Juno News - June 02, 2024


Trudeau’s defence policy fails to impress Americans

Topics
defense spending reforms
Mentioned
Richard Shamuka Andrew Lawton Show Tammy Duckworth Justin Trudeau
On C2C： Who really governs Canada？ Indian students in Brampton DEMAND work permit extensions at protest

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

178.54

Word count

1,464

Sentence count

80

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, Richard Shamuka, joins me to talk about why Canada needs to spend 2% of GDP on defense and why it is falling short of NATO's target of spending 2% on defense.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, I said we talk about the big and the small here. Let's go to one of the bigger ones
00:00:12.400 because Canada's back. Do you remember that? It was Justin Trudeau's bold proclamation when he
00:00:17.360 was elected that Canada's place in the world was going to be secured. Well, now we are being
00:00:23.160 chided by our allies for not spending enough on defense. A letter from 23 senators was urging
00:00:30.040 Canada to meet its NATO benchmark of spending 2% of GDP on defense. Canada has still at this point
00:00:37.000 not made significant moves towards that. Richard Shamuka is a senior fellow with the
00:00:42.240 Macdonald-Laurier Institute and joins me now. Richard, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming
00:00:46.460 on today. Thanks for having me. So first off, explain why this target matters because
00:00:51.940 this is Canada is not alone in falling short in some countries well below that target.
00:00:58.100 Well, we're certainly in the bottom area and even our ambassador from the United States has just
00:01:02.260 recently said that in a public statement. But it's important for a bunch of reasons. The actual
00:01:09.340 target number may not be as relevant. It's really a benchmark that has been agreed to by all NATO states
00:01:15.800 to sort of have a threshold by which, you know, states kind of reach that number. And
00:01:21.460 when you hit 2%, what generally happens is that you start having enough funding that to sort of cover
00:01:29.180 all the major bases of defense. So you're talking about the equipment purchases, the operations and
00:01:35.800 sustainment numbers, and also your personnel. And it allows for basically a sustainable level of
00:01:43.780 defense output within a country. And for Canada, we've really missed that for several decades, I should
00:01:51.600 say. And especially in the last 10 years, at the very bottom, we hit about 1% just as the Harper
00:01:59.580 era ended. And we've seen a ramp up of the funding since. But a lot of that money has not really gone
00:02:04.900 towards basically capital purchases. So rehabilitating the equipment by which the military
00:02:11.920 utilizes. And had we hit 2%, we generally start seeing the numbers sort of come to alignment where
00:02:17.480 you start seeing a regular replacement schedule for equipment that would allow for the military to
00:02:22.600 have a newer, more sort of less expensive operation and management costs that are associated with
00:02:29.020 actually operating defense. Yeah, it's certainly how the money is spent matters. I mean, theoretically,
00:02:33.940 you could, you know, blow your billions of dollars on, you know, DEI consultants and, you know,
00:02:38.960 workplace training and, you know, technically spend 2% of your GDP on the defense, but you're not talking
00:02:43.360 about substantive investment there. And in Canada, I feel Canada must have one of the worst track records
00:02:48.620 in NATO for defense procurement, just in terms of how long it takes and how insanely convoluted a
00:02:54.700 process it is. And that can't be helping us. Certainly, it's among the worst. And one of the big sort of
00:03:00.400 factors that if you look at is that there's a there's another threshold, the 20% threshold for actual
00:03:05.960 capital purchases. And in the last defense policy update, they actually did say that they're going to
00:03:11.260 hit the 20% threshold. The reality is that if you look at some of the more serious members of NATO, they will
00:03:16.240 actually hit around 30%. So that's the United Kingdom, France and the United States. And that's where you
00:03:22.500 start seeing actually actually become more operational relevant, you have newer equipment,
00:03:26.580 equipment that isn't around 2020, 20 to 30 years of age, you're looking at equipment that's starting
00:03:31.980 to come around 10, 10 years, maybe 15 years. And so if you but our system, as you sort of point out,
00:03:38.600 it's been really not been able to sort of deliver systems within reasonable timeframes, right? So if you
00:03:45.400 think about, we've just recently announced that we're going to purchase a new drone system, the MQ9,
00:03:50.940 design, it's taken basically 17 years for the government to go from initial conception of the
00:03:56.260 project, to deciding and announcing a purchase, and it's going to take another four some years to
00:04:01.720 actually get it into service or initial operating capability. Most countries have done that in under
00:04:06.480 four years, the whole system and the MQ9, the RPAS system is, you know, it's a bit of an outliner. But
00:04:12.880 if you look at most of our other programs, they tend to take one to two to three years longer
00:04:17.700 than what they should. And as a result, we sort of keep older systems into service for longer. And
00:04:24.440 that, again, increases the operating costs of the military. And that's actually makes this
00:04:29.400 the system much less efficient overall. So let's talk about the America component here. The United
00:04:35.820 States is a country whose military is very well integrated with Canada's on a number of things.
00:04:41.060 We share intelligence, we share air defense, we are obviously allies in NATO. So what does it mean
00:04:47.040 when Canada is getting really notably reprimanded by American politicians?
00:04:53.880 So this has been coming for a while. You've heard, there's been basically a lot of grumblings that the
00:04:59.680 Americans have gone privately to Canada and have said, this is not acceptable. And as you know,
00:05:05.420 Canada's in a really unique position where because we're part of NORAD, we're basically,
00:05:09.980 we have a binational command where our, basically our military forces and their military forces
00:05:16.260 operate shoulder to shoulder in a single unified command system. So the US has a very unique
00:05:23.120 situation where they're able to, they actually spend their money on our defense. 60% of NORAD
00:05:29.220 spending is actually American spending. So they have a real interest to see our security as well as
00:05:36.400 their security properly paid for. And that's why you're seeing, you know, 23 senators, some of some
00:05:41.760 pretty significant names within both caucuses, like Tammy Duckworth, who's a major senator for the 1.00
00:05:47.540 Democratic Party, come out and say, this is just, just not acceptable. And you don't see this happen
00:05:51.720 very often. And that's largely because the sort of the complaints that have been stated consistently
00:05:57.120 through wide variety of places is they feel it's just not been heated. And they finally came out
00:06:02.860 and said it in public. So let's talk about where this goes from here. I mean, obviously governments
00:06:10.460 are going to have to spend a lot of money at a time when the Canadian government doesn't have all that
00:06:15.120 money to fix this. And even for a conservative government to come in, there's a, there's a risk
00:06:20.120 attached to saying we're going to spend that much. So politically, where do you see this going?
00:06:24.260 My best guess is that even if you had a new government come in, they're going to look at
00:06:29.860 the system itself and say, as we were just talking about the procurement system, that it needs reform,
00:06:35.160 like serious reform. And the sort of the spending that we pour into this, with some exceptions,
00:06:41.200 will probably not be spent quickly enough or effectively enough. So I don't foresee in the near
00:06:48.300 future, even if there was a new government, that there would be vast changes to how defense is,
00:06:52.700 defense is sort of the money that's allocated defense. And if you look at how the liberal
00:06:58.300 government is sort of allocated spending, a large portion is backloaded past 2028, 2030 or something
00:07:03.520 like that. There are some big purchases coming through the CSE or the new frigates that will
00:07:08.960 replace the Halifax class, which are now at 30 years of age are going to, is going to start wrapping
00:07:13.720 up pretty soon. But there's a whole bunch of other systems. And it's really the sort of
00:07:18.360 unsexy sort of in between stuff that kind of the connectivity that's going to be that's really
00:07:23.980 actually revolutionizing warfare going on. And those systems really require a new way of actually
00:07:28.800 thinking about defense and operating defense. If you look at our allies, like the United States
00:07:32.920 and United Kingdom, they're starting to make major reforms around this. So my guess is that you
00:07:37.760 probably wouldn't see much of a deviation from the white paper. But certainly you would see a spending,
00:07:43.480 you may see some real efforts of trying to reform the system in order to make it better when we
00:07:49.460 actually have to put money into it, that we get better results than what we're getting now.
00:07:54.480 All right. Well, it's a fascinating topic. Let's hope some common sense prevails here. Richard
00:07:59.120 Shamuka, Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurie Institute. Thank you so much, Richard.
00:08:03.180 Thanks for having me.
00:08:04.240 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:08:11.480 News.