This is a great piece, and a sobering one. I’m painting with a broad brush, but over the past decades the complacency in Canadian politics, the notion that things will somehow just work out, has been starting to have its effects, in domestic as well as foreign policy (I imagine similar could be said about the UK), an unwillingness to deal forthrightly with major policy challenges (compare to the Mulroney government, for example). And now that a crisis really has hit, with the re-election of an aggressive Trump? I worry.
The graph of Canadian expenditure has to be wrong. It shows almost no change over several decades in which the ratio of expenditure to GDP has been roughly constant and GDP has grown a lot
This is a great piece, and a sobering one. I’m painting with a broad brush, but over the past decades the complacency in Canadian politics, the notion that things will somehow just work out, has been starting to have its effects, in domestic as well as foreign policy (I imagine similar could be said about the UK), an unwillingness to deal forthrightly with major policy challenges (compare to the Mulroney government, for example). And now that a crisis really has hit, with the re-election of an aggressive Trump? I worry.
I wonder if France would lend some nuclear equipment to Quebec, France just need to be sure Quebec wouldn’t use it against Canada
The graph of Canadian expenditure has to be wrong. It shows almost no change over several decades in which the ratio of expenditure to GDP has been roughly constant and GDP has grown a lot
The scale is thrown off by the US juggernaut: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?locations=CA
Also relevant to you (and sorry I can't edit these, or maybe I can and i don't know how): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?locations=CA-AU
AUS milex > CAN despite lower population, and consistently so: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=CA-AU
(It's also annoying that there's no constant-dollar version of this figure; why WDI has some but not all figures inflation-adjusted is annoying.)