I hope that this chapter isn't representative of the entire book. 'Canada' needs to both rid itself of  the peacekeeping myth as well as stop being an imperialist country.

When 'peacekeeping' equals neo-colonial occupation (say, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti...) I am happy to see a "vanishing contribution to UN peacekeeping."

Contrast the excerpt which writes:

"As DND buries Canada's 50-year involvement in peacekeeping, a more ominous version of international military intervention has arisen in its place. Pearson's vision of the Canadian military supporting the United Nations in negotiating solutions has been replaced by an Americanized vision of militaristic solutions imposed by the force of arms."

...with what Stephen Dale wrote in This Magazine, in 1993:

"Canada the peacekeeper: a comfortable and comforting myth, stored in the same part of the Canadian psyche as the memory of Lester Pearson, and the idea of Canada as a moderate "middle power," lacking in imperial pretensions and wanting to do good in the world."

Staples and MacDonald demonstrate that the issue of how much the 'herculean' 'mission' costs is little more than a red herring.

Again, as Dale wrote:

"The truth is that, historically, a minuscule portion of the Canadian military budget has gone towards peacekeeping. In the early eighties...Canada's peacekeeping costs not reimbursed by the UN amounted to a cumulative $266 - million -- less than one half of one per cent of the total military budget during that period."

I am afraid the authors are asking us to return to a mythical place that Dale warned us about 16 years  (and Canadian support for how many Imperial wars?) ago:

"Maybe Canadians -- hard - bitten reporters and all -- really believe the myths we've constructed about ourselves. Maybe we really think we're different from everyone else: that we didn't massacre aboriginal people like the Americans did, that we don't take part in unjust wars (who wants to remember all that Canadian napalm dropped on the Vietnamese?), that we really have everyone else's best interests at heart. Maybe we actually believe those TV commercials that say peacekeeping is the main thing our armed forces have been doing for the past 40 years."