Canadian Defence Quarterly

The Naval and Maritime Air Articles: 1970 – 1998

The Canadian Defence Quarterly (CDQ) was published from 1971-1998, as an unofficial but authoritative vehicle for Canada’s military community to express their views and ideas on all aspects of the Canadian Forces. Our Collection regrettably does not hold a serial run of the journal, but fortunately received a donation of digital copies of all articles published in it pertaining to the Canadian Navy or naval and maritime air subjects, as discussed below.

The first edition of this Canadian Defence Quarterly appeared in the summer of 1971 with John Gellner as editor. An earlier version of CDQ had existed in the 1920s and 1930s but had ceased publication when the Second World War started (and did not have much naval content). After the war, individual service journals came into existence, such as the Navy’s Crowsnest, but these lacked the deeper intellectual content the academic and military educational communities wanted. At a time when the Canadian military was still re-establishing itself as a truly national entity after being thrust into a unified structure in 1966, John Gellner was able to cater to a community that needed to re-kindle its academic foundation. Through his efforts and those of his two successors, the late Colonel John Martienson (1986-1996) and Professor Martin Shadwick (1996-1998), CDQ flourished and provided the Canadian military community with the intellectual stimulus it needed. Unfortunately, because of political and bureaucratic myopia, CDQ ceased publishing in late 1998.

Over the quarter-century of its run in this guise, CDQ published many articles looking at naval and maritime air issues and an impressive number of articles addressing the defence policy upon which the naval and maritime policies and programs were based. Some articles were written by serving officers (not fearing retribution for breaking the tradition of the Navy being the “Silent Service”) but the majority were written by a mix of academics, civil servants, scientists, journalists, and former naval persons. As a collection, those articles provide a useful insight into the Navy and its integral aviation arm (albeit part of the Air Force administratively) and their policies, plans, programs, and activities over the period. These are reproduced here with the kind permission of the last two Editors of CDQ, John Martienson and Martin Shadwick, and have been made available to the Naval Marine Archive The Canadian Collection through the assistance of Peter Haydon (Cdr RCN, ret’d) and the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University.

The collection has a degree of subjectivity in deciding which defence policy articles have distinct naval content, also book reviews and reports of conferences have been left out with one exception. The reproduced articles are taken directly from the various editions of CDQ and thus show some advertisements. In a few cases, copies had to be photocopied from bound collections and the quality is not as good as those taken from the original editions. Each column in the index below is sortable (click on any column header.) The subject areas are broad for convenience and because in some cases not a great deal was written on some subjects. The categories are:

Notes:             Use this finding aid for specifc authors, keywords, etc.

• Given the vagaries of the original indexing – some volumes overlap the calendar years, some are by month, some by season – we have artificially added the column "Chronology".
• Click on any column to sort up/down, and a second time to "reverse" the sort. For "categories", this will group subject matter together alphabeticaly.