Unfortunately, the Canadian Armed Forces again escaped the finance minister’s gaze and for the second consecutive year, national defence is conspicuous by its absence from the budget. Sajjan promised a whopping 70-per-cent increase in defence spending, pledging to drive funding up to $32.7 billion from $18.9 billion. They cut defence spending in 2018 and have ignored it in 2019. With Budget 2019, Canada is no closer to meeting that pledge, spending 1.23 per cent of its GDP on national defence. All successive administrations — Liberal and Conservative — have to varying degrees played the shell game with defence spending.

Source: National Post March 27, 2019 09:56 UTC