New spending, old tricks
Dear Editor:
Hurrah, the Liberals have announced a big boost in defence spending, but let’s hold the applause. All that glitters isn’t gold and we’ve been deceived on this before.
No major spending increases will occur before the next federal election in 2019. That’s partly by design and partly due to the nature of military procurement which requires long lead times for major equipments like ships and aircraft.
This announcement has gotten the Trudeauites off the hook with Trump and NATO for now. And it lets them indulge their spending on the sunny ways agenda for the next election. They’ll keep spending on politically attractive things like climate stuff and big flashy infrastructure and social undertakings in vote rich urban centers like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. We can also expect massive “investments” in Quebec to buy a voting base which had abandoned them for 30 years prior to the last election.
Military budgets don’t exist to satisfy the military. They are an essential sub-set of foreign policy. In a policy driven environment, policy will determine the size and scale of military procurement.
But in a budget driven environment, like we’ve had for the past 60 years, military spending is limited by whatever other government priorities and related budgets will allow as a residual. This has created an unending succession of hollow defence policies and short-term budgets, rather than the stable long term defence funding line which is essential.
That’s why we’ve see a perpetual cycle of rust out and replacement where everything needs to be replaced at the same time, instead of continuous procurement which allows phased equipment replacement at less capital cost.
Assuming that the Liberals manage to finesse the 2019 election, where does that leave their bold defence plans in the aftermath? Money must be found from somewhere and that means cuts in other areas or bumping up deficits and debt which they’ve already committed to for the next 33 years before spending an additional dime on the military.
The cheese will become binding on this so we can anticipate a weaseling away from defence in order to sustain more voteworthy priorities.
This shimmering mirage may well become another steaming pile after 2019. Even if it’s real we’d only be spending 1.4 percent of GDP on defence versus our NATO obligation of 2 percent, even after a new bean counting methodology that rolls military pensions into the mix. John Thompson
Kaleden