While I think that target is just plain dumb, I have no problem with increasing our spending on National Defence. The issue I have is we tend to do it very foolishly. Lets not get into the role of being strong armed into just supporting the American Military Industrial Complex. Lets have a buy Canadian - and I mean Canadian program. No more of having foreign owned companies set up branch offices in Canada to farm out a little of our procurements. Canada used to be a world leader in the field. Some of the first mass produced submarines were made in Montreal. During WWII we were a leader in Aerospace. Canada is still doing fairly well in small arms, and not too bad in road/offraod vehicles.
That was the idea behind Harper's ship building strategy. There would be a constant series of purchases over many years so we wouldn't have ship builders having to tool up every time we needed new ones, then laying everyone off afterward. It hasn't worked out very well. It would work even less well for aircraft. I don't think we have the necessary size of military to keep a factory busy churning out tanks or armored personnel carriers or even uniforms and boots for the military.
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