- Because Canada does not have any hostile neighbours, Canada can afford not having a standing military force. Therefore, I would dissolve the Canadian Armed Forces, and turn it into the Canadian Emergency Response Agency
- CERA is a multipurpose aid force to assist provinces and territories whenever they need it, because there has been in the past, and will probably be in the future, a natural disaster happening somewhere in Canada
- When asked by a province, territory, or city, CERA will respond to a State of Emergency. To keep a clear chain of command, CERA personnel, equipment and supplies, will be under control of the local authority
- CERA will only take over when the local authority doesn’t have a well organized chain of command, or they just do not know what they’re doing
- Only the Prime Minister, or the Minister responsible for CERA can over-rule the local authority
- CERA personnel will take paramedic, firefighting, policing, riot and other forms of training related to dealing with a State of Emergency
- CERA time to time will also help out other countries when they request for assistance, like with the nuclear meltdown in Japan
- All military equipment not needed for CERA, will either be transferred over to the United Nations to assist in peacekeeping operations, or will be sold
- $1 billion of the military budget will be transferred to the annual budget of CSIS, as terrorism, whether it be religious or political, is the true threat to our national security, not invasion from another country
- As for the rest of the military budget, a small portion will be set aside for CERA, leaving the rest to be spent elsewhere
Lemme guess... you're in High School sociology, and you've been told to write a report.
Instead of dissecting your proposal line-by-line, with references to every occurrence in history similar to that attempted by other sovereign powers, let me just cut to the chase so you can get the basic principals.
There are two things required for a nation on this long-overpopulated planet to exist - and by nation I mean a place with borders, within which the laws are different - and those two things are:
1) Ability to mount a defense of the border, aka wage war. If you can't organize a defense... if you're can't even show you're willing to raise a defense, then you cannot maintain a border within which to have your society.
This goes back to long before we were overpopulated. We reached overpopulation at 1.5 billion, which was when the environmental degradation started - albeit slowly at first, although even then some human thinkers could see where things were going well enough to set aside Banff and Jasper - but even in the days when we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, not to mention early agriculturalists, the capacity of ourselves to out-breed ourselves in spite of what we tend to think of as a slow reproduction rate compared to rabbits combined with the nutrient-consumption rate of our brains was so vast that when Europeans landed in North America, those who bothered to learn the language and stories of the First North Americans heard only stories about competition over land and resources between Huron and Iroquois etc.
So... cancel the notion that you're going to have a border without forces. If the UN were to negotiate a global treaty for every nation to scrap their arms, then the first nation to break-treaty wins the planet.
In order for a sovereignty to maintain borders, it must be utterly absolute about its willingness to spend blood to hold those borders.
2) This point is a bit off the theme of your post, but it's very connected as in ... let's call it a corollary... and that is what a sovereign jurisdiction must do to pay for the forces required to maintain borders, which is revenue.
The two incontestable forces required to maintain a border are Forces and Revenue, therefore, if you have an issue with Revenue then use some brains to figure out how to couple your personal ability to pay with your nation's absolute requirement for revenue. Be glad for not being in Darfur where they shoot your for not paying soldiers the tax. I don't know what else to say, other than think about an idea for smugglers of Chinese immigrants to get money taking people out of Canada to drop them off in Antarctica for not having paid their taxes, when I know I could peel the whale-meat off those smugglers and fooled them into dropping the evaders into Arctic Canada.
The principal is... the cost of having a civilization must be paid for one-way-or-another. It's sort of like how to be a cell in a body you have to do more than just collect oxygen and protien from the blood-stream. Do you like the Christian way of a tithe?
In any case, getting back to your original thesis.
Obviously Canada does not have the population to spend millions of lives throwing each other against each other in order to see who's got the most bodies left over after every bullet is shot, and given how something always "weak" about Canadian forces was their license from Parliament to do tactical rescues of Canadians in distress overseas coupled with how ironically Canadian forces are among the best trained tactical fighters on the planet, ask this:
I) Say in the report to your social studies teacher that to defend Canada, given how the size of the population plus its surface area is such that pretty-much any nation above the size and population of Somalia is so sick that if they threw all their people against us we'd loose out of sympathy for not wanting to kill that many dumb idiots, if for no other reason than because we don't have the heart to shoot that many people running at us with sticks... therefore... theoretically, it's possible according to and idea initially proposed by the late PM King that we poison-pill ourselves.
That means, we've saved enough plutonium from our Candu reactors to form as an industrial nation into insanely powerful bombs that if you attack us for the purpose of invasion and occupation, then since we know we're all going to die anyway, those go off, and you, all your soldiers, every resource you hoped to dig, and frankly the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere ten-thousand times worse than Chernoble gets contaminated...
... Or you could get back to the bargaining table and tell us what the F-CK you want to buy!
2) Say also to your social sciences teacher how given Canada's population and ... how do I explain this ... the people who settled it ... the most powerful thing offer-able to the UN would be max-trained tactical Canadian fighter-types.
Condition number one-clear would have to be that if Canada needs it for herself first, she gets to use it for herself first... obviously as a natural condition of survival one would expect the children and grandchildren of this nation to hold onto with an idea of the smart ones to set to seriously exploring and digging the north to both learn how hard it was for the ancestors and to make some ground for some kids in case you have any.
In the mean time, if you want to grow up about tactical operations, in case you didn't know it's on youtube... somehow Alberta's Afghanistan fighters found a way to get a *real* embedded reporter...
