There is a particular kind of memoir that militaries produce, in which a general reflects on a life of service and discovers, with enormous relief, that everyone always did the right thing. Wayne Eyre has not written one of those. Canada’s former chief of the defence staff has instead published Into the Breach: A Soldier’s Journey, a book about what it is like to run an armed forces while the government that owns it keeps finding new ways to make the job impossible — and to have considered resigning “several times” along the way, as he told CBC News in interviews around the release.
The prologue is titled “The Accidental CDS,” which is both a joke and a précis. Eyre was army commander in February 2021 when Admiral Art MacDonald stepped aside over allegations of inappropriate behaviour — allegations that never produced charges — and Eyre woke up in charge of an institution then drowning in a sexual misconduct scandal that had engulfed several of its most senior leaders. He calls the experience “soul crushing” and admits that in his first months he often wondered whether he was up to it.
The book’s most electric episode came in June 2021. Eyre had decided to keep Vice-Admiral Craig Baines as navy commander despite Baines having played golf with former chief of the defence staff Jonathan Vance, who was by then under military police investigation following allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland both publicly questioned the decision. Eyre felt thrown, in his word, “under the bus” by Freeland — and saw a trap laid for the relationship at the top.
If there’s no trust between the nation’s senior military leader and the nation’s senior elected leader, one of them has to go, and it’s not going to be the elected leader
He resolved to quit. He was, he says, on the phone with Trudeau, actually in the act of resigning, when the prime minister cut him off to say he still had confidence in him — and subsequently issued a public statement of support that Eyre had not yet seen when he picked up the phone. Crisis defused; tension permanent. He served three more years.
Why stay, if the idea kept recurring through battles over defence funding and sagging readiness? His answer is the sort of arithmetic only a lifelong soldier would find comforting: “You can fall on your sword, but generally it hurts and you can only do it once.” Resigning, he told CBC, is “an inherently political act” that would cause “a momentary blip in the media cycle” and lasting turmoil in the institution. So the sword stayed in its scabbard, mostly so that no one else would have to trip over it.
Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the memoir’s second great theme: a government that could not “make decisions at the speed of war.” The Trudeau government took public criticism for its slowness to approve lethal aid. “What we experienced at that time was a collision of ideology with reality,” Eyre says — the ideology being that Canada does not send weapons into conflict zones; the reality being that a friend was about to be invaded. He credits Canada with later outrunning allies on some deliveries, Leopard tanks among them. But the frustration runs through the book’s accounts of training missions and the transfer of M-777 howitzers.
The sharpest passage lands in September 2023, at Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Canada. “Both the PM and Deputy PM Freeland gave bellicose, impassioned speeches about being strong and supporting Ukraine,” Eyre writes — and then, quietly, notes that the same government had just inflicted a billion-dollar budget cut on the military and was dawdling over a new defence policy. The generals in the audience, he writes, “had a hard time reconciling” the two.
He is no kinder about NORAD. In June 2022, in the run-up to unveiling a $38 billion modernisation commitment, no one in government, he writes, seemed able to say where the money was coming from or where it was going. “Most galling was the ‘smoke and mirrors’ funding approach,” with money reassigned from other equipment and most investment pushed years into the future. When he told a journalist, frankly, that the source of funds “wasn’t clear to me,” the government was displeased. The funds, notably, did not become clearer.
The book also revisits the strangest caveat in the public inquiry into the 2022 trucker convoy that occupied Ottawa: a passing mention that the military had prepared planning around the crisis. Eyre clarifies. Yes, staff gamed out scenarios — no, that was not planning, “because a plan entails assigning troops to task.” It was “very compartmentalised,” most of it about whether military tow trucks might pull protest vehicles out of the streets, and it was driven by a fear that deploying soldiers would replay the 1990 Oka Crisis. He was firmly opposed to any military role at all, and one of his staff, he writes, offered the verdict that deserves a plaque: “If you accomplish nothing else as CDS, keeping the CAF out of this mess is a singular achievement.”
The denouement has an irony Eyre is too polite to underline: the man he accused of starving the military is gone, and Mark Carney’s government has reversed much of the Trudeau-era approach, pushing defence spending to the NATO target of two percent of GDP. Several European leaders and intelligence agencies are warning of possible conflict with Russia, even China, by decade’s end. Asked whether Canada is ready, Eyre answers no. “But we’re on the right path, and we are getting there.”
Which, from a man whose memoir chronicles four years of budgets that arrived after the threats did, counts as a ringing endorsement. In Eyre’s telling, Ottawa has fetched its sword at last; the country should be grateful the scabbard wasn’t empty.