Disaster in the Making

It is disappointing to see Canada join the list of allied countries with opposition parties formally dedicated to defense policies that, if ever implemented, would precipitate the breakup of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The out-of-office Liberal Party, at its national convention last weekend, officially called for a ban on U.S. testing of cruise missiles in Canada. More seriously, it pledged that, if returned to power, it would prohibit nuclear-armed planes or ships from entering Canadian territory and waters.

In short, the Canadian Liberals, following in the footsteps of the opposition British Labor Party and the Social Democrats of West Germany, are effectively calling for withdrawal from NATO. This is a sad commentary on what is happening to the party of Lester Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Canada, with the second-largest land area and the seventh-most-powerful industrial economy in the world, keeps only 83,000 men under arms. It spends a smaller share of its wealth on defense than any member of NATO except tiny Luxembourg. Most military experts consider Canadian forces singularly ill-equipped.

The modest defense effort reflects Canada’s long history of peaceful, though sometimes testy, relations with the United States. It also reflects the fact that many Canadians simply don’t feel very threatened by the Soviet Union, their powerful neighbor across the polar ice cap.

Ever since World War II, however, the Canadians have nonetheless understood the importance of collective defense in partnership with the United States and Western Europe. Under Liberal Party rule, Canada was a charter member of NATO. Since 1958 Canada has been a partner with the United States in the North American Air Defense Command, which keeps watch for a possible Soviet bomber or missile attack. NORAD’s vice commander is always a Canadian.

Implementation of the Liberals’ promise to make Canada a nuclear-free zone would be a disaster for the United States and the Western alliance as a whole. Without the ability to take the short cut across Canadian air space, the deterrent value of U.S. bombers would be seriously compromised. That in turn would force heavier reliance on ballistic missiles that are, in the opinion of most arms-control experts, far more destabilizing than bombers. Another byproduct, inevitably, would be a serious deterioration in U.S.-Canadian relations across the board. Avoiding this is clearly in the interests of both Americans and Canadians.

Canada’s Conservative government has made clear its own intention of respecting the country’s obligations to its defense partners--including former Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau’s 1983 agreement to allow U.S. cruise-missile tests in the Canadian wilds. But the Liberal Party’s swing to the left is nonetheless worrisome.

Washington can help by less clumsy handling of trade issues between the two countries and by abandoning plans to bend out of shape the 1972 anti-ballistic-missile treaty, which has the same sort of symbolic importance in Canada as in Europe, in order to accommodate tests in space of components for President Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.

The ultimate responsibility, however, lies with the Canadian people to decide whether Canada, with the Soviet Union as a close neighbor, would really be wise to embrace a go-it-alone defense policy.