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He gets there, eventually. But only barely — it’s a half-sentence in the second-last paragraph. But the conclusion is still right: Saunders says that we’re going to have to start spending more on defence. But spend it how?

I’ve been banging this drum for years. I don’t know if it’s my history degrees or my cynicism, but I’ve always believed that Canadians haven’t grasped how much of a historical anomaly the past generation of history has been. We are fabulously wealthy and fabulously safe, and have probably been both of those things just long enough for a critical mass of Canadians to come to take it for granted. Now that we are slowly and painfully realizing that the world isn’t the nice place we assumed it is, and our allies are not necessarily as reliable as we’ve lazily counted on, we’re going to have to see to our own defences — fast.

In a challenging global environment, it’s hard to think of a better way to strengthen Canada than by immediately building on the existing success of the Army Reserve

The problem, of course, is that a byproduct of our perceived near-total security is that we are flaky about defence. Incredibly so. This is especially true on matters of procurement. “Lamenting Canadian military procurement” is a phrase you can use more-or-less interchangeably with the more-common “flogging a dead horse” but one brief example illustrates the point.

A few years ago, the British realized their Second World War-vintage 9mm pistols were in need of replacement. They needed 25,000 new 9mms. So … they got them. That’s it. They picked a pistol, bought them, and had them in service in two years. You know why? Because it’s not that hard to buy a pistol. Canada, by coincidence, also realized a few years ago, in 2016, that we needed replacements for our Second World War-vintage 9mm pistols. We also decided we needed 25,000 of them. So this is virtually a twin of the British procurement, which they completed in two years. And we hope to have them in service … by 2026. At the earliest. Ten years after we started.