Kevin Libin: Liberals eye military budget to fund campaign pledges
Posted: September 24, 2008, 9:33 AM by Kelly McParland
Full Comment, Kevin Libin, canadian election, Liberals
Someone in the Liberal camp isn’t happy with the party’s new platform, it seems. On Monday, just hours before it released its official platform -- "Action Plan for the 21st Century -- the party held a conference call, an “insider briefing,” for party workers and activists. In it, MP and finance critic John McCallum explained how the Liberals would manage to afford its spending promises.
Somebody in on the call taped the conversation. Then they leaked it. Blogger Steve Janke, who put the recording on his website. In an interesting study in contrasts, McCallum made some frank comments to insiders that didn’t show up later when unveiling the platform to the public.
As CBC’s Political Bytes website reported, McCallum admitted in not as many words that the party did not, as supporters had apparently expected, really have a national housing strategy, but rather had some targets for upping affordable housing units. “Well, I suppose you could call it a national housing strategy . . .” McCallum said -- and you can almost hear him shrugging. Another voice elicited laughs when he chimed in "We definitely have a strategy,” after which it sounds like another participant cried: “Thank God!” When asked what the whole platform’s package will cost, McCallum first gives the official answer -- that it’ll cost “$15.5 billion dollars over five years”-- but added, “that's a little bit misleading,” without elaborating on exactly how Canadians were being be misled.
What the CBC didn’t mention may be a more interesting revelation about how the Liberals wish to reconstitute the federal deficit contingency reserve (to cushion the government against slipping into the red): a total of $12 billion over four years. The former Liberal cabinet minister and Bay Street economist is careful to explain that the party is “committed to find $12 billion over four years through more efficient delivery of programs to Canadians. . . If we can't find savings of that magnitude than we’re not good economic managers.”
You’d certainly have to be: $12 billion is a lot of money to squeeze out by just delivering programs with more efficiency. At least one Liberal thought so too, and asked McCallum for some examples of where those “efficiencies” might be found, or more bluntly, “what will we be accused of cutting?”
Here’s the interesting part: McCallum (a former defence minister, by the way) suggests that one of the first things he’d tighten spending on is the Canadian Forces. “I think the defence budget in recent years has gone up at a very dramatic rate and that for us to continue . . . without further ramping up is responsible, particularly at a time of shortage of money.” (Arts funding, however, will get more money from the Liberals).
Military cuts, of course, have long been top on the Liberals’ hit list when it comes to finding money for, as McCallum put it “new priorities.” The military was “burned out during years of Liberal cutbacks,” as the party’s own Senator Colin Kenny once put it. Canada’s budget for national defence was lacerated by 23% between ’93 and ’98 as Liberals closed bases, cut staff and cancelled equipment upgrades. Whether you’re Liberal or Tory, it’s hard to dispute that Canadian troops in Afghanistan have been dealing with some of the repercussions of those decisions with, among other things, a lack of transport aircraft.
That Liberal era of military shrinkage was, arguably, a different time: Canada was in need of emergency financial intervention with out-of-control debts and deficits, and the social democracies of the world had anyway decided to cash in their peace dividends, convinced Huntington’s Fukuyama's (thanks to MGSt in the comments for correcting me on this one) end of history had come to pass. Soft power was then the Liberals’ calling card.
The world is plainly a much different place today. The federal Conservatives prefer at least posturing a more muscular approach, as demonstrated in their insistence (till this election campaign, anyway) on staying in Afghanistan and their bluster over securing Canada’s North using military means. To prove it, they have indeed ramped up spending (though critics claim not nearly sufficiently) and unveiled plans to bulk up on ships and planes. No surprise that the Tories are reported to be actively targeting the military vote this election. What is surprising, though, is that the Liberals are said to be doing the same. McCallum’s confession that he expects the military to deliver a key part of his program efficiencies may indeed be one way to go. Maybe not. Either way, a return to softer power certainly isn’t a position destined to rake in votes from Canadians in uniform. No wonder it’s the kind of thing Liberals prefer discussing off the record, in the comfortable confines of what was supposed to be a conversation strictly among friends.
National Post
