A battle of titans is about to begin in Ottawa's corridors of power. It will be a fight between two giants operating within the non-partisan, permanent side of the government of Canada. General Rick Hillier, the most visionary, charismatic and highest profile Chief of the Defence Staff in decades, will be up against the economist Kevin Lynch, the newly minted Clerk of the Privy Council, one of the most skilled public servants of his generation.
The battle will be over billions of dollars. And it will showcase starkly different world views about Canada's military.
Gen. Hillier will be pushing hard for the Conservatives to quickly deliver on their election commitment to increase funding to the Canadian Forces by $5-billion over five years. But he will go much further than that. In the view of the military leadership, notwithstanding the $13-billion increase in defence funding provided in last year's budget, defence remains underfunded by $3-billion a year. That is regarded as the bare minimum required to transform the Canadian Forces into a more nimble, deployable, operationally structured force, something Gen. Hillier has been pushing for a year now.
Add to that the Conservatives' defence commitments announced during the election -- armed icebreakers, underwater sensor systems strewn throughout Canada's Arctic waters, strategic airlift planes, and a 23,000-person increase to the military -- and you can add another $3-billion a year to that existing shortfall. Thus, the $5-billion over five years Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised is a drop in the bucket.
Enter Mr. Lynch, who is known best for his work at Industry Canada in the late 1990s. While there, he fleshed out a research and innovation agenda that had some transformational programs of its own, such as the Canada Research Chairs and a visionary initiative to connect all of Canada's schools to the Internet.
Kevin Lynch lore also exists within the corridors of National Defence headquarters. There, he is remembered with equal parts disdain and fear as the architect of the Mulroney government's cuts to the defence budget in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he was at Finance Canada and in charge of wrestling the deficit to the ground. Shortly after Mr. Lynch became deputy minister of finance in 2000, it became apparent his views toward defence had not changed in the postdeficit period. Finance under Mr. Lynch's leadership regarded the Defence Department as a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. And Mr. Lynch and his staff viewed military spending as, at best, a fiscal drag and, at worst, an unproductive allocation of scarce resources.
Now Mr. Lynch is the Prime Minister's top official in charge of managing the spending demands across the government. This will have to be achieved while maintaining a balanced budget, continuing to pay down debt and cutting taxes, three items that have always topped both Mr. Lynch's and Mr. Harper's priority list. Judging by past experience, and given his world view, the defence funding issue will not feature at all in Mr. Lynch's priorities. Now, as then, it will be regarded as a "fiscal pressure" to be driven to its lowest level. The fact that Mr. Harper's defence commitments are not among his top five priorities will give Mr. Lynch the mandate he needs to keep a lid on this pressure.
For Gen. Hillier, this is a nightmare scenario. He is driving a military transformation agenda that is not without its critics inside the Canadian Forces. So far, the critics have acquiesced because the general's plan is premised on a massive funding increase for new equipment, and he is seen as someone who can deliver. But now he will be battling his most formidable opponent yet: a former Finance Department, Bank of Canada and International Monetary Fund economist who has little time for military matters, especially ones that involve big money.
Mr. Lynch will be loath to give anything but the bare minimum to the military, especially given the large increase in funding provided last year. Most of the other countless fiscal demands Ottawa currently faces will be much higher on the Clerk's agenda than a further boost to the defence budget. Gen. Hillier is one tough customer, very smart, a real leader, and a fighter. But he is entering a new field of battle, one that is waged over scarce resources within a complex bureaucratic system. This is a battleground on which he is largely untested, against an opponent who is a virtual legend.
The Clerk of the Privy Council might well be a more formidable foe than the Bosnian Serbs or the Taliban forces that Gen. Hillier has fought in the past. His challenge will be to transform himself quickly from highly decorated field general into a top-rate tactician within the bureaucratic war zone of
Ottawa.
The Ottawa careers of Gen. Hillier and Mr. Lynch have not coincided, so they do not know one another well. But that will change over the coming months. The stakes are high for both men, the Canadian Forces and, ultimately, the country, and the battle will be interesting theatre for those who have a window on it.
Eugene Lang was chief of staff
to Liberal defence ministers John McCallum and Bill Graham while General Rick Hillier was Chief of the Defence Staff, and he was a senior economist at Finance Canada when Kevin Lynch was deputy minister of finance.