New team likely to wield cost-cutting hatchet

Prime Minister Stephen Harper cleared out his entire defence team Monday and appointed new ministers to oversee billions of dollars in Defence Department budget cuts and fix the country’s military procurement system.

Longtime justice minister Rob Nicholson will now be expected to wield the hatchet and implement the prime minister’s demand for “more teeth and less tail” as he was named to defence in a swap with Peter MacKay.

While known as a strong supporter of Canada’s men and women in uniform and the minister in charge during the bloodiest years in Afghanistan, MacKay struggled to implement those cuts despite orders from Harper.

Senior military officers, most recently outgoing Canadian Army commander Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, have warned publicly and in private that the cuts will hurt the Canadian Forces.

But if their concerns resonated with MacKay, they could be set to get a deaf ear from Nicholson.

Appointed justice minister in January 2007, Nicholson spearheaded the Conservatives’ tough-oncrime agenda, including minimum sentencing.

This was despite vocal opposition from large segments of the justice community, including from some officials within his own department.

Nicholson also scrapped with provinces over the associated costs of those new laws, and both experiences may well come into play as he sits down with senior military officers over the next few months and begins shaving money from the Defence budget.

“He ushered in some major amendments to the criminal law that was clearly in the government’s agenda and priorities,” said University of Ottawa law professor Carissima Mathen.

In addition to budget cuts at national defence, Nicholson will be in charge of charting a new long-term vision for the military after the Conservative

‘How do you find more people and free up resources outside the actual mandated cuts to position the department to do new things, and the old things?’ DAVID PERRY Defence analyst

government’s last plan, unveiled in 2008, was found to be unaffordable.

While that work was supposed to coincide with budget cuts and transform national defence into a leaner, more agile and capable fighting force, it hasn’t.

David Perry, a defence analyst at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, said that is a major shortcoming which he hoped Nicholson would correct.

“It’s not just how you cut the budget in the short term,” he said. “But how do you find more people and free up resources outside the actual mandated cuts to position the department to do new things, and the old things, in a way that requires fewer resources?”

Meanwhile, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley took over the public works department from Rona Ambrose. Finley will be responsible for the majority of federal government purchases, including military equipment such as the F-35 and new ships for the navy.

Finley is one of Harper’s most trusted ministers and her appointment could be seen as a sign he was not completely happy with how the file was being managed, particularly as the F-35 project remains up in the air and the federal auditor general is looking at the national shipbuilding strategy.

Harper also eliminated the associate defence minister position, which was created after the last federal election to help manage the troublesome F-35 stealth fighter project and numerous other multibillion-dollar procurement projects.