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See below for CBC's article on the release of the government report and their figures ...

From CTV.ca

Afghanistan mission to cost $28B, group says

Oct. 8 2008

On the eve of a parliamentary report on the financial cost of the Afghanistan mission for Canada, an independent group has released their own answer on the subject: $28 billion.

The Rideau Institute, an advocacy group and think tank that largely opposes Canada's military participation in Afghanistan, said the mission will cost the government $20.7 billion by 2011.

In addition, the Institute said the direct and indirect costs to the Canadian economy due to soldiers' deaths and injuries will be about $7.6 billion.

Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page will release his report Thursday morning at 11 a.m. ET. The report was due to be released last month, but concerns of interfering with the election led Page to delay the release -- although Canadians will head to the polls on Tuesday.

The Conservatives have pegged the cost of the Afghanistan mission from 2002 to 2008 at about $8 billion. A significantly higher cost could be a political problem for Harper.

Support for the mission is lowest in Quebec, where the Tories are struggling to gain seats in the election.

Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute and co-author of the report, said he may be taking it a step further than Page's estimate, but obviously won't know until Thursday.

"We took it a second step further by also looking at the loss to the economy of the wounded and killed soldiers," he told CTV.ca.

He said he based his estimate on some American studies that looked at the financial cost of the Iraq war, and included the price to health care. One such study was authored by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. In 2006, he suggested the Iraq war had cost the U.S. $2 trillion, about 10 times the amount previously thought.

Staples said the war in Afghanistan has also come at the cost of Canada's contribution to UN peacekeeping missions.

"We've given up so much in this war, not just in terms of government costs but also the lost contributions of all these young men and women that have died, and also internationally -- we're contributing a lot less to UN peacekeeping where we used to do a lot more," Staples said.

"We used to be Number One in the early 1990s. We had more than 1,000 troops involved in UN peacekeeping. Now we're down to something like 160. In fact, we send more police for UN peacekeeping than soldiers, so when you count the number of soldiers involved it's roughly 50 or 60."

Another report on the cost of the Afghan mission by David Perry, a former deputy director of Dalhousie University's Centre for Foreign Policy Studies pegged the bill at $22 billion.

In light of the global economic downturn and a diminishing budget surplus, Staples suggested the Afghanistan mission could put significant stress on government coffers.

"It's clear that the government's budgetary and foreign policy hands will be tied if it intends to keep our troops in Afghanistan through December 2011," Staples said earlier Wednesday in a news release.

There are about 2,000 Canadian soldiers based in Afghanistan's volatile Kandahar province.

Since the mission began in 2002, 97 Canadian solders and one diplomat have been killed in Afghanistan.

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From CBC.ca

Canada's Afghan mission could cost up to $18.1B - Total could amount to $1,500 per household

October 9, 2008

Kevin Page, Canada's parliamentary budget officer, said Thursday that some federal departments did not respond to his requests for information on Afghanistan mission costs. (CBC)The military mission in Afghanistan could cost a total of $18.1 billion or $1,500 per Canadian household by 2011, according to a government report that also criticized how financial records are being kept.

Canada has spent $7.7 billion to $10.5 billion on costs related to its mission in the past six years, and may spend $13.9 billion to $18.1 billion by the end of the 2010-11 budget year, according to The Fiscal Impact of the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan tabled by parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page on Thursday.

However, a lack of government consistency and transparency has made the figures difficult to estimate, and they likely understate the full costs of the mission, the report says.

The mission began in 2002, and Canada currently has about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan's volatile Kandahar province. So far, 98 Canadians, including one diplomat, have died in the conflict.

The release of the report was agreed upon by all leaders of Canada's major political parties in September, despite concerns that the results could sway the outcome of Tuesday's federal election.

'When we have men and women in uniform, diplomats and development workers who are putting their lives on the line, the government will spend what is necessary to make sure they are safe and successful.'
—Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Prime Minister Stephen Harper had previously estimated that the total cost so far would amount to less than $8 billion.

The figures released Thursday are incremental costs — that is, they do not include costs such as salaries that would be incurred by Canada's military anyway, even if it were not in Afghanistan. The cost of military operations, veterans benefits and foreign aid related to the mission were all part of the estimate.

However, Page said certain costs weren't included due to the difficulty of estimating them reliably, and this suggests the figures "may likely understate the costs" of the mission. Such additional costs include danger pay and the need to replace equipment sooner if it is deployed in war rather than peacetime.

Lack of government transparency

Part of the problem was that certain departments did not respond to requests for financial data that would allow a "rigorous bottom-up analysis," the report says. Instead, the report mainly relies on publicly available departmental performance reports for departments such as National Defence and the Canadian International Development Agency. It also uses some assumptions based on the experiences of other countries.

As Page tabled the report, he criticized the government's accounting methods, citing a lack of consistency, transparency and mission-specific cost records by department. He listed these as challenges faced by his team in coming up with estimates.

"To date, Parliament has been provided with only limited information, often after the fact, on these costs, and has not been given estimates on future costs that may be incurred in the support of the veterans of these conflicts," the report says.

Page added that Canada "appears to lag behind the best practices of other jurisdictions in terms of the quality and frequency of war cost reporting to their respective legislatures."

He later said he still hopes to get the full data and do a proper "bottom-up" analysis.

Uncertainty in the figures was attributed to differing assumptions related to the amount of capital employed in Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of injuries. The estimates for the future costs assume that the number of deployed soldiers will remain unchanged.

Annual cost overruns for the mission up until 2006-07 ranged from 29 per cent in 2002-03 to a whopping 310 per cent ($321 million) in 2005-06, based on planned versus actual spending figures.

The report notes that sometimes spending figures differed between the Department of National Defence and the department's finance and corporate services.

'Will spend what is necessary': Harper

Speaking in British Columbia after the report's release, Harper said his government has "been clear that the cost is high" on the Afghanistan mission — and that the "real cost" is the loss of Canadian lives on the ground in that country.

"We needed to spend more on both the military and non-military sides. We are doing important work there as part of an international effort," Harper told reporters in Richmond, where he was on the campaign trail.

"When we have men and women in uniform, diplomats and development workers who are putting their lives on the line, the government will spend what is necessary to make sure they are safe and successful."

But Harper also said the Page report includes long-term costs that the government believes "don't relate to the day-to-day of the mission."

The Opposition Liberals, who were in power when the Afghan mission began, were quick to point out Thursday that the Conservatives had campaigned before the last election on a promise to be a more transparent and accountable government. Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said Harper had broken that promise.

"We don't know, year in and year out, what were the problems, how much we've gone over the budgetary framework," Dion told reporters in Halifax.

"I think Canadians are entitled to that information, and they'll get it with me."

Michael Ignatieff, deputy Liberal leader, told CBC News in an interview that Page "had to struggle every step of the way" to get numbers out of the federal government departments involved in the mission.

"You can't put a limit on protecting Canadian life in the field; OK. But I want to have lots of budgetary discipline as we go forward," he said.

Questioned about the fact that the previous Liberal government also did not release regular updates on the cost of the mission, Ignatieff replied: "We're in opposition. They're the government. The government is responsible for telling Canadians what this thing is going to cost us."