By Michael Nickerson
Last fall I lost my appendix. Poor thing went and exploded on me while I sat some forty hours in emergency waiting for a surgery slot. Now, I live in Toronto, not Timmins, and have a great big fancy hospital just down the road from where I live. It has a new addition that cost hundreds of millions of dollars filled with shiny new equipment, with more renovations on the way. It’s a world class teaching hospital and home to cutting-edge research. It also has an overworked, understaffed nursing contingent dealing with a flood of perfectly avoidable or treatable ailments, yet never stops crying over lack of funds. It’s a story heard across our fair land, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in funding annually. I’m just glad I didn’t die.
So what’s this have to do with the military? Well, I dare say the state of Canada’s healthcare system provides a constructive case study when considering our way forward with military and diplomatic spending. Both suffer from ‘latest and best’ syndrome; both are dealing with cutbacks on what you might describe as ‘preventive measures;’ and over the next decade they are likely to be sucking similar amounts of money out of our pockets via Ottawa. Oh yeah, they’re also both understaffed on the frontline, and overstaffed in management.
Consider procurement. Much like my local hospital has laid out hundreds of millions of dollars on new digs and stuff to fill it, our military is about to lay out billions on stuff we don’t necessarily need. Consider the F35 procurement. Both the Chief of the Defence and her right hand Lt. General in charge of all things birdlike have stated categorically that we need those planes to defend our northern frontier. Problem is their air force counterpart south of the boarder has stated categorically to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that they’re not needed by NORAD to defend the north, but instead are best when you want to bomb a place like Iran for example.
Now I’d like to think we have no intentions of bombing the middle-east any time soon (been there, done that; you’re welcome Libya) and in an age in which Ukraine has held off Russia for over four years with makeshift attack drones (air, sea and land…something right out of The Terminator), old-fashioned artillery, and modern missile air defence, shouldn’t we be taking notes? At the moment, we’re likely buying dozens of F35s and a dozen uber-expensive submarines to do what Saab Gripens, drones, and missile defence systems could do for much less, leaving money on the table to supply and support those 300,000 reservists we keep hearing about.
Now let’s consider prevention. My hospital is inundated with patients taking up vital and expensive space in its emergency room (ER) and intensive care units (ICUs) due to ailments that could have been prevented or dealt more effectively elsewhere. For instance, my province recently cut support for harm reduction centres, leading to an avalanche of overdoses that strain our paramedics, clog ICUs and ERs, and as an aside, actually kill people. These are deaths a modicum of money and effort could have prevented.
The idea ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is as applicable to our military as it is to our healthcare. In this case the ‘ounce of prevention’ would be diplomacy. If two wars in Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated anything, it’s that wars are catastrophically costly! Not just for the combatants, but in an intrinsically interconnected world, for everyone on this planet. Yet Mark Carney plans on eviscerating an already gutted diplomatic core, rendering Global Affairs impotent to do anything to stop the war drums from pounding, to similar effect I predict.
It should also be noted that both modern healthcare and modern militaries deal with capital cost increases that run almost double that of average normal inflation. Couple that with the stagnant growth in real wages in this country and we’ll have to tax more and more just to meet those costs. Healthcare maxxed out taxpayer pocketbooks and patience years ago, leaving us the dysfunctional state of affairs we live with today.
I dare say that at this embryonic stage of ‘spend baby spend’ with our military, it might behoove us to not make that same mistake again.
