Thunderbay Chronicle Journal - January 22, 2011
Charlottetown Guardian - January 24, 2011
Moncton Times and Transcript - January 25, 2011
By Colin Kenny
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry watching the CBC Monday night when Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded to Peter Mansbridge’s observation that government spending has risen 11 or 12 percent since the Conservatives took power.
You could see Mansbridge thinking: Ha! Gotcha, Mr. Harper. You talk small government, but you spend big – just like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
But the Prime Minister is a very clever guy. He only looked nonplussed for a second, but then jumped into one of his favourite costumes: his military fatigues. Law and order here we come:
“ . . . I think, Peter, you have to look at where some of these (spending) increases have been. You know, for example, this government has been expanding the size of the military.
“We said we would rebuild the armed forces . . .we've expanded, we've hired more police officers. These are roles for government that Conservatives believe very strongly in, and we've increased employment in those areas.”
I laugh because this tough guy routine really is good comedy. I cry because the Prime Minister keeps getting away with it. Because attributing an 11 or 12 percent increase in Government spending to the Conservatives’ commitment to strengthening Canada’s military and police forces constitutes political fraud.
Here are the hard facts.
When this government first came to power it promised to increase Canadian Forces regulars by 15,000, which wasn’t enough but which would have helped ease the burnout cycle of too many assignments for too few troops that has prevailed for too many years. It later cut that commitment in half. Its current promise is to raise the size of the Canadian Forces from 64,400 to 70,000 by 2027-28. That adds up to a whopping 280 people a year.
What that amounts to is a commitment to continued burnout, continued lack of adequate training, continued lack of skilled staff to replace maintenance employees. It amounts to contempt for the people the Government puts in danger’s way.
According to the Library of Parliament, this scenario is playing out as we speak. The Government is ahead of schedule with regular troops. The number of Canadian Forces regulars grew from 61,460 in March 2005 to 68,136 personnel in May 2010 – an increase in strength of 6,676 personnel over five years. But the number of reserves grew by only 580 people over the same over the same period.
In fiscal year 2009-2010, the Canadian Forces recruited 7,522 personnel but lost 5,293, meaning a lot of highly skilled personnel were replaced by a slightly larger group of raw recruits. And that’s about it – recruiting has pretty well been shut down as austerity begins to kick in.
As for police, OECD statistics show that Canada ranks 19th out of 21 countries that participated in the survey in terms of police per capita. The RCMP is badly understaffed and underfunded. The best estimate of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence a few years ago was that the RCMP needed somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 new Mounties to do all the jobs it should be doing, including policing Canada’s crime-ridden ports and our border with the United States. The Prime Minister promised it would fund 1,000 new Mounties a few years ago, but the RCMP only got 600 – the rest went into bureaucratic jobs inside the federal government.
For Stephen Harper to pretend that much of the Government money he has been buying votes with over the past five years is going into Canada’s military or improved policing is laughable. Pardon me if I cry.
(Colin Kenny is former chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca)