Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Just as background, I spent 39 years in the Canadian Forces as a Canadian army officer, and in the last 15 years I've been developing a unique study program here at Queen's that studies the defence administration--in other words, where all the money goes. I thought that in the context of speaking about readiness, I would talk to you for a few minutes about the connection with the current topic of transformation and what that's going to mean for readiness in the Canadian Forces.
Senior defence officials and Canadian Forces officers are today huddled inside National Defence Headquarters looking for administrative efficiencies to contribute, by some accounts, as a much as 10% of the defence budget to the government's deficit reduction action plan. The dilemma facing Minister of National Defence Peter MacKay is to find a way to slash future defence budgets without obviously negating the Conservative government's defence policy or the Canada First defence strategy or greatly decreasing Canadian Forces' military capabilities.
His response to this difficulty so far has been to commission a transformation 2011 study directed by Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie, who, I'm sure you all know, is now retired. The aim of that paper was to develop ideas to increase efficiency and effectiveness, and to act as the driving force behind organizational changes needed to reposition the Canadian Forces and the department for the future. Mr. MacKay thus joins the ranks of other ministers who throughout our history have championed administrative tidiness as the best way to maintain Canada's defence capabilities as budgets fall.
Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer in 1962 declared: "We must greatly increase defence spending or reorganize”. The decision was to reorganize. His reorganizations produced few savings, and defence capabilities declined.
Pierre Trudeau cut the defence budget severely in 1972, promising that maximum effectiveness of the organization and management of the entire department and the forces would save capabilities. Capabilities declined again.
In 1994 Jean Chrétien declared, "Everything will be made leaner...which will mean more resources devoted to combat forces and less to administrative overhead". His smaller armed forces were incapable of conducting modern military operations, a fact displayed in the 1990s campaigns in the former Yugoslavia and in Zaire in 1996, which soldiers still refer to as the bungle in the jungle.
The assumption that administrative tidiness will release defence funds to improve operational capabilities is challenged by two difficulties. First, attempts to eliminate untidy parts of the defence structure are always stoutly resisted by those in it. As General Leslie notes, officers and officials he interviewed “argued for the preservation of the status quo with every particular organization...each of which is believed to be very important to the whole by the people who are in it”.
The second problem—and the case in every reform since 1962—is that savings from defence transformations were taken away from the national defence budget and reallocated to other departments or to other priorities, such as deficit reduction, thus cutting even deeper into military capability.
The 2012 transformation scheme is based on—and this is a quote from some research I've been doing at National Defence Headquarters, from a source—the idea of “resetting” the Canada First defence strategy. It's rhetoric meant to suggest that the strategy's objectives are confirmed and are merely being reprogrammed into the future as the defence establishment is transformed to enable the Canadian Forces to do more with less.
Under this version of transformation, Canadians should expect Peter MacKay to announce several permanent changes to the organization of the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence. For example, in my estimation, he will likely transfer hundreds of military personnel or personnel positions from Ottawa to military duties elsewhere in Canada, downsize the Department of National Defence public service staff, and collapse redundant branches within the department. He will close or relocate so-called support bases or facilities meant to serve the reserve force—for instance, in Toronto and Vancouver—and send them to distant permanent bases. They will reduce the reserve force, probably by several thousand people, and, especially, eliminate large segments of the senior officer ranks in the reserves.
As well, they'll cancel scores of civilian contracts, including those that employ civilian doctors and medical facilities to serve members of the Canadian Forces. They also will cancel dozens of contracts for new equipment, construction, and academic research.
I expect that they will close several small military bases or reduce them—all except, of course, Goose Bay, Labrador—and concentrate displaced units on a few larger bases. There will be a reduction in military training, pilots' flying hours, naval deployments, and military operations generally. There will be an elimination of old and expensive-to-maintain military equipment, such as the older fleet of C-130 transport aircraft, the navy's four troublesome submarines, and aging fleets of army equipment, and perhaps there will be a grounding out of the Snowbirds aerial display team.
Finally, as ministers have done before in these situations, they will make promises to reduce administrative overhead throughout the Canadian Forces and DND to increase combat capabilities.
When Mr. MacKay announces these types of efficiency measures after the budget is tabled in the spring, he will surely face a lot of criticism and many challenges from interest groups and from those who will claim that the government is abandoning the Canada First defence strategy. However, the minister, I suggest, will simply respond with defence ministers' traditional hopeful promise made in the face of deep capability cuts, and I quote: “Everything will be made leaner...which will mean more resources devoted to combat forces and less to administrative overhead”.
Canadians should be wary of this old defence policy canard--that is, defence cuts disguised as transformation. As is evident in every case since 1962, every government's policy aimed at finding efficiencies to allow the Canadian Forces to do more with less has produced in fact military forces capable only of doing less with less.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.