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Sajjan clearly gets this. As he warned on Wednesday, our “status quo spending on defence will not even maintain a status quo of capabilities.” In plainer language, we are starving our already small and poorly equipped force to death. This cannot be allowed to continue, and Sajjan says it won’t. The Liberals, he says, are preparing a “significant investment” in defence. “When Canadians hear the defence investment that we are going to be putting in,” he said, “it’s going to be significant. It’s going to be significant because of the hole that we need to come out of.” Sajjan also, pleasingly, didn’t spare past Liberal governments from criticism. He noted this was a failure owned by successive governments, meaning both Conservative and Liberal. And as we’ve written here many times before, in this he’s certainly right.

Sajjan’s words aren’t themselves an investment. We’ll wait to see what the Liberals actually bring to the table, and we confess we have our doubts as to their sincerity. Canada’s post-Second World War history on defence policy speaks, in tragic terms, for itself. But Sajjan, at least, talked about the issue as it truly is. It was what a soldier-turned-defence-minister should sound like.

In his speech, Sajjan confirmed that chronic underfunding has left all three branches of the military stretched to their breaking point.

And that’s a shame, because no one heard him. Oh, sure, the usual suspects (including this editorial board) paid attention. But those same suspects have been sounding this alarm for years. The effectiveness, or lack thereof, of such warnings is all too evident. The only thing people wanted to talk about after his remarks was his own future. Will he resign? Be fired, or shuffled out?