Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
Thanks for the opportunity to appear today to speak about Canada's new defence policy, “Our North, Strong and Free”.
In my opening remarks, I'm going to talk about the policy itself, considerations for its implementation and how I think it's being viewed by our allies as we await the Washington, D.C., NATO summit celebrating the alliance's 75th anniversary in three short weeks.
“Our North, Strong and Free” is a bit of a paradox, in my assessment. On the one hand, it's building on previous defence policies dating back to 2005. In so doing, it's doing a good job of capturing the fraught international security environment we live in and how Canada needs to respond to deal with that current reality. It also pledges to invest in many needed capabilities and makes a generationally large commitment of funding to the Canadian military. By my math, the financial commitment that's been made since 2017 on a cash basis is now about roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars over about a quarter of a century.
On the other hand, though, “Our North, Strong and Free” falls well short of where we should be in terms of committing resources to defence, because we're starting from a very low start point, and it also doesn't change the behaviour that would be needed to actually make use of those resources effectively.
It also highlights the widening disconnect between Canada's approach to defence and that of our allies, and it demonstrates no intention on Canada's part of living up to the key commitment we made to our NATO allies regarding defence investment only a year ago. Given that the policy took two years to produce, it is a serious shortcoming that it only announces further review of defence procurement, instead of revealing how we will actually change defence procurement.
Similarly, the policy also offers little indication of how recruiting and enrolling new Canadian troops will be addressed and instead outlines an absurdly long eight-year window to return the Canadian Armed Forces back to its current authorized strength. That strength, I would note, will be insufficient to operate some of that new equipment that funding has been committed for, including airborne early warning and control aircraft, among other initiatives.
The policy also bizarrely notes the need for new capabilities—some of which my colleague here just itemized—and pledges to explore their acquisition, but it provides no money to actually buy them.
As a result, if everything in “Our North, Strong and Free” unfolded exactly as it was intended to on the day it was published, Canada's defence spending would have reached just 1.76% of gross domestic product by 2029. As everyone here knows, Canada has committed to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence, but this policy clearly conveys that we have no intention of doing so.
With respect to implementation of the policy, in my observation, “Our North, Strong and Free” appears to have been written with much less focus on implementing the policy than was the case with the previous defence policy of “Strong, Secure, and Engaged”. That initiative in 2017 came with many implementation-enhancing transparency measures that I see absolutely no sign of today, and I would offer that the implementation of “Strong, Secure, Engaged” has been highly uneven. Despite successes like the many Royal Canadian Air Force projects, which have moved along quite well in recent years, I would remind the committee that the very first initiative in “Strong, Secure, Engaged” was to, quote: “Reduce significantly the time to enroll in the Canadian Armed Forces by reforming all aspects of military recruiting.”
Had that initiative been meaningfully implemented, I do not believe that the committee recently would have been told that despite over 70,000 applications being received by the Canadian military, just 4,000 members were actually enrolled. Fixing this unacceptable situation in many fewer than the eight years allotted must be the top priority for defence. Until it is addressed swiftly, the implementation of the rest of “Our North, Strong and Free” will suffer.
Finally, let me comment on how “Our North, Strong and Free” is likely being viewed by our allies in the context of the forthcoming NATO summit in Washington.
I acknowledge that Canada has made and is making important operational contributions to NATO, including in our north, across the Atlantic Ocean and in Latvia, but this alone is very clearly insufficient now, and we are increasingly out of line with our allies and our own commitments.
Canada heads into the Washington summit as the only ally not meeting either of the two NATO investment pledges, since we neither spend 2% of GDP on defence nor send 20% of our defence expenditures toward equipment purchases and related research and development. “Our North, Strong and Free” indicates that we will meet the equipment target next year, but I'd offer that “Strong, Secure and Engaged” indicated we were going to hit that investment target too, and we haven't.
As I mentioned, reaching 1.76% of GDP would require both every dollar earmarked in “Our North, Strong and Free” to be spent as intended and the economic projection the policy was based on to hold. As I mentioned, I see serious shortcomings in the policy's implementation, so actually spending to that level I think is problematic.
Further, just since “Our North, Strong and Free” was published, the OECD economic projections used in that calculation have already been revised upwards for the next two years, which means that the share of our GDP spent on defence will drop.
I'll note that the calculations underpinning the policy assume that by 2029 the Canadian economy will be hundreds of billions of dollars smaller than the federal budget, as just published, predicts it will be, which will result in a smaller share of GDP going towards defence. As a result, as of today, we are already falling short of the spending as a share of GDP outlined in the policy.
