stability. Those are the four roles of the Canadian Forces and they are the four roles of any Force. They are just done differently in different countries. For example, on the international level, we do peacekeeping, the Americans do balance of power as the British once focussed on the balance of power. We see to the protection of our ideals, while in Europe the Europeans are protecting their ideals.

 

[HILL] Would you say the most crucial thing, in terms of Canada's military contribution to NATO, in this period, after 1976, was the fact that in that period you had a plan, a long-term plan, which you kept fighting for? As time went on, you got the resources that were necessary; and you had something coherent which went forward, in essence, in an upward direction.

 

[NIXON] What we haven't done is to relate the 12% real growth to the 3% NATO objective. At that particular time, when the equipment budget was growing at 12%, NATO pushed — it started in 1978 — for a 3% real growth across the whole budget. Well, it just so happened that 3% across the whole budget and 12% on equiptment for Canada were almost the same. You may have noticed, if you looked at the historic record, that there was a sleight of hand, and Canada moved from 12% real growth in the capital programme to 3% growth on the whole budget. But most of it was put to capital for years. And that is why Canada had no difficulty in acceeding to the 3% real growth for NATO. Because we were already doing it. That is one contribution.

 

There are three others: the northern flank, the AWACS; and, in the late 1970s, the High Level Group. I'll deal with them one by one.

 

I'll take the northern flank one first. To the best of my knowledge and recollection, it was in 1968, when Canada made the decision to reduce its contingent in Europe by a half a division, to essentially a brigade, that Mr. Cadieux took on this obligation for a brigade to go to northern Norway (a quote unquote "paper commitment") , as well as the ACE Mobile Force. The impression that I had when I first got to the Department was that, despite the fact that NATO had a northern flank since it was formed, for many years there was no comprehensive plan for the defence of Northern Norway (and also despite the fact there is a C-in-C Northern Region) . And General Dextraze worked on this question through the NATO Military Committee. He got SACEUR and CINCNOR to produce a plan for the area. And I believe that Canada's contribution to getting that plan established was a major, unsung, unrecognized, accomplishment. And even if we withdraw, at least we've done that. Look at the historic activity in Northern Norway, whether it's the Canadians,

the American Brigade, the British Brigade or whatever. There has been more done on the development, and the exercise of the plan for the defence of Northern Norway, since Canada became involved, than in all the years before. I'm sure an awful lot of people will argue with that, but it certainly is the impression that I have.

 

 [HILL] When was that launched?

 

[NIXON] Well, General Dextraze was CDS from 1974 until 1979. His term was extended, but he was unable to do anything until he got that Defence Structure Review out of the way. So he really started to push for the plan around about 1976, with CINCNOR and SACEUR. Until then he wasn't sure about his position in the Department.

 

[HILL] How do you mean?

 

[NIXON] Well, it’s often a very demoralizing position for the people at the top. Did I mention to you the importance of the task of the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff? Well, from 1972 to 1979, there were nine Deputy Chiefs of the Defence Staff. So you can imagine the difficulty they had in producing a force development plan, with such a changeover of people. With that changeover of people — in very important positions — you are continually losing people who are only beginning to learn their jobs.

 

[COX] The CDS position is really end of career, isn't it?

 

[NIXON] Yes.

 

[HILL]    Is that true for the Deputy CDS?

 

[NIXON] No. He could become either the Vice Chief or the Chief. Theriault, for example, he was DCDS, then he was VCDS, then he was CDS. Mainguy retired as VCDS. I don't know whether Mainguy had been DCDS or not? But Bill Carr went from DCDS to be Commander Air Command; then he retired. So, DCDS is not an end of the line position at all. It just depends entirely on how things turn out. Now, going back to the Norwegian question, the attention which Canada focused on northern Norway was a major contribution.

 

Another important thing Canada did was on the AWACS. The issue was this: how to buy it through NATO. And this surely did raise problems, because there never had been a NATO operational force with different countries involved. It raised questions such as: what country would you register the aircraft in for purposes of international law? I think they are actually registered in Luxembourg. And then the big issue was the contributions to the project, for example how to share this between the NATO nations. And then there were also the British Shackletons, an older early warning aircraft that they had. The British were not so enthusiastic about AWACs because it would mean their industry would be left out. Finally, the other point is that NATO's multi-national programmes had not really been the greatest of successes. The ones I'm particularly referring to are NADGE and NICS. One was a ground based radar station (its cost went up and up, right through the roof). The same thing was true as regards the NICS, the NATO Integrated Communications System. There didn't seem to be any way in the multi-national operation to constrain a programme, to keep it within budget, to keep it within objectives, etc. It got loaded with people. These problems are bad enough in one country, but when you try to get many countries together they become almost impossible. However, the AWACS was needed, and work was done in the International Staff, and it transpired that NATO needed eighteen aircraft. The question came around to the issue of contributing to it. We are talking around 1977-78, remember, so keep in mind the low capital budget that we had. We made the decision to go to the Minister with our advice that the best deterrent use that we could get for our defence dollar was to be a participant — and a substantial participant — in this AWACS project. The principals would be the United States and Germany, but they wouldn’t be carrying the whole burden. Italy was not in on the project at that time, so we came in as the third partner. We took ten percent of the project, which was far greater than our normal NATO share. On this question we went to Mr. Danson, I think he was the Minister at the time, to find out whether he also thought it was important. He talked to his NATO colleagues and he decided that it was in fact important. And so we went to the Cabinet. I believe that that had a profound effect, that Canada was there when the going got tough. A side effect of this development, in my view, was that Litton was accepted by the United States Air Force as their second source producer of the guidance system for the Tomahawk cruise missile. I believe that that was because of Canada’s contribution to AWACS. You wouldn't find that written anywhere, but I certainly have the impression that it was part of a gentleman's agreement. I'm sure you'd never find an American who would admit to that, though.

 

There also had to be an International Board of Directors for AWACS. When we made our commitment, we put some "barbed wire" around it, so to speak, to make sure that that was all Canada was going to have to give. We then had to put a member on the International Board of Directors, which are always dreadful things to work on. We put on John Killick, who subsequently became Assistant Deputy Minister of Materiel. But John is a pretty good project manager and he can be a really tough negotiator. When he knows what back-up he's got within the Department at the ministerial level, he can be really firm. And he went to the NATO meetings on this question knowing full well that there wasn't going to be another penny coming from Canada; and, moreover, that, if it wasn't managed well, then Canada would pull out. Through his tenacity and forcefulness, that project was the first NATO project — and I think that he should take a great deal of credit and so should Canada — that came in on time and on cost and with the performance it was supposed to have. No medals were given for that, but I believe that that's something Canada should really be proud of.

 

Now, I'd like to mention another Canadian contribution, in the NPG. Although we are not a nuclear nation, we have been a member of the Nuclear Planning Group for some time. Not all Allied nations are, but we have been. When the SS-20, the medium range nuclear missile, was introduced by the Soviets into Europe, in 1977-78, Helmut Schmidt spoke out, at a meeting in London, about the necessity of finding some type of response. He wasn't just talking about the SS-20; he was talking about the total, continuous, unrelenting build up of the Soviet forces. One response was the 3% growth rate that NATO decided on for all countries (it was initially to be for about three years, I think, but then it went on for five, and I believe it is still going on). However, the Soviets are now spending about 17% of GNP on their military, according to the latest data I have seen. Incidentally, I just saw this morning that they are spending more on the military than they are on health and education combined; whereas in our country, and in all Western countries, health and education combined are probably running five and six times what we're spending on defence; somewhere in the order of 18-19% of GNP for health and education

 

[HILL] Yes, quite a different set of priorities.

 

[NIXON] To come back to the High Level Group, when Schmidt made that decision, with the NATO leaders and the NATO Council and the Defence Ministers, to focus on the SS-20, they were also looking for a way to respond. I have the impression that our contribution to the High Level Group, primarily through George Lindsey, was to suggest, maybe along with others, the two-track approach. So what they responded with, as you know, was 108 Pershing missiles plus the cruise missiles. It was astute, because there's no way, shape or form, they could be looked on as first strike, even if you used the whole lot of them. But they do provide what I'd call a comfort blanket. You see, I look at one of the big threats from the Soviets as being not the actual aggression, but the suasion; the suasive use of force, to cajole and to make people capitulate without firing a shot. To counteract that, and make people stand up to that, you need to have, as I said, a comfort blanket. So I looked on the Pershings as the comfort blanket, but with the real deterrence being in the cruise missile. And I look on cruise missiles as being an absolutely first class deterrent, because, in my view, they have no first strike capability, because they go so slow, and people say, well, OK, they can be spotted. "Look up in the air. You can see with your own eyes. You don't need radar to see them." So I don't understand why people are getting so excited about them. As I said, they don't have any first strike abilities. And the fact that you can't verify where they are located, indeed enhances their deterrent capabilities. If you knew where they were located, then you could take them out. If you don't know where they are, then that adds another element of uncertainty. So you'd be very hesitant to move when you didn't know where anything was or where they'd be coming from. So I think that that two-track decison was an astute move. I think that Canada was a major participant in it.

 

Another area where we made an important contribution, I think, was in the use of Canadian bases Suffield, Shilo, and Goose Bay, for the training of NATO forces under circumstances and environments that couldn't be simulated or duplicated in Europe.

 

[HILL] I'd like to ask whether there are any other areas where you think that, over this period, Canada made a particular contribution to NATO? After that I would like to go on and ask: how do you see NATO, is it a good thing from Canada's point of view?

 

[NIXON] Another point to mention — now this goes back several years — was in the area of technology; also tactics, but particularly technology. You see, we were the originators of putting helicopters aboard ships; and when that was originally mooted, around 1960, the British and the Americans thought we were out of our minds, to put a large helicopter on the back of a destroyer. Well, I guess you probably would be out of your mind unless you had also come up with a way to bring it down; and the way that this was done is called now the Beartrap. Essentially, when the aircraft comes in over the ship, there is a wire which is dropped down from the aircraft and that's put into a holder and the aircraft is just pulled down. And its pulled down under control. The aircraft is trying to lift, and in the meantime you pull him down, and get him on the ship, and then you have a mechanism to grab hold of the aircraft on a track basis. You see, now-a-days, an antisubmarine ship without a helicopter isn't a very useful weapon. Anyway, that was a Canadian contribution. And now, as you know, it's used by all anti-submarine forces. Our Coast Guard uses it, too. They use the same type of a pull-down mechanism.

 

Another item is the Variable Depth Sonar, the sonar that is dropped off the back of ships on a long cable - that's pretty much a Canadian development, right from the beginning. The reason for Variable Depth Sonar is that the ocean water is striated by temperature, and you have got to get down below these temperature layers in order to get good sound propagation. If you don't get down below the temperature layers the sound only propagates in the layer. But if you get down below the temperature layers, to where the submarines usually operate, then you get much better submarine detection and you also get a lot less surface noise. Background noise makes sonar extremely difficult. We worked out this whole development of the technology to get those things down and keep them down, and recover the cable, and keep the cable from breaking. You have a ball hanging on the end of a cable and you want to keep it pointing in the right direction, not spinning all the time. That's not exactly a simple thing, even when you put pins on it. That was a major Canadian contribution.

 

[COX] The Variable Depth Sonar means the ability to manipulate the cable to the depth that you want, and the expectation that you'll find the depth.

 

[NIXON] Yes, that is right. And the depth is found by putting a bathythermograph over the side, and that measures the temperatures as it is going down. So you get a temperature- versus-depth scale. So when you get the reading back, you can say that the place to put the sonar today is at one hundred feet or whatever it might be.

 

The other item to mention is that we developed an unusually good respirator, despite the fact we haven't got any chemical weapons in the Canadian Forces. The canister on it is going to have wide use throughout NATO. And still another one is the command and control systems, which are now universal. You see all these pictures of operators looking at screens. Canada pioneered that work in 1952 and it's now universally accepted. I had a fascinating job in about 1960. I replaced the head of the group that developed this system that we called DATAR; and when they demonstrated it in a 1953 demonstration where two minesweepers were fitted out with all of this computery, senior officers from all over the NATO nations came to see this. Every one of them was asked to comment on it after they had seen it. The comments went all the way from: "I've never seen such a load of stupid hardware in all my life and there's no practical application in an operational military theatre"; to the other extreme, that: "It is impossible to consider going forth with any type of operational units in the highly mobile war of the future without having this type of command and control system". Incidentally, the second type of comment was in the minority at the time. But that certainly turned out to be the truth.

 

Well, I think that that covers some of the major contributions that we have made to NATO and some of the major impacts that we have had. Then, when you ask, how has this served our purposes, well, this is where I come back again to: "What are we trying to do? - "We are not only trying to protect the security of the geographic entity known as Canada, but — and this is why we are in NATO — we are trying to protect and provide and maintain and secure the processes, institutions and values of free nations. And NATO certainly has done that. And another contribution that we have made is to be "the other" overseas country. When we talk about the deployment of troops, occasionally they say that there are five NATO nations that have troops outside their borders. The Dutch, the British and the Belgians have them in Germany, but that is not the real issue — the real issue is who has them across the water. Well, the British do, but I don't look at the English Channel as being "across the water" in that sense. It is we and the Americans. We are going to see, we have seen in the past, American isolationism, American protectionism, that's what was behind the Mansfield Amendment. The Europeans are going to have to do more for themselves. Well, American withdrawal would be much easier if Canada wasn't there. If we actually withdrew our troops, all of them, from Europe, I think it would make it much easier for the Americans themselves to do so. For the Europeans, that is a major Canadian contribution. And another major Canadian contribution is that the troops that we have there in Europe, whether they are land or air, are fully trained when they go there. A German brigade commander would tell you that he spends something like about 75% of his time dealing with the elementary, or the basic, training of his conscripts. He doesn't very often have time to spend on advanced training, and therefore he particularly enjoys being able to work with Canadians who have had a much higher degree of training. The same thing applies on the air side, too. That is, we serve as an exemplar, if nothing else, even if our numbers are small. Coming back to what we need from NATO, I would say the most important thing is protection. We have also, I think, maintained a greater channel of communication with the Europeans, and this goes back to the Schmidt-Trudeau factor. I think our voice is heard more (though there is no question that we are constantly being told to put our money where our mouth is, to increase our contribution a certain amount, and so on). The other side of the equation is that being in NATO and Europe gives Canadians a much greater world perspective. I tend to be a world federalist in a broader sense — I don't mean that there should be an organization called that — but I just happen to feel that we have got to live together in the world, and it is essential to be part of it. When you think of the number of Canadians, and I am just talking about the Forces first, and their dependents, who have been through Lahr and gained a much broader appreciation of Europe than they otherwise would have, I think it has broadened the horizons of Canadians greatly. And then look at what it has done for our industry, the aerospace industry which I may have mentioned to you before, which was one that I relate to. They are doing about 5 billion dollars worth of business, 75% of it export, and they are doing that with a very, very small bit of seed-money from our Department of Regional Industrial Expansion and from the Department of National Defence. You know, it is minuscule compared to what the American industry gets, but Canadian aerospace people are abroad, exporting, and a lot of that comes because of our connection with NATO and with the United States under things like the Defence Production Sharing Programme. I would say that there is a whole unit in the Department of External Affairs, formerly in Industry, Trade and Commerce, working on military-related trade. There is also the NATO Industrial Advisory Group. As the name implies, this is a group of industrialists from all NATO nations who get together two or three times a year or so. I think the Canadian membership is around about twelve. These are either presidents or general managers or CEOs of Canadian industrial firms. They rotate, so it isn't always the same group. In the total length and breadth of Canadian industry, we probably have right now about 150 senior industrialists who have had a fair exposure to NATO and to their industrial colleagues from the other allied nations. So I think that that is also a major gain by Canada from its NATO association.

 

[HILL] Do you see NATO as being a crucial contributor to international peace and security at this time?

 

[NIXON] Absolutely. You see, you should go back to what caused NATO to be created, and ask yourself: has the fundamental concept changed? As I may have mentioned, to me the origin of NATO was firstly the breach of the Yalta agreement, followed by the absolute demonstration in 1948 in Czechoslovakia that the Soviets weren't going to allow any free elections in Eastern Europe. Then the fact that they didn't go through any disarmament after the Second World War, as did the Western countries, was another clear indicator. So we had that threat, and the Soviets have demonstrated that, the United Nations Charter notwithstanding, they are prepared to be the first to use force, despite the fact that the Charter says you will not use force in settling international disputes. If we consider Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland as separate countries, then the Soviets certainly have used force in two of them. They have also used it in Afghanistan, and they completely submerged the Baltic countries — they have just disappeared — and I don't see anything that has indicated that that has changed. And then you compound that fact with the Breshnev Doctrine, where they reserved their right to intrude in the affairs of the countries on their borders. I don't see anything that has changed that. Somewhere today I saw that one should judge people not by what they say but by what they do. Mr. Gorbachev is saying all the right things, but if Mr. Gorbachev really intends what he is saying — that he wants to disarm or wants to reduce his military expenditures so as to direct resources to the economy — the place that he can do that most effectively is not in nuclear weapons but in conventional arms. Despite consumption and so on, Soviet expenditures on nuclear weapons are probably only 20% of what they are spending on conventional arms, which is about 17% of the GNP. He can make a unilateral decision to reduce these without any negotiation, and without imperilling his security.

 

[HILL] Of course he has made an offer to negotiate on that level, I mean to cut about half-a-million troups on each side, although it remains to be seen whether he will follow through on it.

 

[NIXON] That's what I am saying. He does not have to negotiate; he can make a unilateral cut; if he really wants to reduce his expenditures, he can do that unilaterally. When I became Deputy Minister, the German Minister of Defence, Otto Lamsdorff, I think, said that whenever he was talking to his Soviet counterparts, he pointed out to them that it is very expensive for them to do what they are now doing because every time they build three tanks Germany only has to build one, being on the defensive. What I am really saying is that if the Soviets therefore decide that they only want to be defensive, they just have to cut their forces by a full one third and they would still have us outdone two to one. And that could be a unilateral decision. What I am astounded at is the fact that neither the public nor the press picked that up. None of them have thrown that at them. That is what I am going to do when I stop doing what I am doing now.

 

[COX] I have a couple of questions. The first one will take you back to the CAST commitment. The view you presented of it as a major Canadian contribution to planning the defence of northern Norway is a very interesting one, because I would have thought it would be fair to say that, initially, DND itself was not keen on the CAST commitment. Would that be a fair perception?

 

[NIXON] I'd say they would never be over-enthusiastic about it for a variety of reasons. One is that they don't have stationed forces. And this means that the only way you can get any training is to go over there for it. And the second is the question about the actual move, getting them there. The whole idea of the CAST commitment is that the force will be deployed before hostilities, during escalation, during a build up of tension. Well, the problems with that are about three-fold, particularly for Canada. One is, people are going to say: "My God, here we go into Hong Kong again". And the second question in sending CAST over there is whether it will act as a provocation or as a deterrent. I think it will act as a deterrent. And so you're going to get an equivocation around the House of Commons, unless the Government of the day happens to have a really strong back-bone. Incidentally, it is one of the reasons why I think our system of government is a hell of a lot stronger than the American one, because when our government does decide to rule, as we all know, they can introduce legislation in the morning and have the their policies set in law by night time. There is also the problem of the logistic chain, that Mr. Beatty is concentrating on. But, I think it is important to differentiate between a commitment as a deterrent and a commitment that you are going to deploy during hostilities. I think that our commitment there as a deterrent is very, very important for all the reasons that I have cited before. But if you said that we were actually going into hostilities right now and you said where should we put anyone, I would say don’t send the brigade to North Norway, send it to a different area. But then the response to me is: "Well, look, a force which is not intended to fight is no deterrent". And I say: "No, I mean that force will fight if it has to". I am a little bit like Mr. Pearson who one time, when he was confronted with one of these situations, said: "Well, I will jump off that bridge when I come to it". When you are doing some of these deterrent things, I think that you have to work a little bit on that basis. And I also believe that, if you really wanted to do so, you could make that commitment work. But it does take resources. It does take commitment.

[COX] That's a powerful argument for not giving it up. My second question is this: I was struck by your account of the LRPA decision, because it seems to me that here is a decision which is shrouded in confusion on the financing side, but which is actually probably the least controversial decision of any procurement decision. It seems to me to be a spectacular success, the LRPA programme. Is that true?

 

[NIXON] Well, I am glad to hear you say that. I agree with you. But I have to ask: what do you mean by success?

 

[COX] Well, looking at it again from the outside, the task is there, the LRPA aircraft is the right platform for it, and it appears to have worked out very successfully from an operational point of view. All of those things seem to say, here is a decision which is a great procurement decision.

 

[NIXON] Well, that was largely because of a method developed in National Defence, in the early 1970s, for handling major procurements. I helped them with it though I came to the Department later. It was eventually accepted by the government as a whole, although only after a lot of hard fights. It mainly involved the establishment of sound project management for large programmes. I could talk about it for hours, but I won't go into all the details here.

 

[HILL] OK. Are there any other points you would like to make before we close?

 

[NIXON] Well, there is the question of public awareness of defence. When Barney Danson was Minister, he had some of the staff look into this. I think I mentioned the problem that the Director General of Information had when I arrived. He couldn’t even tell the troops what we were trying to do. And I think I may have mentioned the problem that we had with Search and Rescue, that they were not utilizing them for public awareness of defence activities. Well, we decided to do everything that we could to make it possible for interested journalists, writers, etc., to write what they wanted about defence. And so we constantly were taking groups of press people over to SHAPE, and to the SHAPE exercises in NATO, and letting them interview members of the Canadian delegation to NATO, and visit the Canadian forces in Lahr, and go down to Cyprus, and wherever the Canadian forces were, and go to Canadian bases all across the country, and so on. And gradually this approach, I think, started to pay off. Barnie Danson said that his people keeping track of the minute count on the electronic media, a number count, and the column count in the paper, felt that it increased something like about 30 times while he was there (but that was easy, since there was practically nothing when he started). But then we tried to prepare, as I mentioned, the annual defence statements. We started this with Mr. Lamontagne, to try to move to the point of having an annual, comprehensive statement, by the government, about defence. I don't mean the Defence Review, which is really just a departmental publication. This started in 1980, and, I think, has been done pretty well, certainly all during the Liberal time. And I think that Mr. Beatty will do something with a White Paper. Also, I think the Senate has done excellent reports, and I may have commented on that earlier — the reports on Manpower, on Maritime Defence, on Air Defence, and Air Transport. Those are excellent reports, and they have done a thoroughly good job. But again, they have gone over like one day wonders; they haven't had any impact at all. Even the Standing Committee — well the standing committee has really only done two, it did one on Security and Disarmament, wasn't that the title? And having mentioned that title I will come back to it, because I think it is quite germane to this whole question. The other one was on the Reserves. On the Security and Disarmament study, the original reference that was drafted by External for their Minister — to put before the House, the reference for that Standing Committee — was simply on disarmament. And we had a hell of a time, the officials of the two departments, to get that changed, because you know disarmament can't be looked at alone, it has to be looked at in the context of security. I believe the people in the Parliamentary Centre will find this comment interesting. It is not intended as a bouquet, but if you look at that report, on the hearings, the only witnesses that made the connection, or that talked about Canada's security policy being deterrence, defence, arms control and the relaxation of tensions, were Arthur Menzies, and the Minister of National Defence.

 

[HILL] Arthur Menzies being then the Ambassador for Disarmament.

 

[NIXON] Nobody else picked it up, except the staff of the Centre, when they were drafting the report. And if you go and look at that report, you will find that there. But what I find is fascinating is the way that Canadians, people appearing at a thing like that, could try and deal with disarmament without dealing with security.

 

[HILL] What happens, of course, is that you get segments of opinion that come forward.

 

[NIXON] Yes, but if you take a look at the total evidence that was given at that time, the only two who made that connection were Arthur Menzies and the Minister at the time, Mark MacGuigan, I think. My point is that very few people follow defence, security, arms control and related issues carefully. We don't have enough public information or a sufficiently informed public debate. And there is not the positive impact in favour of defence that there should be.

 

[HILL] Well, I think on that note we will close. Thank you very much, Mr. Nixon.

[1] The “bear trap” – a device for hauling down and securing helicopters onboard small ships such as frigates or destroyers