Our speaker in April was one of our own RKUSI members, General (retired) Walt Natyncyzk. We are so fortunate to have General Walt with his tremendous experience as former Chief of Defence Staff and his many years as the Deputy Minister for Veterans Affairs as a member. His talk was charismatic, hard charging, and he provided extraordinary insight into his tenure as the CDS. He focused on our defence policy, procurement as well as financial and personnel challenges. Policies in many cases were planned but were never executed. Procurement was a huge problem for General Walt and unfortunately it remains an enormous challenge today. Canada continues to excel on operations, such as our mission in Afghanistan, despite the financial challenges posed by budgetary constraints. In some cases, the defence budget was purposely not spent by the government and utilized for other priorities. General Walt gave us the good, the bad, and the ugly on the challenges that we face today of a hollowed-out military, lack of money for training, and a government that has made our Canadian Armed Forces such a low priority.
Canada recently elected another Liberal Government for the fourth time and our new Prime Minister promises to put a significant focus on defence. Our new Minister of National Defence, David McGuinty, has extensive experience and we wait to see if there will be a sense of urgency to improve the poor and embarrassing state of our Canadian Armed Forces. We require so many capabilities, including more troops, and it will take a dedicated mobilizing effort to get our Forces back on their feet. We are already asking for the United States to protect us with their Golden Dome. Will this potentially detract from all our other demands? Hopefully the Prime Minister’s intentions of achieving the NATO two percent goal by 2030 will enable our military to support a national security strategy that protects our north and makes us a true NATO partner.
Your RKUSI executive team has been busy over the past month focused on modernizing our website. It is now up and running thanks to the great work of Bryan, Ron, and Bruce with excellent support from our outgoing Webmaster Neil Dukas and our web designer. Bruce Ewing has done some excellent work with The Torch and our membership can now be completed entirely online. We also have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook with the goal of extending our reach and profile. RKUSI has invested significantly in our website as it is critical to our mission and growth.
Our paid membership numbers have been steadily on the rise and we are now over 75 members in good standing with a goal of reaching 100 by year end. We have a list of 115 so we are quite confident that we will reach our goal. Congratulations to our local Kingston member of parliament, Mark Gerretsen, who recently won Kingston and the Islands seat for a fourth consecutive time. Mark recently joined RKUSI. We continue to expand our membership into Queen’s and RMC and recently Dr. Stéfanie von Hlatky who is a Research Chair at Queen’s recently joined our organization.
We continue to support seven local cadet Corps in the Kingston area and Gary Coulter recently took over from RKUSI stalwart member Bill Webster who recently passed away. This is important for our Institute and a very worthwhile investment in our future leaders.
As many of you know, we are partnering with RCMI Kingston for our event next week at the Kingston Yacht Club at 1630 hours, 28 May. John Cowan and Scott Stephenson will speak to us about the Military Colleges Review Report. So far, we have 35 members committed to attending and we have to Monday to confirm our numbers. General (Retired) Wayne Eyre will be coming to speak to us 19 June about the current state of the CAF and where this country needs to focus its efforts. Wayne wrote a great article for Globe about a month back and he will focus on this article which was entitled “The urgency is upon us: We need to defend Canada”.
Lastly, planning is now underway for the October 17th day long defence forum which will be held at Fort Frontenac followed by our centennial dinner. Please mark your calendars and we will have details out shortly.