Military hurt by lack of funding

MINISTER STOPS SHORT OF PROMISING NEW FUNDS

Questions swirled on Wednesday as Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan offered a grim assessment of the state of the military, but stopped short of saying exactly how the government plans to fix it.

In a major speech to a who’s who crowd of defence industry representatives and experts, Sajjan said years of underfunding had hollowed out the armed forces and left them struggling with even basic tasks.

“We are now in the troubling position where status quo spending on defence will not even maintain a status quo of capabilities,” Sajjan said.

“Current funding has us digging ourselves into a hole. A hole that gets deeper every year. As a percentage of GDP, we are spending less on defence today than we were in 2005.”

The comments came as the Liberal government prepares to unveil its new defence policy, which Sajjan promised would begin to address some of the problems.

“It will be a plan to get out of the hole we are starting in and it will be a plan to build an even stronger military,” he said, before later adding that actual implementation by defence officials could take years.

But the key question for many attendees of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute event was whether the Liberal government will invest billions of additional dollars into the armed forces.

If not, they said, what is the Liberal government going to ask the military to stop doing?

Sajjan offered mixed signals on the funding question.

Much of his speech was spent on talking the overriding need to find money for 18 essential military procurement projects, known in defence circles as the “Key 18,” which are currently unfunded.

He said the government has to deal with those must-have projects, which include upgrades to two military helicopter fleets and engineering and logistical vehicles for the army, “before it can build anything new.”

The minister also said the Liberals have been extremely rigorous in determining the real costs of different procurement projects and the defence policy as a whole.

That includes enlisting six accounting firms to review how the government and military came up with its costs and ensuring sustainable defence funding.

But he then went back to the government’s previous line when asked during a question-andanswer session with the audience about meeting NATO’s two per cent defence spending target.

Canada currently spends about one per cent of GDP on defence, but Sajjan said the country is stepping up in other ways, such as deploying hundreds of troops to lead a NATO force in Latvia.

However, the minister did acknowledge in response to another audience member that fielding a credible military is “going to cost money. It’s going to take a significant investment.”