It's not just doctors and new schools that rural and remote reserves are missing. Many are in need of other infrastructure from roads and bridges to basic housing. This was apparent in the media firestorm earlier this year over Attawapiskat, a First Nations reserve in northern Ontario where residents were forced to live in overcrowded makeshift tents or dilapidated, mouldy housing without plumbing. An extreme case, but poor infrastructure and overcrowded living conditions are common on reserves across the country.

As of last August, 118 First Nations reserves were on boil-water orders, and the federal government's own analysis found 73 per cent of on-reserve water systems were at risk. The price tag for bringing safe water to every reserve is $6.578 billion.

Still the AFN estimates that $169 to $189 million more a year in federal spending would begin to retire unsafe reserve infrastructure like housing and roads.

The $475 million price of one warplane wouldn't close the infrastructure gap between reserves and non-Aboriginal communities. But it would almost double Ottawa's 2011-2012 commitment to its National First Nations Infrastructure Investment Plan, which puts money in schools, houses, roads, and water infrastructure for reserves, either for Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces combined, or all the prairie provinces.

Informing decision-makers

One of the smaller news items during coverage of the 2012 federal budget was the loss in action of the National Council on Welfare. Created under a Liberal federal government in 1969, the council had a mandate to advise the Ministry of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada on the country's social development, particularly poverty and low incomes. It also provided a wealth of information to the public on provincial welfare rates, what poverty costs the rest of society, and possible solutions to poverty.

"We were the only organization that looked annually at welfare incomes province by province, and at poverty profiles: who's in poverty, why are they in poverty, and what can we do about it," the council's former chair, John Rook, told The Tyee Solutions Society.

The federal government dismissed Rook's organization along with several similar advisory groups in science and the environment. On the money it will take to purchase one F-35, the National Council on Welfare could have completed its mission well past the quincentenary of the War of 1812, sometime into the final quarter of the 25th century.

"It was a really sad day when I heard the government wouldn't support something like [fighting] poverty, but they could do things like provide for an airplane that's going to do a lot of damage in the world," Rook lamented.

If he had $475 million to deploy, Rook would not only restore the council's funding. He'd raise it, to pay for research into how ideas like those floated in New Democratic Party MP Tony Martin's bill C-545, An Act to Eliminate Poverty in Canada, could be implemented. (The bill, unlikely to become law, would require government to create a national poverty reduction plan.)

Ivanova would like to see money returned to Statistics Canada, which will lose $53.9 million from its annual budget by 2014-15. According to the Globe and Mail, the national agency's spending had already been frozen for the previous three years, despite contracted increases in wage costs.

The service, which conducts a national census every five years, also completes regular surveys on 350 different topics, including income and labour, employment, health and immigration statistics. It offers the most comprehensive and credible look at Canadian demographics and much else. But last month Statistics Canada quietly released a list of 34 programs that will see cuts or be discontinued to meet its diminished budget.

While few tears may be shed over the loss of two of the four annual hog surveys, other cuts are more alarming. Programs mustered out included inventories of facilities providing care for the elderly or long-term patients with severe mental illnesses; information about Canadian companies involved in drilling and other services in the oil and gas industry; and the longitudinal Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, which provides information on the income of Canadian families -- an essential tool for research on income inequality in Canada. $475 million would have kept those and others running for another eight years (without taking inflation into account).

Defending Canadians at home

Even a government retreat on its jet purchase of one fewer plane wouldn't buy much of a salute from left-leaning think tanks, economists, or anti-poverty groups. $475 million simply isn't enough to buy everything those advocates say Canadians need to be happy, healthy and equal. But even so it could give thousands of vulnerable Canadian households secure shelter, improve health care for tens of thousands of our most marginalized citizens, or help welfare recipients climb out of poverty and stay out.

For many Canadians, those are matters of security more immediate than making sure the Russians stay off our ice flows.

And now it's your turn. Appoint yourself Minister of WhateverYouWish and share in a comment below how you'd spend $475 million, either on a 65th F-35 fighter jet or something else. Or tweet your ideas (@TheTyee).