Shooting blanks: Why so many Canadian defence policies fail to launch

With absolutely no exceptions, every defence policy presented by the Canadian government over the past five decades has presented a vision of the world beyond our borders going to hell in a handbasket. The wars may be different, the adversaries might change, threats might have evolved — but the language almost always stays the same. And almost without exception, none of those defence policies ever lived up to their hype, or to the expectations and political spin that accompanied them. The ink wasn’t even dry on some defence policies before they were being dismissed by people in government as unaffordable…