Canada's military spending higher than in WWII, but humanitarian aid has dropped

Catholic New Times, July 4, 2004 by Ernie Regehr

Three things you're not being told about Canadian military spending:

1. Canada is already in the top 10 per cent of military spenders world wide:

a. Measured in absolute spending, rather than as a percentage of GDP, Canada's military ranks 15th or 16th from the top of the world's 190-plus countries.

b. Within NATO, now an alliance of 26 members that includes most of the world's largest military spenders, Canada ranks 6th to 8th, or well within the top third. NATO has four basic tiers of military spending: The U.S. is in a class all by itself. Then the UK, Germany, France and Italy make up a second tier of significant spenders. The third tier includes countries like Canada, Spain, Netherlands, Turkey, Poland, Greece, Norway, Denmark and Portugal. Canada is usually the top spender of the third tier.

c. The $1.2 billion increase in military spending proposed by the Conservative Party would not change Canada's ranking within NATO.

2. Current military spending is still above the post-World War II Canadian average: Prevailing Canadian mythology portrays Canada's once proud Armed Forces as being decimated by neglect, with Canadian military capacity at an historic low.

a) In fact, Canadian military spending remains above the post-World War II average.

b) During the Korean War and the Reagan-era military build-ups, Canadian spending was significantly increased.

c) In the 1970s, a decade of relative detente in the Cold War, and in the post-Cold War 1990s, Canadian spending declined significantly--in both cases following a global pattern of significant reductions.

d) But, even before the post-2000 increases, this country's military spending, calculated in constant 2002 dollars, remained above the overall post-war Canadian average.

3. Canadian Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending has declined much more sharply than has military spending:

In a world that spends roughly $1 trillion a year on armed forces, insecurity is not due to a lack of military capacity.

a) During the 1990s Canadian military spending dropped by 14 per cent, but ODA dropped by 31 per cent. Given that the primary way in which most people worldwide experience insecurity is through poverty, the denial of human rights, exclusion from political processes, and the criminal and political violence that attend social and political disintegration, ODA in fact has much more to do with mitigating insecurity than does increased military power.

4. A rational security strategy would shift more attention to mitigating those conditions that produce insecurity--poverty and underdevelopment, corrupt governance and the denial of basic rights.

a) In other words, a logical Canadian goal should be to meet its declared objective that development assistance equal 0.7 per cent of GDP, the UN target for ODA. Currently, Canada's ODA level is only 0.3 per cent of GDP.

b) If Canada were to meet its target, our Military-to-ODA spending ratio would change from roughly 4-to-1 to 2-to-1. This would put Canada more in line with European states like Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Ireland and Denmark with Military-to-ODA spending ratios ranging from 2.2:1 to 1.6:1. Canada's current defence policy lacks coherence. Any change to Canadian military spending should await a thorough review of Canadian defence and security objectives.

Ernie Regehr is the director of Project Ploughshares.