Conservatives' Defence Hypocrisy

On The Worst Kind Of Tweets

This morning, a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed purports to take Canada to the woodshed for our lax defence spending, a common refrain from the newspaper of choice for the neo-con wing of the GOP. Whether that discredits the argument on the basis of merits is neither here nor there – the newspaper that allows Sam Alito to preempt news coverage of his accepting gifts of value from people with business in front of SCOTUS can fuck off as a general rule – but it’s being picked up by parts of the Conservative friendly press as an excuse to attack Justin Trudeau.

And since I’m awake and mad that Jordan Spieth sucked this morning, I’m in the right mood to make this point: supporters of – or even worse, employees of – the Harper government don’t get to fucking talk about national defence.

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We have had a former Conservative campaign strategist, a former Harper Director of Communications turned columnist, and a former Mulroney Chief of Staff turned columnist share the WSJ screed this morning, three people who all supported the Harper government, who defended the Harper government, and who all I’m pretty sure all voted for Harper in 2015.

The reason this matters is that in Fiscal 2014 – so, April 2014 to March 2015 – the Canadian government’s spending on defence was 0.99% of GDP. This is, of course, the first 12 month period after the invasion of Crimea by the Russians, so if you’re inclined to make the argument that Canada should be ramping up defence spending because we’re in a new world, maybe 2014 should have been that time to do so.

Now, since then? In fiscal 2022, we spend 1.29%, an increase of 30% on that Harper number. In 2023, we’re projected for 1.38%, but estimates are always rubbery (because if you’re comparing spending to the economy, you need to know the actual size of the economy). It’s not enough, but we’re looking at a nearly 40% increase in spending in 10 years. If you want to argue they should have gotten to 2% already, that’s your prerogative, and if Andrew Coyne or Paul Wells or whoever wants to make it, they’re free to. But nobody should listen to anyone who supported or was involved with the last Harper government.

Now, I’m not a military strategist and people cosplaying as experts at something they don’t have expertise in is something I rail against constantly, so I’m not here to say whether the Liberals have done well on this issue. But what I am qualified to do is write about hypocrisy, and write about foreign politics, and this idea that Canada is a country that’s lost respect amongst the good and great western world needs to die in a fire.

The US nearly lit their economy on fire for no good reason last month, has a House Speaker who listens to Matt Gaetz and MTG, and has a 30% chance of re-electing Donald Trump President despite him trying to steal an election. The UK is embroiled in about 72 scandals at the same time, from Boris Johnson’s COVID rulebreaking to them breaking the law in trying to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda to still rising inflation and hospital and doctor waiting times that would make even the worst cases in Canada blush, and their government is routinely 20 points down.

The French are rioting on a weekly basis as Emmanuel Macron tries to act like the heir to Louis XIV and implement an agenda that has no popular mandate or legitimacy, the Germans are facing the prospect of the Alternative for Deutschland polling in first in large part because the Greens pushed for the end of nuclear power in the name of climate, which meant replacing that energy with … coal. (How this makes sense from an environmental standpoint is beyond me, you, or any form of human reason.)

Go further afield, and the Italians are run by fascists, the Australians are about to see their white majority vote down a constitutional amendment to give Indigenous peoples a concrete mechanism to advise the Federal government on issues relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and Japan has managed to be the first country in history where a political assassination ended up hurting the party of the dead guy.

Who the fuck are these countries that we’re supposed to be upset are looking down at us? We know Biden’s not – the speech in Ottawa shows that the people who matter in the US consider Canada and Justin Trudeau’s Canada in specific as allies of the sort that you don’t need to constantly reassure. There’s an implicitness to the way Biden considers Canada, even with the way he admitted to being surprised that people took the Buy America comments in the State Of The Union to be anti-Canada – because to him, it’s self-evident that the target is China and not Kitchener. And yet, we get this discourse.

The idea that the rest of the world looks down at Canada is entirely meritless – there was one passage in Malcolm Turnbull’s book that suggested he wasn’t a fan, but it’s not like Malcolm has been exactly well known for being good interpersonally, as his twin knifings as leader of the Australian Liberals show. When the candid video of Trudeau talking to Macron, Rutte, and Boris came out shittalking Trump, it was clear that Trudeau commands respect in these rooms.

What is less clear is why everyone is so willing to pretend that the very basic truths about this issue – that the Liberals have increased defence spending, but not nearly enough to meet the target, and that beyond some defence hawks in Washington the evidence that Trudeau isn’t respected internationally is a fraud. There’s a lot of legitimate criticisms of this government’s defence record, but most of them get into much broader cul-de-sacs that no oppositions want to go down, and our media doesn’t have the bandwidth to cover – the dual crises of a broken procurement system and a system that protects rapists instead of the victims of rape. So we get this vapid nonsense.

Conservatives don’t get to spend today claiming Canada has failed on defence, nor do their defenders in the press. We need a serious defence policy which we’ve been lacking for a while, and the people who recorded the lowest defence spend in modern Canadian history don’t get to complain the other guys haven’t fixed that fast enough.