As a result, National Defence officials have been urging the government since May 2011 to push the reset button and re-evaluate “the level of ambition” for its vaunted plan to rebuild the Canadian Forces.
The Canada First Defence Strategy, the centrepiece of the Conservative government’s long-term vision for the military, was unveiled with much fanfare in May 2008 and promised to invest $490 billion in new equipment and upgrades over the next 20 years.
“The Canada First Defence Strategy will strengthen our sovereignty and our security,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at the time.
“Our government will ensure that Canadian Forces have the personnel and equipment they need to do their job, to protect our values and project our interests, to fulfil Canada’s international commitments, to keep our true north strong and free.”
The long list of projects includes building a fleet of new naval vessels, dozens of new military aircraft and hundreds of vehicles for the army, as well as important upgrades and refits for existing equipment.
But briefing notes prepared for Associate Defence Minister Julian Fantino weeks after the last federal election and obtained through Access to Information show he was warned billions of dollars in spending reductions had rendered the Canada First Defence Strategy impossible to fulfil.
“The funding reductions from Budget 2010 and the reduced funding line going forward will make the Canada First Defence Strategy (CFDS) unaffordable,” reads the briefing material.
“The department will be challenged to deliver on the CFDS commitments as a result of forecasted decreases in funding and increased in costs,” it adds.
A key part of the Canada First Defence Strategy was annual increases to the defence budget over the next two decades. But the 2010 federal budget cut those increases in half. This past federal budget went further, ordering $1.1 billion in spending reductions over the next three years over and on top of $1.1 billion in budget cuts this year.
The briefing material notes that the government has planned to undertake periodic reviews of the strategy, the first of which was to be undertaken last year. To that end, National Defence officials recommended the government “conduct a CFDS Reset to confirm the level of ambition,” among other things.
An official in Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s office confirmed Monday that the strategy is being reviewed, but he would not offer specifics, including whether the plan to invest $490 billion over 20 years has changed.
“Minister MacKay is working with Minister Fantino and officials to refresh the Canada First Defence Strategy,” Jay Paxton said in an email. “Until this work is complete, it would be misleading and disingenuous to allocate an investment amount to such an important document.”
Philippe Lagasse, an expert on military procurement at the University of Ottawa, said the Conservative government intentionally built up a reputation for supporting the military even though it was hard-pressed to fulfil the commitments laid out in the Canada First Defence Strategy from the beginning.
“It hasn’t been affordable from the outset,” Lagasse said. “It’s based on a very optimistic assessment of costs. If they’d managed to procure things out of the gate, they might have been able to afford everything.”
The Conservatives now have the unenviable task, he said, of choosing to cut specific projects entirely or scaling back on the number vehicles purchased, for example — either of which would affect the military’s capabilities.
Meanwhile, Fantino’s briefing package also notes that “time delays and cost pressures” had significantly affected progress on replacing the navy’s destroyers and frigates, acquiring new search-and-rescue aircraft, and a plan to buy new maritime patrol aircraft.
It went on to state that the purchase of new armoured vehicles as well as F-35 stealth fighters to replace the country’s aging fleet of CF-18 fighter jets was “currently assessed as being on time and on budget.”
The government has since restarted the process for buying close combat vehicles and changed the way it is replacing the CF-18s after a scathing auditor general’s report was released in April.
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: Lee Berthiaume
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