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William Watson: Defence spending debacles are nothing new to Canada

Do we buy the most effective weapons? Or do we see defence as a subcategory of industrial policy and regional and political balancing?

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Recent announcements about rifle and shell purchases by the Canadian Forces bring to mind past difficulties the country has had procuring rifles and shells. Things got so bad during the First World War there was even a Royal Commission on Shell Contracts.

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In the efficient way of our forebears — which could be added to the Post’s list of things we’ve clearly lost — it was appointed April 3, 1916, and presented its report on July 20, 1916. The report mainly exonerated the minister of militia and defence, Sam Hughes: “It was a most natural and in no way improper thing for the Minister to call the attention of the (Shell) committee to the claims of manufacturers of the constituency which he represents, to consideration.” The report aside, history has blamed Hughes for the incompetence of the first two years of wartime procurement.

Problems ranged from the infamous Ross rifle, which was very accurate but reloaded only slowly under the best conditions and not at all when dirty, to an ingenious shovel that supposedly (but didn’t) double as a shield, to shoes that disintegrated in mud (“Sham Shoes,” the troops called them, in Sam Hughes’ honour), to the shell mess, which began after Hughes, a flamboyant, bombastic type who wore his uniform to cabinet meetings, asked his business friends to form “the Shell Committee.” Historian Michael Bliss called a book chapter on this sorry episode, “The Shell Game.”

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Hughes, who had served in the Boer War and was an excellent shot who at one stage headed the Canadian Rifle Association, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Scottish-designed Ross rifle, produced at the Ross Rifle Company factory near the Quebec City riding of Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister when it was built. But Canadian soldiers generally hated the rifle.

In his history of the Canadian soldier in the First War, the late Desmond Morton quotes recollections that at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, “There were some fellers crying in the trenches because they couldn’t fire their damned rifles.” Soldiers took to scavenging the faster-loading, more robust Lee-Enfield rifles from fallen British soldiers, until the army finally gave up and replaced the Ross rifle with Lee-Enfields the Brits were somehow able to spare.

After noting that censors “suppressed any comments” about the inadequacy of the Canadian rifles, Morton concludes the “German attacks (at Second Ypres) had succeeded in part because of the Ross rifle. Just as it had during its first trials in 1901 and ever since, it had seized up on rapid fire. Being equipped with a rifle that could be loaded only after a sharp kick or a blow from a shovel was a scandal …” Another history of this episode concluded that “in dirty trench warfare the Ross was only good as a club.”

Part of Hughes’ thinking in opting for the Ross rifle and for Canadian-made engine-driven vehicles was to turn the Canadian military “into a travelling exhibit of Canadian manufacturing prowess,” as Morton puts it. But the plan “backfired” when Canadian rifles, boots, tunics, trucks and more all had to be replaced by British equivalents.

The scandal of the Shell Committee was not pure corruption, though there were persistent rumours of that, but of over-promising and under-delivering. The Ross factory and a couple of others aside, Canada did not have a munitions industry to speak of as war began. Manufacturers of other things had to switch over to shell casings, and in the most notorious screw-up, fuses. And there was pressure to spread the work widely, both for political and what today would be called “industrial policy” reasons.

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Many businesses simply weren’t up to it. As Bliss argues, “Most Canadian manufacturers, coddled for decades by the tariff, served only the domestic market and could not compete abroad even in such ordinary lines as clothing and footwear.” In the first months of the war, Britain ordered $170 million worth of shells from Canada. Only $5.5 million were delivered on time. Some were never delivered at all.

“It was said,” Bliss writes, “that large and thoroughly reputable concerns could not get orders, that mushroom companies of no standing had been given orders and then either failed to deliver or made millions on the shells they did produce.” Almost a year into the war, prime minister Robert Borden was fed up with the Shell Committee: “Even when they do move their proceedings are so slow and ineffectual that the best results are not produced.” Borden also “was not at all happy,” Bliss reports, “in his dual role of war leader and chief procurer for Canada.”

Many of these problems eventually were solved, in part because Borden eventually fired Hughes. And, of course, the side Canada was on eventually won the war.

But the procurement dilemmas of those days persist. Do we really need to make all our weapons ourselves? Should we put facilities where they make the most sense economically and militarily or do we worry about “jobs for the boys” (and now girls)? Is our goal to fight, defend ourselves effectively and go after aggressors or is it to “strengthen our local economy” and “create good, skilled jobs,” as the MP for London West was made to say in the government’s announcement of its latest $1.4 billion for shells and such.

Will our carefully calibrated social, regional and intersectional balancing of our military procurement impress the Russians as they come droning down from the Arctic Ocean? Or will it be Second Ypres all over again?

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