Happy New Year to everyone and I hope you all had a good family Christmas and holiday break. Our Canadian winter has been full on to this point and I know many of you head to warmer weather like Denis and Viola Levesque to get away from it!

We held a productive AGM and happy hour in December, and we had a very good turnout of thirty plus for the evening.  The draft RoD for the AGM is part of this newsletter so you can read up on our RKUSI and our recent decisions. Our Institute is doing well and we have grown to 130 members. Our website continues to improve and we have some excellent articles in our Torch on defence and security issues and I recommend looking them up. One of our members, Craig Hilton, has written a couple thought provoking commentaries that are attached “Russia’s Game Plan and Canada’s NATO Posture in the Baltic” and “Canada and the New American World Order”.  They are both excellent and some of the recommendations have been discussed with our serving leadership.

The world continues to be full of challenges and conflicts including the Ukraine which pose significant problems for NATO and the world. Russia cannot be trusted and we believe they have future expansion plans that they will execute in 2026 or 2027. Trump, with his recent attack on Venezuela continues to create more uncertainty about what the US will do next and more importantly how much we can actually rely on them defensively. A good topic of discussion in the future will be US imperialism and its impact. Defence and Security in Canada continues to be in our news and we sure hope to see more decisions and communication on the much-needed capabilities that our Forces need and also how we are going to mobilize to support all these capabilities. Honestly, we are not seeing any sense of urgency yet from our government, which is very much concerning.

Our speaker next week, 15 January, is LGen (retired) Blais Frawley who just retired in the Fall of last year and his last command was NORAD. He will speak to us about his experiences in NORAD and what he recommends Canada does for our defence of Canada. It will be our first in the New Year and I look forward to seeing everyone. Stefanie von Hlaky is our next speaker on 05 February and she will speak to us about NATO.