The rest of Canada’s friends and allies are almost all beefing up their military spending because the world situation has become objectively more dangerous, but Justin Trudeau has never been one to follow the trend, especially when it comes to icky military stuff. Tristin Hopper has the details:
Just as the Liberal government’s fiscal update confirms that they will be staying the course on high spending backed by high deficits, they’re making a notable exception when it comes to the perennially underfunded Canadian Armed Forces.
According to the latest budgetary projections, Canadian military spending is set to fall in absolute terms for at least the rest of Trudeau’s third term – the only G7 country to do so.
For the current fiscal year, Canada is set to spend $26.93 billion on its military. For the 2024/2025 fiscal year, that will drop to $25.73 billion, and then drop again to C$25.33 billion by 2026.
These cuts are all in spite of increasingly desperate calls by the minister of defence and the military’s own internal reports that the Canadian Armed Forces may soon struggle to fulfill even basic tasks. It also stands in sharp contrast to virtually all of Canada’s peer countries, who are roundly beefing up their defence spending in response to an increasingly volatile global environment.
While Bill Blair’s turn as Defence Minister has mostly involved shepherding nearly $1 billion in cuts, at the Halifax International Security Forum over the weekend he struck a very different tone of saying that Canada’s “aspirations” required “more resources”.
“We need to spend more on munitions. We need to spend more on military platforms, planes, submarines and ships. We need to spend more on the equipment, the resources and the training that the Canadian Armed Forces needs,” he said in comments published by the CBC.
And Blair’s assessment was comparatively rosy when compared to the Department of National Defence’s annual departmental results report.Click image to download the PDF version
The 152-page document, which dropped earlier this month, painted a picture of a Canadian military that is hemorrhaging personnel and capability with no end in sight.
Among the highlights is a table indicating the “percentage of operations that are capable of being conducted concurrently”. Last year it was 100 per cent, but right now it’s plunged to a meagre 40 per cent.
“The CAF is currently unable to conduct multiple operations concurrently,” reads a footnote, adding that military readiness has been hit hard by “decreasing number of personnel and issues with equipment and vehicles”.
Recruiting is suffering an “applicant crisis”. There’s a shortage of “qualified aircraft technicians”. The military’s bases are in serious deterioration because they can’t afford “maintenance and repair”. Only about 40 per cent of the RCAF is operational due to “ongoing personnel shortages” and “inadequate maintenance infrastructure”.
It wasn’t too long ago that another defence minister, Anita Anand, was openly musing about raising Canada’s defence budget to the point where it would finally start meeting NATO’s minimum threshold for military spending.
