The head of the Canadian Forces is standing behind a report that calls $1-billion in savings by slashing military contractors, the size of the reserve force and civilians in the defence department.
Gen. Walt Natynczyk, the chief of the defence staff, said Thursday that the force has already started to reduce the number of full-time reserve force personnel and cut its reliance on civilians but some of the more substantial cuts require further study and approval from the Conservative government.
“It’s a big number,” he said of the $1 billion in administrative costs that could go on the chopping block.
“Of course I’m concerned, but indeed we’re all part of government.”
The proposed cuts put the ruling Conservatives in a politically difficult position. The party has branded itself as the steadfast supporter of Canada’s military and backed it with an ambitious 20-year-plan to re-equip the force.
Cuts to the defence budget are necessary to eliminate the federal deficit, but make the wrong cuts — or cut too deep — and the government risks plunging the military back into a financial funk, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1990s.
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....Natynczyk accepted little of the blame for the growth in the bureaucracy, both since 2009 when he took his current job or in previous positions at the top of Canada’s military hierarchy.
When the federal government cut the defence budget by 35% in 1994-95, Natynczyk said, among the many positions eliminated were those of military cooks and air force flight instructors. Their jobs were contracted out to private companies.
“We also hired more (contracted) folks in the past five years because of the operational tempo. We took a lot more of those military cooks and we sent them into operations,” he said.
“Now what we have to do is demonstrate the discipline and the rigour and go through all those contracts and say, ‘What don’t we need anymore?’ ”
) for downing tools that day to help me find that paper. ;D
