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Closing these bases and distributing the ‘tax savings’ to operational priorities and reassigning Canadian Forces personnel now employed on base administration duties to combat classifications would enable commanders to stabilize and grow operational capabilities within predicted defence budgets.

Senior Canadian Forces officers and Department of National Defence officials have attempted to rid the Canadian Forces of “bases surplus to requirements.” Yet politicians’ anxiety – for instance, that any base closures, no matter how prudent, might cost them votes in affected civilian communities – usually quash such initiatives.

Nevertheless, if Trudeau is serious about cutting fat and redirecting savings towards building a leaner, better equipped military, then he ought to initiate a defence infrastructure review aimed at closing permanently surplus bases and installations. The challenge in such a process is to produce defensible recommendations while holding at bay political lobbyists and partisan pleading.

Should Trudeau decide to rationalize Canada’s defence infrastructure, he should appoint a House of Commons evaluation committee to develop criteria to assess the operational value of every base and installation and then, from that evaluation, to place each base on a “retain or do not retain” list.

With that advice in hand, the prime minister alone and without modifying the committee’s recommendations, should accept or reject the entire list as presented. If he were to refuse the committee’s recommendations, then the entire list must be discarded, otherwise the prime minister would leave himself open to charges of political bias.

Without such a directed process, Canadians will continue to fund unnecessary military infrastructures while the operational units of the Canadian Forces, the heart and muscle of Canada’s national defence at home and abroad, continues along an expensive path to irrelevance.

Douglas Bland is professor emeritus and past chair of the defence management studies program at Queen’s University, Kingston.

