Defence Spending: Too Good to be True

Damian Brooks has been looking at a Canadian Press article which shows that that big budget increase for DND isn't quite as big as the Liberals would have you believe.

Damian, of course, would like to see some graphic representation of the CP figures, and so here we go:



(About creating the chart: the figures supplied by CP were plugged into Microsoft Excel and converted to a GIF chart. This was in turn converted to a JPG using Adobe Photoshop Elements and posted via hello/Picasa.)

Now, the area in red represents the actual dollar figures (in billions of Canadian dollars), while the green represents those figures converted to 2005 dollars. While the Liberals report a spending increase (and in some years they're not lying), in terms of real spending there's been a decrease, and a fairly significant one at that.

Yes, it's smoke and mirrors on the part of the Liberals. And I doubt they're going to become really serious about defence spending unless this upcoming defence review comes up with something really shocking to their system.