Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, left, in St. Petersburg, Russia, prior to the G20 Summit in 2013. Photo: Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press Is Russian president Vladimir Putin a bad, bad man? We think probably he is.
Do the butchers of the Islamic State, now running amok in Iraq and Syria, pose a clear and present danger to Western civilization? It seems so.
Therefore it’s good, we can agree, that this country’s prime minister and foreign minister, Stephen Harper and John Baird, can get their Winston Churchill on now and then. Harper and Baird’s denunciations of Putin’s reckless invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign country that had not fired so much as a rubber band towards Russia, have been refreshingly blunt.
Oh – except for our military, which, according to reporting by the Canadian Press’s Murray Brewster, is about to have another $2.7-billion lopped off its annual budget. Awkward. Postmedia’s Matthew Fisher reports that Ottawa is under pressure from North Atlantic Treaty Organization members to spend more, not less, as Harper heads to Wales for a NATO summit. Might someone at this confab publicly suggest that, when it comes to smiting evil, Canada is mostly bluster?
This is in no way intended as a slight against the Canadian Forces, whose members have displayed such skill, courage and simple good humour, in so many foreign engagements. No one who travels with the CF, or watches them work, can fail to appreciate their worth. The same very high standards, I observed recently, are exemplified by the Canadian Coast Guard. Thank goodness for them.
The simple truth is that Canada’s military is badly under-resourced, given the range of emerging global threats.”
But the simple truth is that Canada’s military is badly under-resourced, given the range of emerging global threats, and the United States’ continuing withdrawal from its long-standing role as global policeman. Setting aside a sharp increase in defence spending between 2002 and 2010, the pattern has been for Ottawa to use the CF as a kind of piggy bank. When money is tight, it can safely be lopped out of the defence budget, because a) soldiers, sailors and airmen and women can’t complain too bitterly and b) the defence of North America is essentially an American responsibility. Right?
The Jean Chretien-Paul Martin Liberals famously balanced the federal budget on the backs of the CF during its so-called “decade of darkness,” in the 1990s. Those cuts were so severe that on some bases, according to soldiers I have spoken to, every second light bulb was unscrewed to save power. The Airborne Regiment was disbanded in the wake of the Somalia affair. Major procurements were cancelled, delayed or botched. In 2005, ringing in the dawn of a new era, Harper promised to undo all that. And until roughly 2010, with Canada at war in Afghanistan, his government delivered.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (left) speaks with Commander Joint Task Force North Brig.Gen. Greg Loos as they make there way to speak to troops Tuesday August 26, 2014 on Baffin Island near York Sound, Nunavut. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)
But it appears the Tories are doing again what the Liberals did 20 years ago, even though the geopolitical context is demonstrably more perilous today than it was then. Canada spends roughly one per cent of GDP on its military – putting us 22nd second among 27 NATO countries, ahead of Hungary, Latvia, Spain, Lithuania and Luxembourg. The Slovak Republic, Belgium, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Italy and the Netherlands all spend a greater share of GDP on their militaries than does Canada. Even though, as the prime minister is fond of reminding us, this country leads the Group of Seven industrialized nations in terms of fiscal performance. It doesn’t square.
Last week on Baffin Island, I watched Harper deliver his toughest-sounding denunciation yet of both Putin and the Islamic State. Speaking to a small audience of soldiers, sailors and airmen and women, including Inuit Rangers tasked with providing Canada’s first line of defence in the north, Harper declared that “in Europe, we see the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin, who seems determined that, for Russia’s neighbours, there shall be no peace.” And this: “… because Russia is also Canada’s Arctic neighbour, we must not be complacent here at home. In our time, the Royal Canadian Air Force has again been called to respond to increased Russian activity in the Arctic.”
Members of the Canadian Joint Incident Respnse Unit rappel onto the deck of the ship Strait Explorer as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper watches Tuesday August 26, 2014 in York Sound, Nunavut. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld)
Bracing stuff. But how to justify the gap between the talk and the walk? The 5,000 Rangers, it is now promised, will receive their long-awaited new bolt-action rifle next year. Beyond that, there is precious little good news to report. As I have written previously, new ships are half a dozen years from delivery, at best. The fighter-jet replacement program has been on ice since late 2012, when the government’s sole-source F-35 purchase went supernova. There is still no competition under way to replace the CF-18s.
This state of affairs is not, to be fair, entirely the Harper government’s fault. The Tories’ defence spending is dictated by what they perceive to be Canadians’ wishes. There is no tradition in Canada of popular support for the kind of outlay – close to $40-billion annually, compared with the current $19-billion – that would bring us into line with the NATO standard of two per cent of GDP. But at what point does the government assume its responsibility to lead and shape popular support, rather than simply put a finger to the wind and move with the current?
If the threats are as grave as Harper and Baird say, leadership is called for. They can’t have it both ways forever.
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