Invest $25 billion in fighting real threat to Canadian society

As the auditor general, Department of National Defence and the parliamentary budget officer slug out the actual cost of the F-35 fighter, no party has bothered to really explain why this procurement is even necessary.

As a young Canadian attempting to obtain decent employment in order to pay off a student loan, I could actually put that excessively expensive education to some use here. We shouldn’t let cynicism or indifference write a blank cheque, yet again, to the folks in Ottawa: We face serious threats that an overpriced weapon is useless against.

Many Canadians like myself are overburdened with enormous student loans. These loans prevent us from settling down, acquiring a home and starting a family. Suffice it to say, the debts also severely limit our employment and career choices, with this being a brutal reality even prior to 2008.

Many older Canadians might point out, in a sad parody of that Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire, that this is the reality of “growing up.” Unfortunately for virtually all of these people, the reality of growing old is going to necessitate a large tax base and labour pool to look after these aging people. We currently have neither of these requirements developing, and it is frightening to think what the retirement age will be for me in 20 years.

Spending $25 billion in an effort to offer at least some relief to students in debt would permit the vast majority of us to do something that is the basic right of every Canadian: live our lives.

Comparatively, spending $25 billion on stealth fighters is wasteful and unnecessary. Can we envision a situation that requires our air force to penetrate a sophisticated air-defence network and conduct bombing missions? Is our sovereignty seriously threatened by another nation’s air force? Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya represent rather exceptional cases that virtually every member of NATO has no wish to repeat, Syria being a good if unfortunate example. Canada is also hardly under threat from an aging and lethargic Russian military, and it borders on the insane to imagine partaking in bombing missions over China with the United States Air Force.

However, I digress, as they say.

We need $25 billion spent on combating the very real threat of students overburdened by loans, marginalized, and unable to truly live their lives for the benefit of the country as a whole. That is the very real existential threat facing Canadian society and it doesn’t require an over-expensive toy to solve it.


Source: By THOMAS BRUCE - April 19, 2012 (thechronicleherald.ca)

Photo: Canadian Air Force Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth multi-role fighters (Photo by Lockheed Martin)

(19.04.2012)