Move to boost military outlays in federal budget has to defeat history of procurement stumbles
Within a day of last week’s announcement that Canada would buy American-built F-35 fighter jets, Defence Minister Anita Anand was on the phone with the Pentagon, telling officials there thatthe most significant investment in the Canadian Air Force in more than 30 years.
Ms. Anand’s office is promising action soon. “In the short term, Minister Anand will present a robust package to modernize NORAD and ensure our Arctic sovereignty in the years to come,” her press secretary Daniel Minden said in a statement. David Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said Canada hasn’t spent 2 per cent of GDP on its military since 1990, when the Cold War was winding down.
If not for the change in the calculation method, government figures suggest, Canada’s defence spending would have remained essentially flat. According to numbers in a 2017 military strategy document, defence spending under the old measurement was projected to hit 1.01 per cent of GDP by the 2019-20 fiscal year.
Canada has been consistently below that mark since 2014, not quite cracking the top half of NATO members. Increased spending since 2017 has pushed the proportion of defence dollars spent on equipment somewhat higher, but that increase has been much slower than what was envisioned in the 2017 defence plan.
The Globe and Mail reported last week that plans to establish a military refuelling facility in Canada’s High Arctic, already repeatedly delayed, have once again fallen behind schedule. The Defence Department said the Nanisivik Naval Facility will not be operational until 2023 – 16 years after it was first announced.
Part of the problem is the military’s desire to “Canadian-ize” big-ticket items. Because Canada can’t afford to buy several types of equipment to serve different purposes, the military pushes to add multiple functions to whatever it purchases.
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