National Post (National Edition)
Liberals steer toward defence spending boost
Government views show signs of shifting
As it prepares to release its new defence policy, the Liberal government is backing away from claims that buying new equipment for the Canadian Forces has largely been successful and using NATO’s two-per-cent standard to measure spending doesn’t make sense.
The Liberals and the Defence Department painted the majority of military procurements as a success story in documents prepared last year for its defence review. The records, released through Access to Information and later put online by the department, also point out that NATO’s use of the Gross Domestic Product to measure military expenditures “is a questionable measure of what a nation can achieve with its defence spending.”
Similar comments about the GDP-defence ratio were made earlier this year by Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They’ve argued that how a country contributes to defence is more important than its ratio of GDP spending. Canada spends around one per cent of its GDP on the military, about $20 billion annually.
The Liberals now appear to be in retreat on those claims.
In a May 3 speech, Sajjan outlined how defence acquisition was a mess and that a lack of procurement officers made it difficult to buy even equipment the government figures it could afford. As for defence spending, Sajjan cited the same GDP measurement that the government had previously called a “questionable measure.”
“As a percentage of our GDP, we are spending less on defence today than we were in 2005,” Sajjan warned.
Defence analyst Martin Shadwick said the Liberals seem to have jettisoned some of the views in the policy review documents developed last year.
Talk about peacekeeping and contributing to the United Nations has also seemed to have dropped off the agenda.
“They could be reacting to pressure from the Trump administration to boost spending,” said Shadwick, a strategic studies professor at York University in Toronto. “But there certainly seems to have been a change when it comes to the Liberals’ views on defence.”
In December, the defence publication Jane’s issued a report noting that Canada was ranked 15th in the world in actual military spending, far ahead of most NATO nations.
Steve Staples, vice president of the Rideau Institute, said the Defence Department seems to have been successful in convincing the Liberals of the need for more money.
“We have seen a steady stream of reports from prodefence think tanks and analysts about this claim that Canada must spend two per cent of its GDP on the military when all along we’ve been a top spender,” said Staples, who has opposed increased military spending.
The Senate defence committee last Monday issued its report calling on the Liberals to buy 12 submarines, 24 attack helicopters, 21 more Chinook helicopters and 18 new warships. The price tag would be in the tens of billions.
Increasing Canadian military spending to two per cent of GDP would see the defence budget doubling to $40 billion.
The DND records prepared for the defence review noted that spending on the military already comprises 6.6 per cent of total federal spending.
Sajjan said there would be 18 key equipment programs that the government will focus on. Those include fighter jets, ships, trucks and air defence systems, he pointed out.
Jordan Owens, a spokeswoman for Sajjan, said the full list would be outlined in the defence review.
The Liberal government had looked at releasing the defence policy review as early as May 11 but that has been delayed.