Time to pay the bill for national defence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/06/2024 (642 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Probably the best way for a country like Canada to think about defence spending is to consider it the way you think about buying insurance.

You don’t ever want to have to make a claim on your insurance after suffering a catastrophic loss, but you certainly value the peace of mind your policy brings.

The same for spending on national defence.

You never want to have to use your defence assets, but you want to have them if it turns out you need them. And in these dangerous times — especially with the war in Ukraine and news on Thursday that Russia and North Korea had signed a joint defence pact — has there ever been a period when, as a country, we more badly needed to have our insurance premiums fully paid up?

Yet they are not.

This year, Canadian defence spending is supposed to amount to 1.37 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product, well below the amount — two per cent — that the federal government told our NATO partners Canada would spend.

Frankly, other countries in NATO are doing much more to meet their own commitments, and our excuses ring a bit hollow.

Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of NATO, said during an event hosted by the NATO Association of Canada in Ottawa on Wednesday that Canada was facing the same budgetary issues as other Western nations when it comes to committing money to defence spending.

“They’re concerned about the fiscal balance. They want to spend money on health, education and on the other things,” he said. But spending to address health, climate change and education “will fail” if war occurs and defence spending hasn’t kept pace.

The federal government has been bullish on defence spending commitments, but they are of the sort that might grace an Alice in Wonderland script — they’re never today, always tomorrow. Projects to reinforce and re-equip our Armed Forces either get bogged down in seemingly endless procurement snafus, or else suffer from embarrassing design and construction issues.

Canada’s Navy has been waiting years for two new naval supply ships. The planning process for the now-$4.1 billion vessels started in 2010 — the first vessel won’t be ready until 2025 (the current estimate), the second in 2027.

The Navy is currently using a leased civilian vessel as a supply ship — and depending on our allies in other instances — after the last two naval supply vessels were pulled from service in 2015 after a fire on one, and corrosion issues with the other.

And then there’s the way successive governments have simply pushed military spending off into the future.

Here’s our take from April on a huge commitment for Our North, Strong and Free: A Renewed Vision for Canada’s Defence, a policy that promises in strengthen the Canadian military’s Arctic capabilities: “In the case of defence spending, it was $72.3 billion in new net spending over the next 20 years. But only $8 billion of that would be spent in the first five years of the program. That amount of spending would mean that, even by budgetary year 2029-30, Canada would still be spending less than the two per cent of GDP that we have committed to NATO that we would be spending on defence. And the Canadian military was told to come up with cutback savings of $4.4 million already this year.”

To repeat, from April: “Quite simply, we’re gearing up for potential future military challenges far more slowly than we should be and far more slowly than many of our traditional allies.”

Those allies have noticed, and they’ve spoken. Regularly.

The insurance bill is on the kitchen counter. We’d better get around to paying it.