IT’S TIME TRUDEAU STARTED SPENDING ON THE MILITARY
Let’s agree, for the sake of everyone getting along, that the Liberals’ decision to pull Canada’s CF-18 fighters out of the U.S.led coalition in Iraq was a mistake.
The proof of this, surely, is that the new Iraq mission is more robust than the old, both in terms of cost and in terms of Canadian Forces personnel deployed, and includes a significant air refuelling and targeting component. Canada remains a part of the bombing campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and will take up a greater burden — three times greater, based on the tripling of the special forces contingent — in the ground war. Only in Ottawa does this not equal deeper military engagement.
Therefore, Justin Trudeau is now a wartime leader who leads a wartime cabinet. You wouldn’t know it, judging from the rosecoloured hue of his joint presser with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Ottawa Thursday. But that is the reality.
Trudeau and his ministers certainly wish it were otherwise. Much like the Obama administration in the United States, they’d prefer to focus on anything other than weapons and war — middle-class wages, inequality, social policy, gender equity, climate change. If Canadian soldiers must be sent abroad, the Liberals would much prefer they operate under a UN flag, as in the old Canadian Forces ad, with the kindly Canuck in Cyprus busting up a squabble between a kindly Greek and a kindly Turk, who kindly agree to make up. The Liberals would rather it were 1994, with the Cold War newly ended and peace breaking out all over.
If that were the case, the easy road to budgetary health would be as obvious now as it was then: Chop defence spending and redeploy the money toward raising living standards for the middle class, defined as “most voters.” Who’s likely to complain? This could take the shape of another tax cut, or more generous program spending; in fiscal terms it wouldn’t matter. Liberals have done both in the past.
But here’s the wrinkle. Even the Harper Tories’ defence outlay, which they always intimated was rockribbed and muscular next to what the doughy Grits and Dippers might offer, was inadequate. The Conservative defence budget of about $20 billion annually, which the Trudeau Liberals have promised to maintain, is not enough. The former government’s timelines for procurement, which the Liberals may or may not uphold, were too sluggish. The evidence grows more obvious by the day. At its root is the U.S.’s continuing, long-term pullback from its former role as global policeman.
Set aside, for the moment, the sociopaths of ISIL, who pose a particularly asymmetrical military challenge, and consider the more oldfashioned variety of threat. In 2014, Russia, a great power and permanent member of the UN Security Council, invaded Crimea and took it by force from Ukraine, a foreign country. Russia, like Canada, is an Arctic power. Unlike Canada, it is frantically building a large fleet of new icebreakers. The largest, two 173-metre, four-season nuclear-powered behemoths under construction in St. Petersburg, are due to float by the end of this decade.
By way of strategic response, Canada has Sir John’s Franklin’s lost ship the Erebus, which is historically fascinating. It has a small fleet of Arctic patrol vessels, possibly fewer than six, the first of which is under construction now in Halifax. There is a plan to build a three-season polar icebreaker, the John G. Diefenbaker, on the West Coast, after construction of a few other ships, including several smaller Coast Guard vessels and two massive oilers. The John G. Diefenbaker may as well be Franklin’s second lost ship, for all the geopolitical relevance it has now. Completion is many years away, at best.
Chinese defence spending, now about 10 per cent of the world total, is growing by double digits every year. Beijing is increasingly asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea, so much so that strategists in Japan are increasingly worried about the future balance of power in the Western Pacific and the consequences of declining U.S. interest in projecting power globally.
Look southward to the U.S. presidential primaries: is there an old-fashioned internationalist Republican, or a Clinton Democrat, who is a shoo-in to win? The watchword this season is uncertainty. Neither Donald Trump, now leading the Republican field, nor Bernie Sanders, who has a shot at upsetting Hillary Clinton, is anything close to a known quantity. Both are populist isolationists.
Canadians have been free riders on defence for so long that this seems normal to us. Changing the political calculus by which we collectively decline to spend more than one per cent of gross domestic product on defence — the lowest in the G7 — requires leadership. It’s lamentable, given the mounting risks to our collective security, that no one — least of all the new government — has the stomach for it.