OTTAWA – “A disappointment,” “frustrating” and “cruel” were just some of the comments levelled at Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan’s announcement Thursday of yet another review into sexual misconduct in the Canadian military.

Flanked by senior Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officials, Sajjan announced that the government was tapping former Supreme Court justice and United Nations human rights czar Louise Arbour to lead a new review of the military handling of sexual misconduct at large. The move comes six years after former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps tabled an explosive report on the same issue.

“Announcements don’t make change. Our actions do,” Sajjan said Thursday.

But his announcement was met with blistering comments from analysts — and one victim of sexual assault in the military — who said it was six years too late.

Michel Drapeau, a well-known military law expert who has represented dozens of CAF members in sexual misconduct cases, said Sajjan does not have the moral authority to stay on as defence minister.

“This was a major, major, major disappointment. It could not be any more major than that. It’s been a failure upon failure. Deschamps’ report was exhaustive and precise, with significant recommendation, and DND failed to act on it,” he said. “We’ve known about these issues for 30 years, and I think we’re worse off now.”

Carleton University assistant professor Leah West, herself a victim of sexual assault in the military, said on social media that Sajjan has “no credibility” on this issue after “he ignored complaints of misconduct about those previously responsible for implementing change in the CAF.”

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In a later interview, she said the steps announced by Sajjan are good news coming well too late.

“Obviously, this needs to happen. But it needed to happen five years ago. It should have happened at the time of the Deschamps report, and it didn’t. And now it’s happening at a time when this issue has been elevated to a level of political scandal,” she said.

“I find that quite frustrating, because failing to act after the Deschamps report sends a signal to those in the Canadian Armed Forces that leadership didn’t think this was an issue, which further exacerbates the problem.”

National security expert and Carleton associate professor Stephanie Carvin was seething after the announcement, saying that the government’s plan was “mind-boggling” and “makes things worse” by ordering another review so shortly after the Deschamps report.

“This just seems to be a way of kicking the can down the road and for the minister to avoid not only responsibility, but trying to make the issue go away. And that’s very cruel to the women, and in some cases, the men, who’ve been through this,” she said.

Arbour’s job will be to deliver an “independent external comprehensive review of current policies, procedures, programs, practices and culture within the CAF and the DND” in order to “shed light on the causes for the continued presence of harassment and sexual misconduct,” read the review’s terms of reference.

She is also tasked with: recommending how the government should set up a misconduct reporting system that is independent of the chain of command, with reviewing the military justice system and with determining how best to transform the culture at DND and CAF.

In many ways, Arbour’s job will be to figure out how to implement some of the recommendations made by Deschamps, whose 2015 review concluded that there needed to be an independent centre to hold the military to account for sexual assault and harassment.

In a statement sent to multiple media, Deschamps said she welcomes Arbour’s nomination.

“From what I read, her mandate appears to be broader than the one I was given. This would not be a mere repetition of what I did,” she said.

The announcement comes amid two and a half months of controversy for the Trudeau government and Sajjan, who have been repeatedly accused of mishandling a sexual misconduct allegation targeting Canada’s former top soldier Jonathan Vance since 2018.

During the press conference, the defence minister said he was “truly sorry” to all members of CAF and every employee at DND who have not felt supported by their employer after being a victim of sexual harassment and violence.

“It is clear, we have not lived up to our responsibility to protect members from misconduct,” said Sajjan. “We know we must transform the culture of the defence team to one of dignity and respect. And we need to put in place an external reporting outside of the chain of command to begin rebuilding confidence.”

DND and CAF leadership also announced that Lt-Gen. Jennie Carignan would head a new organization within the chain of command tasked with “creating the conditions for cultural transformation” and coordinating reform efforts throughout the military.

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi

The reception that greeted last week’s federal budget from fiscal conservatives was predictable. If you agree with American tax reduction advocate Grover Norquist that government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub, you probably didn’t appreciate a budget that will send federal net debt levels to $1.4 trillion within five years.

The Trudeau government can brush off such criticism as ideological and partisan. It will find it harder to discount the reaction from an officer of Parliament and from respected economists who have been allies and colleagues in the past.

The critique coming from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux; from two former Bank of Canada governors – David Dodge and Mark Carney, and from former senior Liberal adviser, Robert Asselin, is that a budget that claims to build prosperity for the future

overstates the amount of growth

it is likely to generate.

Giroux told the finance committee on Tuesday that a chunk of the $101 billion the government touted as economic stimulus was in reality a continuation of existing COVID-19 support measures.

Dodge told the Globe and Mail this week that a budget which positioned itself as being pro-growth does not invest much in growing Canada’s economic capacity at all. “My policy criticism of the budget is that it really does not focus on growth,” he said. “To me it wouldn’t accord with something that was a reasonably prudent fiscal plan, let me put it that way.”

He said that of the $100 billion billed as being a catalyst for growth, he estimates that only $25 billion adds to public or private investment, with the rest increasing consumption.

Those will be painful words for Chrystia Freeland to hear, given Dodge has been something of an intellectual godfather for the Trudeau Liberals. His endorsement of the use of temporary deficits to finance productivity-enhancing infrastructure investments were emblazoned on the Liberal policy platform in 2015.

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The finance minister might have expected a more ringing endorsement from Carney, the godfather to one of her children and someone who appeared at the recent Liberal convention saying he would do what he could to help the party. The former Bank of England governor appeared on the Herle Burly podcast this week, with former Paul Martin adviser David Herle, and damned the budget with faint praise.

He talked about how COVID has accelerated “the digital and sustainable revolutions” and how the budget did “some things” to push the economy in that direction. “But it’s going to take more than one budget. I don’t think the government would pretend otherwise that this is job done,” he said. “In my judgment, this was a hybrid budget, in that it had to conquer COVID by doing important things on the social side and to start growth. What we are seeing in some other jurisdictions is that the focus is more squarely on the growth. And when the focus is more squarely on growth, more and more spending is direct government investment or the type of taxes and other measures that encourage private investment to (create) the growth in jobs and income that we need down the road.”

Even with Carney’s fancy footwork, it’s plain he would have preferred more investment and less spending.

Asselin, a former budget and policy adviser to Trudeau’s first finance minister, Bill Morneau, is more blunt in his assessment. He labelled the short-term stimulus as “a political solution in search of an economic problem” in an article in The Hub, a new online commentary website.

He pointed out that the budget assumes economic growth of 5.8 per cent this year, four per cent next year, before moderating to two per cent for the rest of the forecast horizon. He criticized the lack of a coherent growth plan, with the bulk of innovation funding going into a Strategic Innovation Fund that has been neither strategic nor innovative. “Does it drive business investment and make our firms more competitive? Nobody has ever tried to answer this question seriously in Ottawa,” he said.

Asselin spoke from experience when he said the most likely outcome of the stimulus spending is “long queues of ministers and their senior officials in line at Treasury Board meetings with their budget submissions.”

The budget has added “layers of duplication and bureaucratic complexity to a system that was not known for its nimbleness and agility,” he said.

In addition to the prospect of disappointing growth numbers, all four economists acknowledged the inherent risk of soaring debt loads.

Giroux pointed out that, even with a new fiscal anchor that aims to reduce debt to GDP levels from a high of 51.2 per cent, there is no intention to reduce that ratio to pre-pandemic levels in the low-30s. He said the government has decided to effectively stabilize the federal net debt ratio at a higher level through to 2055, with all the implications that follow for future fiscal room.

Dodge said that, while the rising debt burden is a concern, it is not yet a problem – and won’t become one as long as interest rates remain lower than growth.

On the rising debt level, Carney said “just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it is optimal.” He pointed out if the growth strategy is successful, it will force interest rates to rise, which will have a knock-on impact on debt servicing costs. The PBO has estimated that a one per cent rise in interest rates would cost $4.5 billion more in the first year and an increase of $12.8 billion by year five.

But while most economists agree the debt is manageable, there is a sense of missed opportunity in the budget. Asselin accused the government of contriving a false economic premise to justify spending on “unfocused and unimaginative structural spending.”

All would clearly like to see more public capital investment, more incentives for private investment or, ideally, both.

Instead, we have a federal government that is failing to create the conditions needed to make Canada the best place in the world to do business.

Just three days after the budget, Canadian chip maker Alphawave decided to move its headquarters to the U.K., and issue shares on the London Stock Exchange to fund a new research centre in Cambridge, England.

That’s not Ottawa’s fault necessarily but it isn’t helping.

An additional $12 billion to bolster Old Age Security in the budget is good news for seniors but it does very little to catalyze long-term growth.

• Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ