Rebuilding Canada's Military

Canada's new Prime Minister, Steven Harper, has several big jobs ahead of him. One of the hardest and most expensive will also be one of the easiest and most rewarding.
Rebuilding the Canadian military.
Canada has a superb body of troops; well disciplined, well trained, well motivated - and saddled with equipment no self-respecting Third World nation would keep around. The latest acquisition was a set of leaky second hand submarines, one of which nearly went down for the final time during delivery.
The Liberals never really believed in the military. They were content in the fact that the US would never allow an invasion by a foreign power, since it would endanger the US as well. Therefore, the ruling party felt it could safely earmark military funding for more appropriate uses - like patronage.
As a result, the Canadian Armed Forces are equipped with leaking subs, ships with metal fatigue, 20 year old tanks, unarmored patrol vehicles, and obsolete everything.

Fortunately - perversely - this helps.
The Harper government now has reason to scrap everything - start from the ground up. New planes. New guns.
After 20 years of Liberal multi-million dollar make-work programs in the Maritime provinces, that lasted a year each, the Conservatives can set up a military shipyard and build state of the art patrol ships. They could retire the current (hah!) fleet, and re-equip the navy with vessels that can do the job.
Unlike the NATO powers, who must rework their anti-Russian forces into anti-terrorist forces somehow, the Canadian army can just rebuild straight into a 21st century military.

Let's see if Harper and his people are smart enough to see the possibilities.

The Small Town Hick also blogs on The Blogger News Network.