Canada's plan to spend 5 per cent of its gross domestic product by 2035 means the defence budget will grow to $150-billion annually.ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP/Getty Images
Philippe Lagassé is an associate professor at Carleton University. Patrick Lennox is a consultant and former national security official.
Canada is about to spend much more on defence. The Carney government plans to increase the defence budget from $40-billion to $62-billion this fiscal year. If Canada follows through on the plan to spend 5 per cent of its gross domestic product by 2035, the defence budget will grow to $150-billion annually. These are massive amounts.
To ensure public support for this huge spending increase continues once Canadians actually start to feel the real impacts of having less butter but more guns, the Carney government had better be prepared to do it a way that is dramatically more transparent and accountable than the current status quo which Canadians have become used to.
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Indeed, the new Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Sabia, has written to the Public Service that: “Formal accountabilities have to be clear – it’s the job of senior management to ensure that they are. And people need to feel and act in a personally accountable way.” This should apply to national defence and the armed forces as much as any other arm of the federal government.
Unfortunately, accountability for defence matters is weak in Canada. The Department of National Defence’s reports and financial statements to Parliament are frustratingly opaque. Only a few specialists manage to decipher how DND and Canadian Armed Forces spend their budget, and even then they usually have to call officials from the defence department to get clarifications and make sense of it all.
DND should have been compelled to clear up how it reports to Parliament long ago. With defence spending set to more than triple in the coming years, allowing this obfuscation to continue would invite scandal. Parliament must demand far more transparency from DND. Our parliamentarians should know exactly where and how military money is being spent, and without having to rely on explanations through back channels from sympathetic defence officials.
Military procurement must be made far more transparent, too. Defence procurement officials from DND, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and the Treasury Board Secretariat should be required to routinely brief parliamentary committees together on how various projects and programs are faring, what high level mandatory requirements are informing military acquisitions, and when costs start to balloon beyond initial estimates. Having Treasury Board Secretariat officials routinely appear alongside their DND and PSPC counterparts would ensure that meaningful accountability for the defence-related decisions of Treasury Board and its Secretariat occurs at the parliamentary level.
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In addition, the Office of the Auditor-General should review the entire defence procurement portfolio annually and attest that DND’s assessments are sound. As Canada begins to acquire far more military capability, the Auditor-General should be directed to audit far more defence projects, too. The Auditor-General’s own budget must be greatly augmented to take on this heavier workload.
Defence officials may protest that parliamentarians lack the necessary clearances to properly handle more information about military procurements and spending. To address this concern, members of Parliament’s two defence committees, and those who serve on the Public Accounts Committee, should be compelled to apply for the security clearance necessary to properly review these files. They have a “need to know,” and giving them clearances will not only strengthen defence accountability, but ensure greater cross-party understanding of the military threats Canada faces and what is required to counter them.
Finally, accountability to Parliament for defence spending and procurement should rest with the Deputy Minister of National Defence and the future deputy head of the promised defence procurement agency. This could be done by following the United Kingdom in making these professional bureaucratic officials true accounting officers. Under this British model, these deputy heads, rather than their political masters, would be personally accountable to the Public Accounts Committee for ensuring budgets and procurements under their responsibility are tracked effectively and to a high standard of integrity. Canada partially embraced this idea following the sponsorship scandal, but it left ultimate accountability with ministers. Canada should fully implement the accounting officer model to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of national defence.
None of these proposals are cost neutral. As expenditures escalate, the mechanisms and processes required to ensure value for money will also rise. Canadians appear ready to spend far more on their armed forces. They should also be willing to invest in additional defence accountability to ensure that Parliament and the public trust aren’t lost along the way.