Matt Gurney: No Canadian party, including the Tories, really cares about defence
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Matt Gurney Feb 7, 2012
In a recent column, Postmedia foreign correspondent Matthew Fisher wrote of the enormous gap between the Australian and Canadian concepts of national defence. Canada has 40% again of Australia’s population, and nearly double the GDP, yet the Australians spend $7-billion more on defence each year, and have a military only slightly smaller than our own, with more and better equipment. If Canada were to match Australia’s spending on defence as a percentage of GDP, we would need to ramp up military spending to between $35-40-billion, up from the current figure of $22-billion. Instead, National Defence is being eyed for cuts as part of the federal government’s austerity program.
Australia and Canada make for an interesting comparison given the obvious historical and cultural similarities, but Fisher rightly points out that the nations exist in very different geopolitical environments. Canada has counted on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting for continental security for generations, knowing help is never further away than the North Dakota National Guard. Australia, on the other hand, is an underpopulated bastion of Western civilization in an increasingly tough neighbourhood, far from its friends and allies. If trouble erupts, even if help comes, it will take time to get there. Australia needs to be ready to look to its own defence, at least in the early days of any contingency.
But Fisher makes another point — Australia’s larger emphasis on defence may be a necessity, but it’s also possible thanks to the country’s mature political stance on defence. To the Australians, national security isn’t about politics, but securing the nation, which is something valued more than partisanship. In Canada, by contrast, each party uses the military as a political prop, to use and abuse as necessary for electoral gain, and then ignore and underfund until the next election.
This is again related to our proximity to the friendly American giant — Canada has been spared the need to have a serious, adult national conversation about our defensive needs and geopolitical reality because we can count on our neighbour to keep the peace for us. This has let the entire Canadian political consensus develop essentially without reference to national security issues, with the military more about party identity than defence.
Take the NDP, for example. In 2006, their party platform didn’t even have a dedicated section to defence. It declared that the military was needed to “support the priorities of peacekeeping, peacemaking, humanitarian and environmental support operations,” and that well-trained personnel and good “basic” equipment were necessary. Beyond that, it promised only to make sure Canadian troops are only ever deployed as part of an international peace and security efforts (no explanation as to why this is a good thing was offered), and to speed up compensation for service members exposed to Agent Orange and the clean up of chemical dumps at former military bases.
Compare that to their 2011 platform, which is essentially a repeat of their 2008 offering. The NDP promised to “give the men and women of the Canadian Forces, who put their lives on the line every day, the best equipment to do the job with, proper support and benefits.” The job of the military was to defend Canada, provide “support for peacemaking, peace-building and peacekeeping around the world,” and disaster recovery. Staffing and equipment would reflect these needs, and the NDP even committed to maintain “current planned levels” of defence spending.
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