In January 1994, Canadian Major-General Roméo Dallaire, commander of a small UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, sent an urgent message to UN headquarters in New York: an informant had revealed plans to exterminate Tutsi civilians. He asked permission to seize hidden weapons. He was told not to. When the killing began on April 7, 1994, his lightly armed force was cut back instead of reinforced. In about 100 days, an estimated 800,000 people or more, mostly Tutsi, were murdered. Dallaire and his remaining peacekeepers saved thousands of lives, but he returned home haunted by what the world had failed to stop, and later spoke publicly about his post-traumatic stress injury. His story raises the central question of this lesson: when should Canada act in the world, and what can it actually do?
After the Cold War: new kinds of conflict
| Conflict (years) | Canada's role | What it showed |
|---|---|---|
| Gulf War (1991) | Ships, CF-18 fighter jets and a field hospital joined the UN-authorized coalition that expelled Iraq from Kuwait | Canada would fight alongside allies when the UN approved |
| Former Yugoslavia (1992–1995) | Thousands of Canadians served with UN forces in Croatia and Bosnia; at the Medak Pocket in Croatia (September 1993) Canadian troops came under heavy fire | Peacekeepers were sent where there was no peace to keep, with rules that limited what they could do |
| Somalia (1992–1993) | Canadian Airborne Regiment joined a UN-authorized mission to protect famine relief | Ended in scandal after soldiers killed a Somali teenager (see the callout) |
| Rwanda (1993–1994) | Dallaire commanded the UN mission, which was too small and restricted to stop the genocide | The world's failure to act led Canada to promote the "Responsibility to Protect" principle in 2001 |
| Kosovo (1999) | CF-18s flew in NATO's bombing campaign against Serbia to stop attacks on Kosovo Albanians | Canada acted through NATO without explicit UN Security Council approval |
| Libya (2011) | Canadian Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard commanded the NATO air mission protecting civilians | A UN-approved mission, though critics later questioned its results |
| Iraq and Syria (from 2014) | Air strikes, then training and advising forces fighting ISIS (Operation IMPACT) | Coalition missions against a non-state armed group |
In the early 1990s Canada was one of the largest contributors of troops to UN peacekeeping, a tradition dating back to Lester Pearson and Suez in 1956 (see Unit 4). By the 2000s the numbers had fallen sharply, and in recent years Canada has had only a small number of personnel in UN missions, though it sent helicopters and crews to the UN mission in Mali in 2018–2019. Missions had become more dangerous, defence budgets were cut in the 1990s, and governments shifted resources to NATO and Afghanistan. Many Canadians still see peacekeeping as part of their national identity, which historians describe as both a source of pride and something of a myth by the 2000s.
Afghanistan and Iraq: two different decisions
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which 24 Canadians were killed, Canada joined the US-led campaign in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that sheltered it. Canadian troops served in Kabul and then, from 2006 to 2011, in heavy combat in Kandahar province, followed by a training mission that ended in March 2014. More than 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces members served; 158 were killed, along with a diplomat, a journalist and civilian contractors. Crowds gathered on overpasses along a stretch of Highway 401 in Ontario, named the Highway of Heroes in 2007, to honour the fallen as they were driven from CFB Trenton to Toronto. In 2021 the Taliban returned to power, and Canada resettled tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, many of whom had helped Canadian forces.
Diplomacy, humanitarian work and Ukraine
- Apartheid: in the 1980s, Mulroney's government imposed sanctions on South Africa's racist apartheid regime and pushed the Commonwealth to do the same; Nelson Mandela addressed Parliament in 1990.
- Famine and disaster relief: Canadians raised money for the 1984–1985 Ethiopian famine; the military's Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) helped after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
- Landmines treaty (1997): led by Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines was opened for countries to sign in Ottawa in December 1997.
- International justice: Canadian Louise Arbour was chief prosecutor for the UN tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and Canada helped create the International Criminal Court (1998).
- Refugees: Canada resettled more than 25,000 Syrian refugees between November 2015 and February 2016, with private sponsors playing a large role.
- Ukraine: after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Canada began training Ukrainian forces (Operation UNIFIER, from 2015). Since Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Canada has sent military, financial and humanitarian aid, and welcomed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians; since 2017 it has also led a NATO force in Latvia. Canada has one of the world's largest Ukrainian diasporas, with roots going back to the 1890s.