Since the 1950s, Canadians have taken pride in their role as a peacekeeper. In fact, two-thirds of Canadians believe that Canada is still essential to peacekeeping efforts today . From the Suez Crisis and Lester B. Pearson to modern day peacekeeping in Afghanistan, many Canadians have fought to re-establish peace. Many still debate whether Canada’s contributions to these efforts are meaningful or not. Based on the evidence, Canada merits the image of world peacekeeper to some extent as in the past they were an integral part of international peacekeeping efforts, however, in recent years they have not been a significant part of any UN missions, and the effect Canadian peacekeepers have today is minimal. Until the mid-1990s, Canada was an …show more content…
The sudden decline in participation is something that many Canadians ignore. According to Michael Valpy, “Canada has turned down so many United Nations’ requests to join peacekeeping nations during the past decade that the UN has stopped asking. Today, there is, in fact, not a single Canadian officer in the UN’s peacekeeping headquarters. ” Valpy, a Canadian journalist, has written a number of articles on the fall of Canadian peacekeeping, and so it can be assumed that his information is correct. This shows that Canadians are now so few in number in the UN forces, that they are insignificant. As mentioned earlier, before, they contributed as much as 10% of all the forces . Today, they contribute a mere 0.1%. A prime example was in 2007, in the Darfur area of Sudan, where the UN decided to send a force of 26,000 . However, according to Hurtig, “At this writing, there was no sign that there would be any Canadians among them.” As well, many of the so-called peacekeeping missions Canada is actively participating now are as a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) . Most significant of these is the war in Afghanistan. However, this mission is not so much a peacekeeping mission as it is an offensive operation . According to Stephen Thorne, “When Gen. Rick Hillier was named chief of Defence Staff in February 2005, however, the rhetoric of Canada's role in Afghanistan changed. Hillier proclaimed that the primary aim of the Canadian Forces is to protect Canada's national interests; as he put it, the job of Canadian soldiers is 'to kill people,' and the enemy in Afghanistan are 'detestable murderers and scumbags'”. This is a clear indication of how Canada has moved away from traditional peacekeeping efforts. In 1991 Canada has almost 1150 soldiers directly involved in UN peacekeeping operations, but by 2008, Canadians only made up 57 out of the