Canada wants into Britain's rapid-response defence club
Canada has formally applied to join the United Kingdom's Joint Expeditionary Force, reversing a decision made more than a decade ago. Born from the Afghanistan war and reshaped by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the coalition promises speed and flexibility — but raises an old question about what Canada is actually committing itself to.
Formal application to Joint Expeditionary Force announced during Carney's U.K. visit
Murray Brewster · CBC News
·
Listen to this article
Estimated 4 minutes
The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results.
Canada has formally applied to join the U.K.-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), a collection of NATO nations whose mandate is to respond more quickly in a crisis.
Prime Minister Mark Carney formally announced the plan on Wednesday while meeting with his British counterpart Andy Burnham.
In a statement, Carney called JEF an "important initiative" and highlighted other close defence ties with the U.K., including Canada's observer status in the development of the next generation of fighter jet.
Canada was asked by the U.K. more than dozen years ago to join JEF after it was formed in the waning days of the war in Afghanistan. The concept was discussed at the 2014 NATO leaders' summit in Wales, but ultimately the government of former prime minister Stephen Harper rebuffed the overtures.
Canada joining international program to build next generation of fighter jets
Canada urges U.K. to join new global bank for defence projects
The Canadian military, at the time in the throes of deep budget cuts by Conservative government of the day, was also deeply reluctant to join.
In an interview with The Canadian Press at the time, the commander of the military's joint operations command, Lt.-Gen. Jonathan Vance, who later became the chief of the defence staff, said there were a number of concerns about joining the British expeditionary force.
It would be, he said, a substantial undertaking for the military and could bind the country to respond in a specific way to a future crisis when the federal government might favour a different course.
Joining the force without a specific mission, Vance said in 2014, would signal "a commitment to future operations, having done the training, that you may — or may not — be able to honour."
In his statement on Wednesday, Carney did not say how Canada's participation in JEF would work on a practical level. And the country's current top military commander, Gen. Jennie Carignan, has yet to weigh in on what the membership might mean.
As it was originally conceived, the Joint Expeditionary Force was meant to preserve battlefield relationships that grew up during the Afghan war.
In 2012, Britain's then chief of defence staff, Gen. Sir David Richards, described a future force that could deploy rapidly overseas without Britain having to assemble an entirely new coalition for every crisis.
It was thought at the time that the British Army would provide the command structure and much of the military backbone and other countries would bring forces that plug into JEF as needed.
Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 gave the idea urgency.
At the NATO summit in Wales that year, Britain, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Norway formally agreed to establish JEF under NATO's new Framework Nations Concept. Finland and Sweden joined in 2017, before either country belonged to NATO, and Iceland entered the fold in 2021.
There is an important distinction to make. While JEF is made up of NATO nations, the organization has no equivalent of NATO's Article 5 collective defence clause.
First phase of Army restructuring creates division focused on defending Canada
Canada, Ukraine forge 100-year pact built on drones and defence
Analysis
No longer taboo, Canada's defence industry steps into Europe's spotlight
It is essentially a coalition of willing states that can assemble forces for a particular contingency without requiring consensus among all NATO members.
There have been a series of military exercises held under the JEF banner since 2018.
But Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned JEF from an expeditionary military concept into something approaching a Northern European security coalition.
A 2024 research report by the U.K.-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) argued that JEF had genuine advantages, notably speed of decision-making compared with NATO, but it has not been seriously tested politically or operationally.
The study said that the expeditionary force is not actually a standing military body and governments provide forces when required.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Murray Brewster is the senior defence writer for CBC News, based in Ottawa. He has covered the Canadian military and foreign policy from Parliament Hill for over a decade. Among other assignments, he spent a total of 15 months on the ground covering the Afghan war for The Canadian Press. Prior to that, he covered defence issues and politics for CP in Nova Scotia for 11 years and was bureau chief for Standard Broadcast News in Ottawa.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.