What is it that made the Harper government, which cannot guarantee it will survive until the weekend (although, yeah, it’s a pretty safe bet they will), decide to go for the 20-year, $30 billion defence plan instead of, say, the 10-year, $15-billion plan; the 100-year, $150-billion plan; the 6.5-year, $9.75 billion plan; or the indefinite, billion-and-a-half-per-year plan?
What is it that made the Harper government, which cannot guarantee it will survive until the weekend (although, yeah, it’s a pretty safe bet they will), decide to go for the 20-year, $30 billion defence plan instead of, say, the 10-year, $15-billion plan; the 100-year, $150-billion plan; the 6.5-year, $9.75 billion plan; or the indefinite, billion-and-a-half-per-year plan?
UPDATE: Critics of the government may want to know that the day’s approved talking point is not, “These maniacs are ramping up military spending recklessly.” It’s, “These layabouts are not doing anything interesting with military spending.” I have this on no less an authority than NDP defence critic Paul Dewar, who was asked what’s in the Tories’ policy after QP today:
“Nothing. In fact, what we got today was something, we had all been waiting for something new and he’ll claim and his Minister will claim it’s new, but there’s actually nothing new to this. This is a retread, it’s a recycle and at the end of the, at the end of the day, it’s no new money and no new commitment. What they’ve done here is that they’ve I guess shown that they don’t have a plan for the future in terms of Canada. Because they’ve spent all of their money in capital in Afghanistan and we’ve, we’ve known that, when the government came out recently and said that they over committed themselves by way of saying that the projections they have for Afghanistan are almost $1 billion off. ”