Canadian Service Unification

I'm writing about Canadian defence policy, and have been reading Major General Daniel Gosselin's two-part account of the unification of the Canadian military. Gosselin makes an interesting argument, which I'll boil down to the following (and here I'm quoting directly from the piece I'm writing):

The first concept (the need for a single coherent defence policy) was made relevant by Canada’s idiosyncratic position in the NATO alliance, and by its special relationships with the United States and the United Kingdom. During the 20th century, Canada’s defense policy was tightly tied to military coalitions led by the UK and the US. In World Wars I and II, Canadian forces worked closely with UK, then US military organizations, while in the Cold War period Canada’s commitment to NATO dictated much of its force structure. Hellyer and others expressed concern that the three Canadian services had integrated themselves more fully with their alliance partners than with each other, and that the services required a genuinely Canadian perspective. The three services, fixated on parochial problem solving within the context of alliance commitments, could not contribute to a unified national defense policy.

The second objective (the creation of a Chief of Defence Staff) also responded to concerns about services placing alliance commitments ahead of national strategy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Canadian civilian leadership had experienced problems managing three disparate defense service staffs, especially as each service attempted to fulfill its alliance commitments. The three services developed standard operating procedures in response to the requirements of operating with coalition partners, rather than to the concern of civilian political leadership. Hellyer intended the development of a new position, with a unified staff, to make the military more responsive to the civilian government than to Canada’s allies.

This is interesting for several reasons. It doesn't surprise me that the independent Canadian services may have been more responsive to alliance commitments than to their own government, given that it was probably difficult to envision any use of force by Canada outside of a coalition operation. This was certainly true after 1945, but I suspect that even prior to World War II the idea of Canada engaging in independent military action against a conventional adversary without coalition support was not considered plausible. However, I hadn't thought about the relationship in precisely the terms that Gosselin laid out. As an institutional fix I'm not sure that unification solves the problem, although that may depend on the precise character of collaboration and alliance commitments.

The argument brings to mind a common conservative critique of the US Department of State, which is that DoS habitually becomes captive to foreign preference rather than US national interest. In terms of US foreign and security policy there are a couple interesting implications. On the one hand, there's the threat that US military organizations, collaborating closely with foreign partners, might experience the kind of drift that was problematic in the Canadian context. On the other hand, wouldn't it be accurate to suggest that the long term US effort to develop military-to-military contacts (and I think you could interpret the Cooperative Maritime Strategy in these terms) are at least in part about creating the reality that the Canadians were worried about, specifically that foreign military orgs might have more interest in collaboration with the US than in the policy of their home governments?

I'm curious, for those with expertise on Canadian defence; is Gosselin's interpretation of the reasoning behind unification novel, or is this a generally accepted explanation?