By Scott Taylor
In last week’s major cabinet shuffle, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau puzzled many with his decision to move Minister Anita Anand out of the Defence portfolio.
Anand was viewed by many in the Defence community as an effective and efficient politician.
The man selected to replace Anand is former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair who will be moving from his current post as Emergency Preparedness minister.
Avid political observers speculated that the appointment of Blair to Defence is an indication that the Trudeau Liberals intend to focus on domestic issues rather than foreign policy, in the run up to the next election.
The consensus is that Blair will be more of a caretaker than a crusader and defence will not be high on the government’s priority list.
The problem with that scenario is that the Canadian military is already in a crisis mode. The institution remains reeling from the string of sexual misconduct scandals which have led to calls for sweeping cultural reforms. Added to this, or perhaps as a result of the sexual misconduct revelations, the Canadian Armed Forces are presently facing a recruitment and retention crisis that has reached the tipping point.
With a current shortfall of 16,500 personnel out of a combined Regular and Reserve authorized strength of 105,000, the CAF will soon be unable to train the necessary replacements while still fulfilling our international commitments.
Coming into his new job, Blair will also be faced with warding off pressure from our NATO allies, the U.S. in particular, to spend more money on defence.
The magic number bandied about by the usual defence industry-funded military analysts is the NATO stated goal of two percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Canada currently spends just 1.3 percent of GDP on National Defence. That’s the supposed bad news. However, thanks to Canada’s relatively massive GDP that amounts to $36 billion in actual defence spending.
To meet that magical two percent of GDP NATO goal, Canada would need to spend an additional $20 billion on the military every year.
I think I can safely say that whether our Minister of Defence’s name is Bill Blair or Anita Anand, that is not going to happen.
In terms of real dollars spent, Canada ranks 6th out of the 31 member NATO alliance. Most Canadians would also be shocked to learn that we rank 14th in defence spending out of the 193 United Nations members. That’s well inside the top 10 percent of big defence spenders.
To illustrate the arbitrariness of the GDP percentage formula one need only examine the disparity between Canada and Greece.
With an expenditure of 3.87 percent of their GDP on defence one would think that Greece would be the darling of the alliance.
That is a higher percentage of GDP spent on defence than what the U.S. spends.
However, Greece’s GDP is one tenth that of Canada’s so in terms of actual dollars spent, Canada spends four times more than Greece.
Surprisingly, none of the two percent of GDP cheerleaders ever think to link defence spending to actual military capability. By this I mean that Canada could simply spend that extra $20 billion required to hit the two percent of GDP goal by giving serving members a massive pay raise.
If you paid each soldier an additional $400,000 a year that would spend that $20 billion and I daresay end the recruiting and retention crisis overnight.
Yet it would not add a lick to our existing defence capability.
Ditto for boosting spending on things like munitions. In theory, Canada could meet the two percent of GDP mark by simply purchasing huge quantities of munitions for soldiers to simply blast away on live fire ranges.
Which is why the NATO objective for member states should be rooted in the actual capability that countries bring to the alliance.
In theory this could be based on a per capita of population.
For instance, for every one million citizens, a NATO member would be required to maintain 1500 regular servicemembers, trained and equipped to an alliance standards.
Not every country in NATO is blessed with the same minimal national security threat levels as we are in Canada. Hence come countries, like Turkiye, by virtue of their geo-political circumstance would require a far different security footprint. Thus they would maintain far larger standing militaries than the NATO minimum.
The per capita yardstick would level the playing field in a manner that actual military contribution could be assessed on a practical basis.
Canada punched above its weight for over 10 years as part of the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, and by maintaining a forward deployed battle group in Latvia to deter Russian aggression, we are delivering real capability to the NATO alliance.
That should count for more than meeting an arbitrary percentage of our GDP.
