If the Prime Minister is to be discouraged from dumping major policy documents onto the Internet in the middle of the night at the end of the session six weeks after they should have been ready, the only thing that will do the trick is the knowledge that such clandestine behaviour will not spare him the journalistic scrutiny he is clearly trying to avoid. My own poor effort was not going to do do it. And I am sad to say that after a spate of early stories simply recording the fact of the late-night document dump, Harper's instinct has been confirmed by a near-total lack of journalistic scrutiny. (The Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese, as is almost always the case, remains the honourable exception. Here is his blog post on the defence plan. I suspect more is on the way.)
So I was really grateful to get an email this morning from Inkless comment-board regular MikeG, who — puttering in his spare time on a sunny weekend — has produced the most detailed analysis of the Harper defence plan's spending projections that I have seen. He even made charts and graphs. And what they show is curious: while $490 billion sure looks like a heck of a number, it amounts to a gentle budgeted decline in Canada's defence effort, compared against major allies, over time.
I'll close by pointing out that a defence policy isn't only a policy for spending. It's a set of choices about what that money will buy. Since we're all planning to snooze on that set of choices in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, perhaps Inkless readers will care to read the policy themselves and discuss the choices the Harper government has made.
Democracy: not only can you do it yourself, I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to. Thanks once again to MikeG.
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