John Robson: Government Must Make Major Cuts to Fund $150B Defence Plan

Commentary

So now we have a number. After sliding along for years pretending we meant to hit NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defence target, or quietly admitting we didn’t, we suddenly promised to. Then the target was raised to 5 percent and the prime minister didn’t blink even though it will cost $150 billion a year, a lot of money even in Ottawa. Which mercifully and horribly brings us to the practical question: Where are we going to get it?

Of course, there are people who don’t want us to try. Some socialists would rather spend the money on social programs or not at all, and some libertarians would rather not spend it at all, meaning the latter do need to find it anyway but the former don’t. As for those who think saying we’ll spend it amounts to having spent it, it buys us precious little time today.

It’s also clear that Canadian military procurement needs a drastic overhaul. And the prime minister’s supposed plan that “We will look to make adjustments, with appropriate authority … to our ability to buy Canadian and our ability to buy more rapidly as appropriate” is the sort of thing politicians say when they have no actual plan. But one thing at a time.

Here, let us confine ourselves to the single very practical question of how to go about finding an additional $110 billion a year or so to spend on national security, however defined and implemented, assuming we mean to.

It shouldn’t be that hard. As recently as 2015, the Canadian federal government spent under $300 billion. Today it’s very close to $500 billion and there seems no way to slow down, though it’s not obvious that we’re getting better government today; in many respects, quite the contrary.

Unfortunately, if it were easy to see which government spending is achieving little, or is actively harmful, we probably would have long ago. Instead, even most conservatives are secretly convinced that a massive welfare state is all that stands between us and a return to Dickensian misery or worse, while neo-Keynesians offer the comforting claim that any kind of public spending, from welfare to warfare or waste, “stimulates” the economy.

Thus, predictably, the prime minister’s ostensible pain-free plan for finding endless sums is to “grow the economy.” But again, if we knew how to balance the budget without cutting spending, somebody would have done it long ago. Brian Mulroney, say. Or Ronald Reagan.

Speaking of failed plans, some people still welcome almost any rationale for raising taxes. But another part of the new consensus is that Canada desperately needs to improve its economic performance to protect our sovereignty as well as our standard of living. And walloping the economy with massive rate increases is widely understood to be a terrible way of doing so and, hence, of increasing revenues.

You see where I’m going here, right? We’re going to have to cut, bigly. Both bureaucracy and social programs. Because otherwise that $150 billion a year will deliver not security but insolvency, especially with debt service already nearing $50 billion federally alone and not being an optional budget item.

Something has to give. Including our habit of treating any increase in spending, as soon as it happens, as somehow sacred and core to our identity. Or indeed any increase in staffing.

The Australian government has initially balked hard at the notion of a major increase in defence spending. And they may have done the fiscal calculations more carefully than we have. But certainly not the geopolitical ones. So it’s actually encouraging that our government, and political class, have pivoted suddenly and seamlessly from treating 2 percent of GDP on defence as embarrassing atavistic American clinging to guns to agreeing that even that figure is pitifully inadequate. (And yes, I called for doubling defence spending a decade ago.)

We’re not out of the woods, partly because of our chattering classes’ deep-seated habit of mistaking words for deeds. (Right down to calling spending on mining spending on defence.) But let us seize their change of tone cheerfully and cling to it grimly.

We really are going to spend more on defence, a lot more. So we’re going to spend less on non-defence, a lot less. And as former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein said, before blowing the roof off spending, instead you have to go hunting where the ducks are.

It actually won’t hurt much. The PM recently assured the press: “The investments we’re making in defence and security, broader security given the new threats Canada faces, we’re not at a trade-off. We’re not at sacrifices in order to do those.” Remarkably, it’s true. Just not the way he thinks.

Because so much government spending is pointless or worse, cutting it to defend ourselves from real threats is win-win. Provided we see it clearly and do it boldly.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.