Defence minister Sajjan faces tough road
• Canada’s defence minister may have a harder time selling the Liberals’ new policy to his own military after claims he was an “architect” of a major Afghanistan operation.
There is no doubt Harjit Sajjan has lost respect as a soldier, say sources close to and inside the Canadian Armed Forces, and that this will colour the remainder of his tenure. But whether he retains credibility as a politician will depend on whether he delivers on promises to fix major funding and capability gaps. And there is significant skepticism about whether he can.
The minister himself acknowledged this reality Wednesday, telling reporters he’ll be judged by “actions, not words.”
A substantially delayed “defence policy review,” originally promised for last December, is being put out before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits Brussels for a NATO meeting May 25. Sajjan is also expected to reveal a dollar figure for Canada’s “significant investment” in the military.
In its first two federal budgets, the Liberal government decided to “defer” about $12 billion in military capital spending, itself contributing to the types of shortfalls Sajjan described.
Sajjan offered few hints as to the substance of the review other than that it will be “rigorously costed” and audited, and that it will ostensibly fill a funding “hole.” He described it as “a plan to allocate realistic funding to ... ‘bread and butter’ projects.”
It is unclear whether the review will clarify peacekeeping deployments, or how heavily it will focus on North American defence, thought to be a priority of the Trump administration. It is unlikely, however, the review will recommend the more than doubling of the defence budget that would be required to meet NATO spending targets.
Opposition parties and some in military circles are miffed after Sajjan misrepresented himself during a recent speech to Indian military officials. Sajjan said he was an “architect” of Operation Medusa, a major offensive against the Taliban, but accounts from others who served at the time say his role was much smaller than that, focused on intelligencegathering. He made a similar claim in a 2015 podcast. He has since apologized.
A veteran and military communications consultant in Atlantic Canada, Tim Dunne, said Wednesday the minister has “two burdens he’s got to shoulder”: defending himself over his comments, and defending the impending review document to a military belaboured by decades of underfunding, which “looks like it may fall short.”