Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you for the opportunity of having the CDA and the CDA Institute appear as a witness today for your study on Canada's defence policy update.

The Conference of Defence Associations, or CDA, was founded in 1932. Today, it serves as an umbrella group for 40 member associations, representing more than 400,000 active and retired members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

The defence policy starts off with a dire premise, but one that is absolutely correct: The geopolitical environment has rapidly deteriorated. Since safeguarding Canada's territorial sovereignty is the paramount purpose of national defence, the strategic emphasis placed on protecting the Canadian Arctic is welcomed. How the impacts of climate change are integrated is also crucial, because we've seen recently that floods, forest fires, hurricanes and other catastrophes are placing growing demands on our armed forces.

We see two significant and positive changes to the status quo: First, the DPU increases defence spending over time, moving us closer to the 2% target we pledged to NATO during the Wales summit. Second, it proposes a quadrennial approach to keep Canada's defence and security policy in lockstep with world events.

Regarding the new spending, let's just say that this is much easier said than done. The procurement system is broken. Every year, billions of dollars provided in projected expenditures for “Strong, Secure, Engaged” remain unspent and have been compounding over time. Given that the system buckles at spending between $4 billion and $6 billion per year on capital expenditures, how can it possibly manage to spend $14 billion in 2026 without a procurement overhaul? The system and its costs have left the CAF in a dire state of readiness.

The armed forces will have to recruit more than 17,000 members. We have enough ammunition for a few days, but NATO countries should have more than 30 days' worth of ammunition. If Canada were called on to participate in a major operation, only 58% of the Canadian Armed Forces would be available to respond, and 45% of the Canadian Armed Forces' equipment is currently unavailable or unusable. Decades of underfunding have finally caught up with us.

We're reaching a rust-out threshold on too many key capabilities. Meanwhile, this past year, the Department of National Defence saw its funding slashed by roughly $1 billion, mostly to its operations and maintenance budgets, so it's one dollar in, one dollar out.

More troublesome still is that while the new monies are earmarked to acquire future capabilities, these cuts to O and M are immediate, and they impact operational readiness today.

We've seen good progress in recapitalizing the RCAF and the RCN; however, the army and reserves appear to have been given a back seat in envisioning the future capabilities and missions of our forces. There's also a missed opportunity here to envision the role of the reserves and considering them as a means to achieve personnel objectives in both numbers and diversity.

The CDA is concerned about the lack of discussion on expeditionary capability: Will the army be confined to its borders for domestic operations in the future?

The document also doesn't say enough on how we should fix the backlog in recruitment and retention so that interested candidates are brought quickly into service. Without a plan to reach our personnel numbers, the defence spending plan is notional. New platforms cannot be operated without people.

Although mentioned as requirements, there appear to be no funding lines for submarines, replacement tanks, ground-based air defence, replacement labs, long-range strike missiles for the RCN and the RCAF, future artillery and all-terrain vehicles for the north, or a fast replenishment of ammunition stocks in the context of the war in Ukraine. Many of these could be streamlined by treating them as national security exemptions and bought off the shelf as proven and readily available systems. We seem not to fully appreciate the urgency at the intersection of the CAF's readiness challenges, the state of global security and the demands of climate change in the way that's being exerted through multiple requests for aid to civil authorities.

In world affairs, compared to where we stood a few decades ago, Canada has come to think of itself as a lot smaller than we actually are. We are the ninth-largest economy on the planet, and yet we wrongly believe we can't afford to be the ninth-largest player. Many nations—smaller nations—have greater pull on a direction the world is taking, and often that's not for the better.

Part of the problem likely stems from the fact that our industrial and technological benefits, the ITB system, has created such a chasm between how much we spend on defence relative to how much or how little capability we get for the money invested.

Also, trade and industrial agreements with the United States need to be better leveraged to achieve economies of scale.