In your opinion what makes it terrible for peacekeeping & observation? Isn't it just a matter of Canada not buying and integrating suitable armament? With Jdams and Paveways you have to go too close for early operations, but Canada still dropped 10% of bombs in Libya according to wikipedia. Sweden has a similar setup, missing proper ranged options but they were restricted to doing strictly recon in Libya. In the end I suspect that even if you had the ability, no-one besides USA(/UK/France/Germany) has the stockpiles/willingness to start throwing around cruise missiles in foreign ops. For smaller countries there's political reasoning behind doing enough but not everything you possibly could in foreign ops.

Not all modern fighters have started as a multi-role, but every good fighter has ended up as one.

Dropping bombs isn't necessarily peacekeeping :).

If I'm remembering properly, my grandfather was stationed in Yemen in '63-'64 as an aircraft field mechanic. Their mission was purely observational: every 12 hours, fly over the border and count any accumulation of military equipment. I believe they had a DHC-3 Twin Otter.

I don't know the specifics, but looking at the specifications: 945 mile range, 121 mph cruise speed on the DHC-3. That's give or take a 6-7 hour loiter (they were landing in the desert and had fuel trucks come daily). It's harder to get exact specs on how a CF-18 would perform on such a mission, but I've got a pretty good feeling it's not going to be landing on any gravel airstrips, nor is it going to be fun trying to count vehicles on the ground.

When I think of peacekeeping missions, I think of boots on the ground, ideally with air support. Looking at the A-29 from the article, that sounds a lot more like the type of aircraft that should be providing that support.