gonavy47 gonavy47:
Bootlegga: Nice quote from Esprit De Corps magazine. You however failed to mention; years of neglect for the military before Mulroney came to power. The fact that before the rearming plan could be implemented, the Soviet Union collapsed, thus ending the immediate threat, and to top it off there was a world-wide recession. Just a couple of facts to set the record straight. These weren't liberal plans that were cancelled, in fact the liberal naval plan was doubled by the conservatives. Nice try though.
Let me highlight what I said for you...
$1:
The only truly honest critique of defence spending is that they have been ignored and short-changed by every government since Pearson until the 9/11.
Now, if you have any inkling of Canadian history, you'd know I called out the Liberals with that too. But the fact is that Mulroney really started the post Cold War slide into military irrelevance, not the Liberals as is so often thought. I fully admit Chretien continued it with his budget cuts, but the fact is that Mulroney rang up $20-30 billion deficits annually and didn't spend a dime on the CF, while Chretien had to eliminate that deficit (by making cuts in every department, not just defence). To me that is far worse, as the money was available, Mulroney simply choose to spend it on pork barrelling and other BS, instead of doing something positive in the defence portfolio.
Now if you want to go back in history look at the systems that those awful Liberals bought and compare them to those the Conservatives bought, you'll see almost every big ticket item (and lots of little ones) were bought by the Liberals, not the PC/Conservatives.
Here's just a sample (merely going back to the 70s);
Liberals bought the Leopard tank, CF-18, 6 Halifax Frigates, MLVWs, the entire LAV fleet (Coyotes, Bison, etc), Victoria SSKs (a really bad decision BTW), 12 MCDVs, Aurora and Arcturus patrol aircraft, M-577 howitzer, G-Wagens, Nyalas, the C-7 rifle (and its variants), and so on.
The PC/Conservatives bought 6 Halifax frigates, Leopard IIs, six CH-47ds and C-17s. (This is admittedly much shorter than it should be, but I honestly can't remember any big ticket items either party has added while in office - and I'm talking paid for and deployed, not promised). Feel free to add in anything else you can remember.
Oh, and BTW, the PCs started the move to close our bases in Germany (which was one of the biggest reasons for our huge drop in our military profile abroad) and MacKay recently cancelled upgrades to eight Auroras (cutting our fleet to 10 from 18).
Oh I have quite the inkling of Canadian history, especially military, having served for 35 years and counting. What you failed to mention is that liberal governments had roughly a 3 to 1 timeframe in which to keep up the military, and although they bought your great list of equipment, it wasn't enough and it was usually a kneejerk reaction to a crisis. Armoured vehicles for instance. Any government that would send personnel into a war zone driving Iltis vehicles is negligent in the least.
CKA Uber 
