John Robson: Cutting $1B From Defence Budget Yet More Proof That Canada Is No Longer a Serious Country

The Canadian Armed Forces prepare to load a helicopter onto a C-177 Globemaster III in Quebec City as part of sending relief to the flooded areas of British Columbia, on Nov. 19, 2021. The Canadian Press/Jacques Boissinot

Commentary

If you needed more proof that Canada is no longer a serious country, look no further than the announcement that the feds are looking to cut $1 billion from our pathetic defence budget. It reveals our government’s frivolously toxic mix of fiscal incompetence, obsession with symbols over substance, and hostility to our country and our culture.

Start with the budgetary mess. Spending had already rocketed up from $296 billion in 2015–16 to $362 billion by 2019–20 when the pandemic hit and the Trudeau cabinet was able to “find,” or more properly invent, literally hundreds of billions of dollars in new social program spending while locking us all down so actual wealth creation plummeted. And the finance minister and Bank of Canada assured us interest rates would remain low so we couldn’t afford not to borrow and spend on like whatever man. Now interest rates are rising, the squeeze is on, and they’re trapped.

Then there’s the symbolism. The CBC reports that Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre told the House of Commons defence committee, “There’s no way that you can take almost a billion dollars out of the defence budget and not have an impact.”

Given how our top brass habitually back politicians in almost any folly, them’s fighting words. But how can you fight fog? Thus “in a statement on Friday, Defence Minister Bill Blair’s spokesman Daniel Minden said: ‘Any claim that Canada is ‘cutting’ defence spending is not accurate, because overall defence spending has increased and will continue to increase.’” Feebly from way too low a base. Unless it doesn’t. But never mind. We don’t.

Federal budgets don’t even list defence separately; it’s not big or important enough. But the current consensus figure seems to be $26.5 billion and about 1.22 percent of our GDP, which despite some boosterism puts us with Slovenia, not everyone’s first phone call in a military emergency.

In some sense further cuts make sense since the Canadian Armed Forces are basically symbolic anyway. Like everything else. Can you name one area where the Trudeau administration decided the way to seem to be doing a better job was to do a better job? Instead, they burble “continue.”

Hence, Blair told the Commons defence committee Thursday, “I also want to assure you and every member of this committee of our unwavering commitment to make sure that we support the Canadian Armed Forces” he’s gutting. And remember when the prime minister was taking heat for blurting out to our NATO partners that we would never be keeping our symbolic promise to limp to an inadequate 2 percent of GDP, he and his colleagues tried to change the definition of military spending so it would go up without rising.

As expat ex-conservative pundit David Frum groused, “Canada cannot even defend its Defense department website against hackers. In the Canadian context a billion-dollar defense cut is a big deal, Canada defense budget is C$26.5 bn, less than it spends on cash transfers to indigenous populations.”

Which drags us from symbol to substance, because a major budgeting problem even for serious people is that social programs have large, intractable constituencies and frugality and defence do not. First there’s Hazlitt and Bastiat’s “broken window” fallacy where superficial observers see the short-run concentrated benefits to those who get subsidies directly, but not the long-term dispersed costs of extracting them from others, especially through subterfuges like deficits or inflation.

Then there’s the issue that those who benefit from, say, dairy quotas have a far greater individual stake in preserving them than the far larger number who pay the dispersed costs have in abolishing them. And if someone somehow relinquishes their own favours from our modern bribe-everybody governments, for instance home-schoolers, it doesn’t start a trend. They’re just chumps.

National security is especially problematic because until Hitler and Stalin invade Poland or something, nobody “loses” from starving defence except people who serve in the military. Of whom there are now, understandably, even fewer than the feeble number the government claims to want.

I say claims because we are governed by people who don’t really think Canada worth defending. They spontaneously enthuse about dictatorships from Beijing to Havana. But don’t ask them to praise Western civilization or Sir John A. Macdonald.

Instead, a typical line in a random Saturday press release from the “Minister of Health and the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and Associate Minister of Health” (speaking of entrenched wasteful spending) went: “Systemic racism, resulting from long-standing oppressive and discriminatory practices, remains embedded in Canada’s health care systems.”

Boo. Even our treasured health care is a hotbed of bigotry, say people who applauded a Nazi in Parliament. Who’d want to fight for that stinking mess?

So there’s your proof that Canada is no longer a serious country. And it’s really serious.

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