The whole train wreck is waiting for you to show monetarily that Canada is “mooching”. Or will wind up mooching at a some point. Since we cost you nothing now, I’m not sure how we could drop below that level, in the near term. My numbers imply that the level is consistent with recent history and with general NATO trends.
Elvis’s point about some moral obligation Canada has to the world by virtue of its wealth is a tangent as I fail to see him railing against the Japanese.
I’ve already provided plenty of examples of Canada’s inability to meet its commitments:
Ammunition shortages in Yugoslavia that required us to ‘borrow’ munitions from the U.S.
Poorly equipped soldiers who had to borrow desert camo from British soldiers.
British officers complaining that Canada’s lack of upgrading has hurt joint operations because we are not compatible with current technology.
Our offering to send soldiers to Haiti, then having to withdraw the offer after it turned out the military didn’t have the capability.
Our being forced to withdraw our soldiers from Afghanistan after six months, because we didn’t have enough soldiers to replace them. This was a direct failure of our NATO commitments, since Article 5 was invoked over Afghanistan, requiring Canada to provide military support.
The death of Canadian soldiers in a friendly fire accident due to our lack of IFF equipment.
I also remember that we had committed a frigate to the middle east two years ago, and we had to cancel a mission after an aged Sea-King crashed on the deck. We didn’t have a replacement helicopter available, so the mission was either scrubbed or delayed. Can’t remember which.
And Rickjay, the issue isn’t whether the U.S. could reduce military spending if we increased ours. This is a ‘free rider’ problem. It’s like saying that if you don’t kick in any money to clear your streets, the streets will still be cleared because your neighbors need to come and go. So why should you pay anything? They’d clean the streets whether you were there or not, right?
But you are there. And being there, you should expect to bear your percentage of the costs of maintaining your street. The same thing applies here - Canada spends less than most NATO countries. We spend less on our military as a percentage of GDP than all but five of the top 30 countries.
The Canadian military said two years ago that it needed a boost of five billion dollars a year to rebuild its infrastructure, upgrade its aging weaponry, and expand enough to meet our future commitments. The auditor general concured. The Chretien government responded with 1.2 billion over 5 years - about 4% of what the military said it needed.
How about we just bring our spending up to the level of countries like Sweden, Portugal, Norway, or Finland? 2% of our GDP would still be 1/3 less than what Australia spends, and less than half of what the U.S. spends. This seems like a reasonable amount to me. It would allow us to rebuild our military into a first-class operation.
Here, I can even tell you where to get the money:
Cancel the gun registry. We’ve spent a billion dollars on it, and it’s going to cost another billion.
Cancel the ‘five year action plan on official languages’, which is going to get almost 300 million dollars. What the hell does this money DO, anyway? And why do we need an ‘action plan’ on official languages? And how do you spend 300 million dollars on it?
Get rid of the ‘Canadian Television Fund’. We spend 75 million dollars a year on this. And what do we get for it? A whole bunch of really crappy shows that don’t have to compete in the market because they survive on the government teat. If you cancelled this, the quality of Canadian television would go UP.
Cancel the new 935 million dollar Child Care assistance program.
Cancel the 135 million dollar a year program to ‘fight homelessness’.
Cancel the 2.2 billion dollars over five years to promote healthy pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood development. These are laudible goals, and completely inappropriate for our government to be spending such huge amounts of money on.
Get rid of a host of tax credits designed to promote businesses the government favors. Things like the film production tax credit, the mineral exploration tax credit, etc. Another 100 million or so.
Let’s cancel the 6 million a year we spend on the world council on sustainable development.
Then there’s social spending - health care, welfare, etc. In general, Canada spends about 18% of our GDP on social spending (about 12% non health care). Assuming we leave health care alone, all we have to do is reduce our social spending from 12% to 11.5%, plus the cuts above, and we could solve our military problems.
And don’t forget, Canada is projecting a 6 billion dollar surplus this year. That surplus alone would fix our military problems.
Are you prepared to write a letter to the families of the dead soldiers stating same? This is unadulterated BS. The reponsibility lies with the overzealous shooters.
Paid for, IIRC. I could be wrong on this one. If we didn’t, I doubt it cost as much as our contribution to fighting al-Qaida.
When did the United Kingdom become a state? But in any case, having to borrow camouflage uniforms is certainly an embarassing gaffe. I’ll give you that one.
Haiti I hadn’t heard yet and I’ll look it up.
As to this, now I’m really confused. You yourself said our initial contingent was 870 soldiers, about a regiment. Today, we have 2,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and they’re not just paper-pushers, either; they include a battalion of Van Doos with artillery and armor elements, HQ elements of 5 Brigade, and airlift capability. Would you please explain to me how 2,000 is a smaller number than 870? We now have MORE soldiers in Afghanistan than in the initial mission, not fewer. Of course, now it’s under the auspices of the UN, so maybe the Americans don’t count that, I don’t know.
Secondly, Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty requires member countries to "assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. " It’s really a very noncommittal statement. And we did send combat troops - as we should have - more than some NATO countries if not most, and still have them there, so what’s your problem?
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6. The death of Canadian soldiers in a friendly fire accident due to our lack of IFF equipment.
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And this is a horrible, offensive lie, and you should be ashamed of yourself. You know damned well that accident was caused by stupidity up the chain of command and that the American pilot who killed them disobeyed a direct order, was hopped up on drugs, and acted way outside his ROEs. Infantrymen do not customarily equip themselves with IFF equipment in our or most other armies. You can blame that accident squarely on the Illinois National Guard and their coked up pilots.
That particular mission is being engaged in as we speak. Accidents happen. Yes, the Sea Kings should be replaced and the cancellation of the EH-101 purchase was a political joke of the worst magnitude, but we are executing that mission.
I’m still waiting to hear what we’re mooching off the USA. Tap, tap, tap.
So what streets, precisely, are we not paying to clean? We have two thousand troops in Afghanistan, and troops in half a dozen other places, ships patrolling the Persian Gulf… I don’t know a guy in the Forces who HASN’T served overseas.
But it does appear that what we choose to use our military for is different from what the USA uses ITS military for. And I suspect that’s the hidden agenda here.
You really do not seem to be listening here. I agree that the Canadian military probably does need more funding. I agree that we can certainly afford it - I mean, the hell with the gun registry, you’re not even getting to the really wasteful stuff that destroys people’s lives. Let’s stop paying people to live in shitholes in Northern Ontario just because they’re “Aboriginal” and we don’t want them mixing with normal people. (Hey, don’t look at me. It’s not MY idea, I’m just telling you what the government’s doing. I can’t think of any other reason the government does this.) You could save billions more by not paying people to not be fishermen in the Maritimes. (Americans: Trust me, Sam knows what I’m talking about here.) You’d save six, eight billion a year, easy. The Forces also needs better leadership and it needs NDHQ to stop changing the uniforms. New helicopters, main battle tanks, and airlift capability too.
But that does not prove to my satisfaction that the United States has a goddamned thing to complain about when we’ve spent a BILLION dollars or so and five lives defending them. Those are two separate issues, dude.
Thank you Rick Jay. The accusation that our soldier’s lack of equipment was responsible for deaths caused by friendly fire nearly made me cry.
Shoot, I screwed up the coding on the most important thing in my post.
Maybe, because it is part of a treaty which we have not broken in the last century. Believe it or not Aboriginal peoples in this country are not a conquered people in the traditional sense. The status they hold in this country has been upheld because it is part of a treaty between nations that has been kept these past few centuries first with England and then later with Canada.
Ok so what is the alternative… tell them to move the fuck out of the Region, or tell them to fish what is left in the waters? Please explain what Ottawa should do or are you in favour of just telling the people of the maritimes to just piss off and make do with nothing? Better yet why don’t you tell me what the fuck you really know about that region and its people aside from the dollar values you seem to deem so important.
You obviously have know Idea what it is like in that part of the country or how hard it is to make a living off of anything but the resource industries. Would you prefer they simply all migrate to the rest of Canada and empty out the provinces?
Fuck, I’m sick of the people who think they can fix financial problems by cutting off people who are already in desperate straights. Nothing like fucking over a few million Canadians for the sake of looking good to the outside.
OK. Very simple question here.
If (Notice that I said if, because there’s still the possibility your politicians will actually spend some money on your military, despite the history of the last 10 years) Canada underfunds their military into ineffectiveness and/or irrelevancy, who will defend Canada in the event of an attack?
Like I said, simple question. The answer is not “Oh, we’ll never be attacked”, the answer is the name of a country.
Rickjay: I will offer a partial mea culpa on the IFF thing, but I didn’t just pull this out of the air. It was widely reported after the four soldiers were killed that a causitive factor was their lack of IFF gear.
I just did some research into this, and the quote that blamed the IFF was a little more general than that. Basically, NATO as a whole has been dragging its feet on IFF, and most of the NATO countries do not have good IFF gear today, and won’t have it for probably another 8-10 years. And of course, you’re right that the pilots bear the majority of the blame for their behaviour. Still, if an IFF system had been in place, it would have acted as a check on their recklessness disregard and might have stopped a tragedy.
But we can’t really blame Canada for this, since NATO as a whole hasn’t got their act together around this.
Some interesting articles on this:
British Officer Calls for System to Prevent Friendly Fire Deaths in Iraq
Canadian Board of Inquiry on Friendy Fire Deaths in Yugoslavia
From the Board of Inquiry:
The Iceland Defense Force.
Still, I still have voice my appreciation for Canada. In January, one of their peacekeepers took a bullet for us in Afghanistan. RIP, soldier: please accept my sincere appreciation. This past week, Canada contributed forces in Haiti.
And I still remember them hiding US citizens in Iran, during the Iranian hostage crisis in the 1970s.
But, from the Canadian perspective, I think Sam makes some good points. Taking a look at some decade-old analysis from the CDI, I think that spending 4% of GDP on the military as the US does, is rather high (in pre- 911 terms, when no wars are being fought). That said, 1.1% seems low.
I am a centrist by the standards of the typical democratic country. This puts me on the extreme left of the US political spectrum. Here’s an example. Sam wants to spend $20 billion (Canadian, I assume) on the military. That amounts to 1.6% of Canada’s economy ($1214 billion, Canadian, 2003). If I was a Canadian, I’d be all for it.
Try advocating 2.5% for the US during the 1990s however, and you would be considered part of the wacky left. Such is fun-house mirror world of the US media.
Airman, OK, I’ve fucking had it with you. I have tried for months to be fairly reasonable with you, because I thought you seemed like someone who could actually think if provoked. Obviously, I was wrong.
The answer to your question is “Canada”.
You have not paid any regard, any attention, any consideration to anything anyone who disagrees with you has said in this thread. This thread had evolved into a quite interesting(in my opinion) conversation between Canadians about the abilities and uses of their military forces. This evolvement occured after the consensus of thread seemed to be that you had your head up your ass.
Now that a Canadian has chosen to agree with you (one out of how many?), you have pulled your head out of your ass, and regaled us with the feces that has collected on your tongue, well, fuck off. I will never again consider your posts as coming from a rational person.
You are hereby granted honorary status as a Canuck.
I was going to suggest to Airman doors, in answer to his question, that I had two flagpoles – one with bars and stars and one with a red maple leaf. He can take the flagpole with the Maple Leaf and stick it where the sun don’t shine… sideways.
Well, to be fair the U.S. does need to spend a lot more than Canada does. The U.S. is the big dog, and like it or not that imposes an awful lot of commitments. You have to maintain an entire nuclear detterent force that Canada doesn’t. You have force projection needs that we don’t have. You’re footing the entire bill for ballistic missile defense (something Canada really is getting a free ride on), and since you were the ones attacked, you’re bearing the lion’s share of the cost of retaliation. So you can’t just say it’s crazy to think that 1.6% in Canada looks high and 2.5% in the U.S. would be low. It’s not.
Months? What have we been discussing for months that I’ve been unreasonable about?
OK, so here’s the follow-up to that.
With what? Only US citizens think that a privately owned weapon would be any defense against an army. Those people are fools. So what’s left?
Sure, I’ve paid consideration to what others have said, and I’ve admitted that some good points were made, but nobody answered the question that I so bluntly asked above. I simply disagree, and I’m allowed to do so, especially since nobody has provided me any evidence that the situation with Canada’s military will improve. I’ve received nothing but assurances, and those don’t go very far when they’re not made by people who hold the actual pursestrings and the ability to make it happen. As for the consensus of the thread, it’s been up in the air the whole time, so don’t pretend that I’ve been going it alone in the face of stiff opposition.
Actually, I’ve had a good bit of support, even from a guy who is currently in your Forces, whom you guys have chosen to ignore. And I pulled my head out of my ass because I attempted to let this die a natural death, it was not doing so, and I simply changed my mind. Sam Stone entering the thread had nothing to do with it. I just decided I had more to say, three days after I had initially backed out. Big deal.
Worse things have happened to me. Worse things will happen to me in the future. I’m sorry you feel that way, but you do what you think you have to do. My life will go on.
msklystron, nice retort. Unfortunately, you didn’t answer the question. I knew that by asking that I would get insults in a deliberate attempt to evade answering it, and I must say, that was a good insult. Bravo.
It’s pretty easy Airman.Who will defend Canada? Canada and those allies who feel she has upheld her obligation to their mutual defense will. That’s it. There is no way in hell Canada alone could stop a invading army large enough, sophisticated enough and diplomatically cunning enough to pull all a transoceanic invasion/conquest.
For Canada to stand alone, we would have to alienate our allies and, completely miss the obvious signs of growing hostility, troop mustering, fleet assembly and developing logistic trains. If we do nothing about it then we deserve to become a footnote in history. I don’t see that happening but you obviously see clearer than this Canadian.
The question is can Canada reciprocate in any meaningful way to the defense of other countries?
Fifty state-of-the-art jet fighter-bombers, a dozen state-of-the-art missile destroyers, and about a division of mechanized infantry, with the various weapons and support systems they deploy, plus local reserve infantry and whatever else the government could rustle up. You asked. You seem to be proceeding from the idiotic assumption that we don’t have a military at all, which is false.
I will freely admit that if some other country were somehow to magically land, say, fifteen divisions of heavy assault troops on the shores of Lake Ontario covered by hundreds of heavy combat aircraft, or were to simultaneously launch attacks in divisional strength against a number of coastal locations, we would be up shit creek sans paddle. At some point, though, you do have to ask what level of preparedness is reasonable given the threat envelope you’re facing.
What’s really strange about your “you’re mooching off us based on a theoretical future expense” bit is that a lot of countries ARE costing the United States a lot of money to help defend, but you don’t complain about that. I really find this to be one of the most puzzling, misguided Pit threads ever. We cost you nothing, WE help defend YOU, and you bitch about it. It’s weird. Why aren’t you complaining about the Philippines?
Uzi, as to whether we can reciprocate - I’m getting a little tired of pointing this out, but we HAVE helped in defending the United States, have we not? At substantial expense in money and lives, and apparently with a high degree of skill, since our soldiers have been lavishly decorated by the USA for their outstanding performance. I’m amazed that everyone is forgetting something that happened just two years ago. And did we not assist in liberating the Kosovans? Have we not assisted people in a dozen or more countries with our military? How many mines have our men disarmed in Cambodia? How many spats did we resolve in Cyprus? We’re all over the place, here, there, everywhere. Jesus Christ, man. Maybe we need to spend more so our troops have the kit they need, but give us credit for what we’ve done.
I suppose that depends on the assault. Care to present a case where there will be a threat within the next 15 years that will:
I mean what if we dumped all our military spending into intelligence operations? We’ve got a multicultural country, lots of potential field agents, with potentially useful backgrounds. We could be the eyes and ears of the alliance. Would that make people feel better, or would we still be considered mooching?
We’re going around in circles here. Team A says Canada might wind up being defenseless and unable to help others or itself in the future. Team B says, there is no current threat so why would we spend more than we did at the end of the Cold War (1.2% vs. 2%)? Team A says but you might be threatened. Team B says but we aren’t. And so it goes.
Honestly at this point in time the Canadian militaries most vital role is to curry favour with the Americans so we can maintain access to their market. That’s my view of course. Strategically we need to maintain access to that market simply to keep the economy going. When about 50% of the nation’s GDP comes from trade with the US, you need to make sure typical US domestic politics doesn’t screw you over. Providing military support to some American initiatives helps turn the volume down. However, until someone can make a compelling argument to Canadians that money should go to guns instead of healthcare I don’t see much changing.
Sorry RickJay, I missed your post.
It seems to me Canada is free to decide how to best defend itself and its interests and Canada’s policies are to not make enemies in the first place and to be on friendly terms with as many nations as possible. This means lower chances of conflict. Part of being on friendly terms is done by helping others militarily which means it can count on those friendly nations to come to its help in time of need. Overall this means less need for defense spending. It also means any conflicts are more likely to be resolved by peaceful means than by resort to military force. It seems like a good policy to me. Good for Canada and good for the world. The USA would do well to learn from Canada, the UK and other countries which rely less on the use of brute force and more on good international relations.
The USA OTOH has chosen a different path. It has chosen to not have to rely on others and to be able to impose its will by brute force whenever it feels like it. Fine but why should other pay for that? If you want to be the bully you should not ask others to pay the bill. The fact that the USA has decided to have a strong military means it sees military solutions to problems which could be resolved peacefully. When you have a big hammer every problem looks like a nail. This in turn raises tensions around the world and forces others to increase their own military spending. The USA has not been attacked by Iraq but rather the USA chose to attack Iraq. It only seems fair to me that the USA pay the bill. If you want to call the shots (he he) you can bloody well pay the bill. IMHO Canada and other nations are doing in Iraq more than their duty and the USA should be plenty grateful.