It's not really a question of increasing the defence budget per se. The question is, how much, over what period of time and, particularly, dedicated to what acquisitions independent of operations and maintenance, and independent, as Professor Saideman has pointed out, of the problems of recruitment.
If you want to punch this money into or funnel it into expanding the Canadian Armed Forces, recruitment and retention are a big problem, and you're probably in a real difficulty.
If it's going to go into certain capital investments—new ones outside of what was committed in 2017 and 2018—we don't know where they would go. Certainly, in 2017, with “Strong, Secure, Engaged” and North American defence modernization, NORAD modernization is emphasized, but specifically on what that entails in terms of thinking not just about sensors, shooters or interceptors, but about command and control arrangements and infrastructure, this is a really big picture. It's hard to know what we should do.
It's easy to...and I believe the German [Technical difficulty—Editor] increased their defence budget over some period of time by $110 billion U.S. That's great, and that's vitally needed, both for Germany and, in our case, for how much the government needs to invest and says it's going to invest. However, unless we know where they're going to invest, that becomes a different problem. It raises the question, which this government doesn't want to do—no governments want to do it once they do defence once—about the need for a defence review.
It's very clear in my mind that what was committed to in 2017, in the absence of any funding commitment to NORAD modernization and North American defence modernization, is the key area where you want to go or where we should go. Whether that's the case, I think it's important that the government make this clear. That means that something in the policy world has to be done before we simply say that there's money.
Remember that National Defence, over the past many years—I think in every year I can remember—continues to give back money to the central agency. I might be wrong about the number, but I think last year it was $1.1 billion that was returned. Well, that's a problem. You can commit money, but the question is, where do you spend it [Technical difficulty—Editor] for what ends? That's an open question to this day in Canada.