The images we got from Iraq this weekend were designed purely for campaigning Stephen Harper near the front lines in northern Iraq, the Chief of Defence Staff next to him, and talking tough about the fight against ISIS/ISIL, thanks to our brave men and women in uniform. It's not unexpected the Conservatives have had a polling boost in the past few months thanks to national security issues, and the assertion that they are the only ones who can be counted on to fight terrorism and to support the military.
The reality behind this rhetoric, however, can be seen more clearly when you take a look at the budget. Quite simply, the government is not making the investments that show they're serious about any aspect of national security. In their quest to "balance" the budget, they've cut from these very same priorities while simultaneously proclaiming how much they've increased their budgets, and even when they threw a couple of tiny pots of money at the military or the RCMP and CSIS, none of it has been enough to actually make a difference. (They didn't even balance the budget really, having raided both the contingency reserve for the next three years plus the EI fund in order to generate a nominal surplus).
The tale of the recapitalization of our military has been a sad tale as this government heads into their tenth year of power. Grand plans, started under Paul Martin's government, have been continually scaled back, be it with the Joint Support Ships that still don't have a design finalized yet, the fleet of heavy Arctic ice breakers that got downgraded to a diminishing number of "slushbreakers" that haven't yet cut steel, a fighter jet procurement that was so badly mismanaged it had to be restarted from scratch as their previously chosen fighter continues to deal with major design flaws, and as we learned this last weekend, replacement trucks may finally be delivered in 2017 a decade after they were promised and even then, they may not have enough money in the budget to keep them maintained. Their only real procurement success new C-17 heavy lift aircraft only happened because they could be purchased "off the shelf." And this is just procurement, never mind the other promises like a deepwater port in the Arctic that has also been scaled back to virtual nothingness.
This lack of government funding to the military certainly doesn't match the outsized boasts that the government likes to make every time they stand up in the House to talk about it. Never mind that the Parliamentary Budget Officer's recent report states quite clearly that the military needs at least $3 billion in additional funding in the next three years just to maintain their current capabilities. Never mind that the former PBO, Kevin Page, crunched the numbers to show that in real dollar terms, the current government's overall military spending is on par with the previous Liberal government's you know, the infamous "decade of darkness" that the Conservatives continually decry. And never mind that the few dollars being thrown at the Forces in the current budget which won't happen until at least two years down the road won't make a dent in that funding shortfall, let alone do anything for the capital budgets for those procurement projects, whose purchasing power is rapidly evaporating as inflation eats away at them.
Other national security agencies aren't getting it any easier either. Numerous times now, both the RCMP and CSIS have appeared at parliamentary committees to make note of their funding shortfalls, to the point that the RCMP Commissioner has stated that they are pulling away most of their resources devoted to fighting organized crime toward terrorist threats instead. That's a pretty big deal, and while the government keeps insisting on giving the RCMP and CSIS new powers under national security legislation, they're not actually giving them the resources to fully utilize the powers that they already have. The fact that they're being given new powers without new resources tests the stated commitment the government is making when it comes to public safety.
The oversight of national security agencies is no different. While the government likes to tout how our "oversight" is robust never mind that it's review and not actual oversight they can't even properly resource that either. The Security and Intelligence Review Committee hasn't had an appreciable budget increase as CSIS' budget and powers have been increasing, and the past year has been spent with absences on their five-person board. While Harper just made appointments to fill those spaces last weekend, and while there was a commitment in the budget to doubling SIRC's budget, that's only enough to keep up with their current workload, not take on the additional workload that bills like C-51 would be putting on them.
Even with cybersecurity, the government has been all talk and no funding. Sure, it was given a mere pittance in the budget, but that money was a drop in the bucket compared to the real costs of locking down our servers and critical infrastructure from foreign hackers. They can say they're taking action, but it's just more empty words.
But while the government has been nothing but talk on these important issues, it also needs to be stated that the opposition has been almost nowhere when it comes to what they would do to fix these slow-moving crises that we can all see coming. Instead, the pre-election focus has been relegated to middle class tax cuts and spending for things like childcare. They will stand in the Commons to bemoan that the government has botched procurement after procurement, but not one of the opposition parties has made a commitment to properly recapitalizing our military, or to give the national security agencies the resources they need to combat both terrorism and organized crime. It seems to me like that's a pretty big deal but you wouldn't know it based on the policy planks that have been released.
