>I'm surprised no one has taken up our criticism of useless spending programs taking up valuable resources.
Define "useless". $100 million for a couple of new passenger jets? Millions of dollars in operational expenditures for domestic operations which should (in theory) be repaid by the requesting agencies (ie. provincial governments) back to the federal government? Hundreds of milllions of dollars lining the pockets of corrupt and incompetent native leaders practicing the politics of cronyism and nepotism with federal monies? You want to sweat over corporate subsidies - how much have Bombardier and the various factions of the auto manufacturing industry in Canada collected in the past few decades? How much more have we spent on defence acquisitions to place a "Made In Canada" sticker over the "Engineered in Europe/USA" one?
Anyone serious about tackling waste in government spending would go after all government spending, particularly since defence is - relatively speaking - small potatoes. A fixation on defence spending tends to be dismissable, rightly, as mere ideological posturing. If you're serious about coming up with 0.7% of GDP - 0.35% for aid, and 0.35% in graft to get the aid past the thugs who make the aid necessary and ensure the situation continues so that noble members of NGOs can ride white Toyota pickups to the rescue and preen indefinitely - then go after the big money in federal spending.
As for the issue of what our armed forces should be doing, I don't need to prop up my self-worth by leeching and trading on the sacrifices and risks taken by our service people, past or present. I don't need to be able to puff up my chest and say to any foreigner who crosses my path, "I'm Canadian. Did you know our soldiers are peacekeepers?" I don't need to vicariously claim our soldiers' achievements as my own. But more importantly, I realize that while the Greeks and Turks and the Israelis and their neighbours can be mostly trusted not to shoot at people wearing blue baseball caps and not much more armour than a cotton shirt, the thirteen-year old with an AK-47 in Central Africa and the Balkan thugs nursing grudges predating Vlad's tiff with the Turks, can not. We have to be able to deliver our soldiers and the equipment they need to be more than hostages-in-waiting; we must be able to sustain them without necessarily having the goodwill of someone who owns a nearby port and airfield, and we need to be able to extract them when the locals tire of the interference in their timeless domestic disputes. That means airlift, sealift, and the requisite air and sea power to face down rogue air defences, fighters, ships, and submarines - because a C-130 full of body bags is a hell of a price to pay for the self-anointed post-modern intellectual elites of Canada to assuage their guilt for being born here and to feel good about themselves.