Canada’s peacekeeping myth ‘needs to fade away,’ retired general writes in memoir

OTTAWA — Canada’s former top soldier says the country’s “persistent myth” about being a nation of peacekeepers hasn’t kept up with a changing world and it “needs to fade away.”

In a new memoir, retired general Wayne Eyre says traditional, UN-style peacekeeping is not only dead, it has been a ghost for decades. He says he knows because he was there when it died — at Medak Pocket in 1993.

Eyre details his experiences in peacekeeping in Croatia, Bosnia and Cyprus — along with his later time in Afghanistan and eventual rise to the top of the Canadian Armed Forces — in his book Into the Breach: A Soldier’s Journey, which comes out on Oct. 6.

In it, he describes in great detail his experiences in the Battle of Medak Pocket in the former Yugoslavia, where he was deployed as a captain in the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. He calls it a “turning point that saw the death of traditional UN peacekeeping.”

Canadian Forces in the former Yugoslavia faced artillery and heavy machine-gun fire in the neutral zone but ultimately drove back Croatian forces. In the book, Eyre describes his battalion pushing past a roadblock into the village of Lički Čitluk, where they found evidence of ethnic cleansing among the burning buildings.

A traditional peacekeeping operation deploys a minimally armed force to separate combatants and act as a buffer. Eyre writes that multiple sides in the former Yugoslavia made targets of the under-resourced peacekeepers and the mission failed to prevent a brutal escalation of the violence.

“The only thing that the belligerents respected was force,” Eyre said in an interview with The Canadian Press, adding the wider United Nations Protection Force mission was unable to provide enough of that force.

He said peacekeeping was “an era for the Canadian military” that lasted decades and ended in the early 1990s. Modern missions, he said, are set against a very different geopolitical backdrop.

“Take a look now at where most peacekeeping operations are — Africa, where there is an extreme local reluctance to have large Western forces on the ground there, for various historical reasons, to keep the peace,” he said. “And the utility of many of those missions are in question.”

Medak Pocket was a formative experience for Eyre and many of his colleagues. He writes about the overpowering smells of smoke and death hanging over the field and how, for many years afterward, he could not “smell a campfire without being taken back” to that moment.

His book, which runs to just over 400 pages, covers the ups and downs of his career, from the battlefield to top command.

Eyre said he felt the need to describe history as he saw it from his front-row seat.

“In the Canadian military, we don’t have a tradition of senior military officers or generals and admirals capturing history,” he said in the interview.

Eyre said as chief of the defence staff, he frequently fielded requests from politicians who didn’t always understand the potential impacts of their decisions — or how thinly spread the Canadian Armed Forces had become after decades of underfunding and the launch of the Russian deterrence mission in Latvia.

“I know I irritated some in government. I was told at one point I was being seen as obstructionist, but it’s the reality of what we had on the shelf,” he said.

Eyre said Canada’s future in a shifting international order depends on strong alliances and selectively deploying military power on very specific operations.

He called Latvia — where Canada leads a battalion on NATO’s eastern flank and has stationed 2,000 troops — the most “geopolitically significant deployment that Canada has undertaken since the end of the Cold War.”

Eyre’s own time and experiences in the military were shaped by major turning points, starting with the end of the Cold War and continuing through the 9/11 terror attacks and the start of the Afghanistan war. In Afghanistan, Eyre commanded Canada’s largest combat advisory mission up to that point.

Eyre stepped into the role of chief of the defence staff somewhat reluctantly just five years ago, when Admiral Art McDonald stepped aside in the face of a sexual misconduct allegation. The allegation did not lead to charges.

Eyre said he initially thought he would only be in the job for weeks as acting chief — and soon after considered resigning on principle.

He said he wondered whether cabinet had lost trust in him when then-deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland openly criticized his decision not to fire Navy commander Vice-Admiral Craig Baines amid a scandal.

“The lesson here is just the messiness of political-military relations,” he said, adding the book is not meant to be a political “tell-all.”

He said he felt he had the confidence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau but it took “a while to develop” at a time when, thanks to the pandemic, meetings were all being conducted by video.

Eyre helmed the forces from 2021 to 2024, a tenure he writes was consumed by “crisis stacked upon crisis.”

On top of the series of sexual misconduct allegations against top brass that rocked the armed forces, Eyre’s time in the top job also coincided with a global pandemic, the evacuation of Canadians from Afghanistan in 2021, the start of the war Ukraine, the “Freedom Convoy” that occupied Ottawa, chaotic gang violence in Haiti and forest fires and floods at home.

He said he fielded nearly two dozen requests for international disaster response and upwards of 100 for help with managing the COVID-19 crisis, in addition to other domestic requests.

“My observation was all of these crises stacked upon each other was really limiting the bandwidth of our decision makers,” the retired general said in the interview.

“That’s where something like understanding and having clearly articulated national security interests and objectives can provide you guardrails so that when the pressure is on, when time is tight, you have something to help you make those decisions.”

He said that while he empathizes with elected officials, he struggled with the slow pace of government peacetime processes.

Eyre said in one instance, he worried he had he overstepped his authority by committing Canada to training Ukrainians in Latvia at a time when Ottawa was not giving him “decisions at the speed of war.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2026.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press