Blair steals a page from the Harper playbook to justify cuts to National Defence

For more than a decade while it was in power, the former Conservative government railed against a great, faceless bureaucracy it blamed for undermining its ambitions for the Department of National Defence (DND). That tactic appears to have been adopted by the current Liberal defence minister as he explains the government’s intention to cut $1 billion from the defence appropriation. Appearing earlier this week on CBC Radio’s The Current, Defence Minister Bill Blair presented the proposed cut as good fiscal stewardship at a time when ordinary Canadians are feeling the bite of rising inflation and a shortage of affordable housing…