I'll try to keep the answer short.
The strategy for our armed forces, which most of us here are used to, comes from fifty years of the Cold War. It was a period in which we had what I refer to as a strategy of commitments. In other words, Canada had certain commitments, mostly with NATO, a little bit with the United Nations, and with NORAD, and to ourselves. As long as we were building forces to meet those concrete commitments, everybody was happy.
Once the Cold War ended, we didn't have that strategy any longer. NATO didn't have a strategy. The United States has a different strategy. The UN never has any strategy. We're like the kid in the movie: we're home alone. We had to decide what we were going to do with our own armed forces. What you do in that situation, in my view, because you don't have concrete mission statements any longer, concrete commitments, is to generalize the purpose of your armed forces.
What do armed forces do that no other segment of society does? Why are they a group of Canadians set aside from society for a special purpose? The special purpose is combat operations--land, sea, and air, and in combination. Many of those other things that armed forces do--fight floods in my home town of Winnipeg and forest fires and do incidental peacekeeping missions here and there--are jobs that could be done by someone else. Why would you spend a whole bunch of money on an armed force to do things that someone else can do?
So the point is to concentrate on the specific, necessary advantage that armed forces give you, and then work your defence policy from that point of view.