Andrew Coyne: Canada’s glorious bipartisan tradition of messing up military procurement

That was a cracker of a column my Postmedia colleague, Michael Den Tandt, unloaded the other day, taking the Harper government to task for its “disjointed, underfunded, poorly understood [and] chronically secretive” defence policy.

For all the prime minister’s tough talk about the growing list of strategic and security threats to the democracies — Russia, Iran, ISIS and beyond — there is, he noted, a widening gap between Canada’s professed readiness to “do its part” and our actual ability to do so.

Indeed, so bad is the “rust-out” that “unless there are dramatic changes soon, it’s fair to ask whether Canada will even be able to field a capable military in a few years’ time.”

Read more