Watchdog Warns Ottawa’s Defence Spending’s ‘Unsustainable’ Over Next Decade

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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The country’s budget watchdog mentioned in a report issued on Thursday that the Harper government has put together a military that it will not be able to affordable for long and so it will be forced to make tough choices about it in the future. The watchdog’s report has come at a time when the Commons are set to debate about an expanded and extended war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

The parliamentary budget officer, Jean-Denis Frechette, has highlighted that the federal government will either have to resort to pour more money into its defence budget, scale back its ambitions, or do a mixture of both in order to put Canada’s military on a sustainable footing. Currently, the Harper government spends $21.5 billion on defence, i.e. or 1.1 per cent of the gross domestic product, but in order to sustain the existing number of troops, bases, tanks, planes and ships, the budget office says the Conservatives will have to spend about 1.6 per cent of GDP, i.e. an increase of at least $3 billion annually.

The report said that “our modelling shows that until 2014, there were sufficient funds to maintain the program,” but “the model shows that it was only with the significant spending increases seen in the latter half of the 2000s that the affordability gap was closed and capability was able to be maintained and to some extent re-built. However, the recent cuts to the defence budget point to an impending affordability gap beginning in this fiscal year.”