Those are fairly recent pressures, though. The Canadian tradition of military under funding is decades long. It could be argued that the Canadian public, through its government, has prioritized what it wanted more than what it needed.
They aren't fairly recent pressures. Wages and cost of living have been diverging for a while now. Worse more recently. But the trend is long running. The housing crisis has been easily going for two decades. And again, exploded post COVID. How many people in this country don't have a family physician or can't find childcare?
I'll also go back to what I said earlier. What's the actual need? Because if the requirement is strictly defence of Canada, that can be done for less than 2% and an even smaller full time army. Anything above and beyond derives from the obligations we understand and perceive for our participation on the world stage. And to the average voter, that is quite subjective.
Some here want divisions in Europe. Once you take the cost of recruiting, equipping, training and sustaining that force, we're talking north of $10B per year (going by a rough wag
from this US CBO doc says various brigades cost and looking at conversion and inflation). If we want balanced budgets at the same time, how are we going to convince voters that this is more important than say universal dental care or say reducing the lowest income tax bracket by 1-2%?
I don't have the answers. But I find that military folks (myself included at times) love to shit on the taxpayers who pay our salaries for not giving us more toys to play with, while failing to articulate in concrete terms what the threat is and why they should fund us more.
The $10-15B the government is going to spend every year going forward, to get to 2%, is a ton of money. We had better start working on explaining to the tax paying and voting public why we need this over everything else, including some very real day to day shortfalls they have.
I will admit to being lucky. I'm on a space project that directly shows benefit to homeland defence. My job isn't that hard. But if you want to sell the government on why the CA should have 300 MBTs, that's admittedly harder to justify.