I didn’t think Justin Trudeau could possibly come up with another stunt to outrage our allies, but I stand corrected:
Canada’s top general revealed on Thursday that the armed forces is facing nearly $1 billion in cuts by the Liberal government, saying that military leaders are struggling to understand the change as the forces deal with more pressures in an unstable world.
Speaking to MPs Thursday during a meeting of the defence committee, Chief of Defence Staff Wayne Eyre was asked about proposals to cut $15 billion across the government, which the Liberals promised to do in the spring budget.
Eyre said the Defence Department’s piece of that cut will hurt.
“There’s no way that you can take almost $1 billion out of the defence budget and not have an impact, so this is something that we’re wrestling with now,” he told MPs.
Eyre said he had been discussing the cuts with military leaders and they’re struggling to understand the change.
“Our people see the degrading declining security situation around the world and so trying to explain this to them is very difficult,” he said.
Conservative Defence critic MP James Bezan said he hopes the military doesn’t weaken its readiness with these cuts.
“I sure hope we’re not going to hear stories that we can’t afford to put the fuel in the tanks and train guys in armour, we’re not going to put diesel in the ships and not have the Navy go out there and training, we can’t afford to do maintenance on our tanks,” he said. “We have to make sure we continue to move forward in training and operations.”
Deputy Minister of Defence Bill Matthews said the department is looking at ways to ensure the cuts don’t hurt the ability of the military to fight.
Not to be too cynical, but the Canadian Armed Forces are already well below the funding level we promised our allies we’d achieve, and it impacts pretty much everything the CAF needs to do. It’s quite possible that a budget cut of that size will end meaningful participation in NATO land operations in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and other front-line allied nations.
