Senator urges Canada to take issue seriously
Senator Colin Kenny has never put on a uniform but in a real way he’s a top-notch military hero of the current era.
Relentlessly, Kenny, chairman of the Senate committee on national security and defence, badgers the federal government to get serious about defending our country and fulfilling our responsibilities with our allies.
Kenny’s current campaign is to hike Canada’s defence budget from around $15 billion to $25 billion and, preferably to $35 billion.
Even though Kenny’s a Liberal—a Liberal hawk, you might say—Jean Chretien and Paul Martin didn’t have much time for his aggressive campaign to put some muscle into our defence forces. The rest of us, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor, should cling to Kenny’s every word.
Actually, just about the time O’Connor was announcing plans yesterday to spend $2.1 billion on three 28,000-tonne naval supply ships, I was pondering his Senate committee’s latest report entitled The Government’s Number One Job and that’s not an exaggeration.
As he and his members point out, unless we defend our sovereignty and continue to live in a free country, the government won’t have any jobs to do because we’ll be dead or our enemies will be running the show.
That $25-$35 billion may initially seem outlandish but Kenny’s committee also estimates the “nuts and bolts” cost of outfitting our military with new big-ticket equipment—ships, aircraft, tanks and whatever—over the next 20 years will be between $58 billion and $81 billion.
Canada now spends only a piddling $343 for each man, woman and child to defend our nation. Britain spends $903, The Netherlands spends $658, and Australia, $648. That’s right, The Netherlands, which most of would figure is a pretty insignificant entity, spends almost twice as much on defence as we do. Of all the NATO countries, only minuscule Luxembourg and Iceland spend less of their GNP on defence than Canada.
Both Britain and France spend about 2% of their GNP on defence, double what Canada spends. If we spent 2% our military budget would be in the $30-billion range, so Kenny’s pleadings are hardly excessive.
Aside from military hardware procurements, the Senate committee also wants to up our Armed Forces from 60,000 to 90,000. Also hardly excessive for a nation as large as Canada. Before the Chretien/ Martin duo hacked away in the mid-1900s we had 80,000.
He goes on to dispel—no, shatter—some complacent theories many Canadians have:
n Canada is not a warlike nation. True, we’re not, but in two world wars and Korea we played our full part.
n There is no imminent threat to Canada. Osama bin Laden himself put us on his hit list. Most nations on al-Qaida’s hit list have already been hit.
n The Americans will defend us. The U.S. is a great friend of Canada and many of our interests are complementary, but the bottom line is in a crisis the U.S. will have to look after its own interests first. So should we.
The report tackles the politically hot subject of economic payoffs for Canadian industry in signing military procurement contracts. In essence, we should buy the best equipment no matter where it is made and the Defence Department should not be used as a vehicle for regional economic development.
Last week, Kenny came out supporting an apparent Conservative plan to spend $4 billion on new military transport aircraft from Boeing without putting the contract to competitive tender. The military is so ‘wounded’ we don’t have time for a drawn-out process.
His no-nonsense reports sometimes make for uneasy reading, but there’s no flabby fat.
They should have been wakeup alarms for the previous government, and could be the entire blueprints for the Harper government’s defence and security policies.
- Suzuki playing gutter politics - Sunday March 4, 2007 at 10:41 am
- Grit record terror-ible - Tuesday February 27, 2007 at 9:51 am
- Britain’s Blair takes tumble - Sunday February 18, 2007 at 10:53 am
