Robert Coates (politician)

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Robert Carman Coates, PC , QC , BA , LL.B , LL.D (born March 10, 1928) is a former Canadian politician and Cabinet minister.

Coates was first elected to the Canadian House of Commons in the 1957 election as the Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Cumberland, Nova Scotia. Coates was a backbencher during the John Diefenbaker and Joe Clark governments. He was appointed to the Cabinet of Brian Mulroney as Defence Minister following the Tory victory in the 1984 election.

Coates main initiative was the re-introduction of separate uniforms for the naval, land and air branches of the military. Liberal Paul Hellyer had unified the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army and Royal Canadian Air Force into an integrated Canadian Forces with a single uniform in 1967. Coates and other Progressive Conservatives had long derided this decision as disrespectful of tradition. While Coates reintroduced distinct uniforms for each service, he was unable to reverse the unification of the forces.

Coates was forced to resign from Cabinet on February 12, 1985, three months after taking office, for breaching security by visiting a strip bar in West Germany and chatted with strippers while he had secret North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) documents in his possession. The resignation was the first to hit the Mulroney government. Coates returned to the backbench, and did not run in the 1988 election.