Canada’s age-old stigma against defence spending will cost us dearly

Open this photo in gallery:

Omar Saleh is the chief commercial officer at North Vector Dynamics.

Paul Ziadé is the chief executive officer of North Vector Dynamics and an associate professor at the University of Calgary.

Canada’s commitment to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 is historic. It’s not just a budget line. It’s a signal – that after decades of strategic drift, we intend to matter.

This signal comes at a critical moment. In the Arctic, the likeliest attack vector on North America, Russia’s 2024 military base expansions and China’s icebreaker deployments threaten Canada’s sovereignty over the world’s second-longest Arctic border. As a G7 country, we cannot afford to be a bystander. The 5-per-cent pledge is our answer: a commitment to lead, not follow, in securing our region and alliances.

But if we want this investment to actually deliver – in jobs, innovation, sovereignty or security – we need to confront something deeper than procurement reform or workforce planning.

Because capability isn’t just material, it’s cultural. And that’s where we’ve fallen behind most.

Opinion: The time for Ottawa’s war games is over

Canada should consider hiking GST, other taxes to pay for defence-spending boost: analysts

Canada has spent the better part of 50 years moralizing itself out of national capability. We don’t just lack a defence sector. We lack a public vocabulary for why defence matters. We treat military capacity as something to be minimized, outsourced or tiptoed around – even as we enjoy the benefits of alliance protection, secure trade routes and global market access.

That cultural aversion shows up everywhere. Our procurement system avoids risk. Our investors avoid the sector entirely – most Canadian venture capitalists won’t even look at defence tech. Our universities treat defence partnerships like reputational liabilities. And even with a 5-per-cent commitment, the vision behind it remains unfinished.

And it’s costing us – economically and strategically.

Defence spending at this scale is not just a military act, it’s an industrial policy, a demographic strategy and a national development program. It creates long-horizon demand for complex systems. It anchors clusters of manufacturing hubs, supply chains and applied R&D. It builds technical skills across the trades, engineering and IT. And it generates exportable technologies that drive value far beyond defence.

This is the part we’re missing.

In short, defence is the tool other countries use to solve the very problems we keep saying we want to fix: low productivity, skills shortages, shallow industrial clusters and limited IP retention. Defence is nation building.

But in Canada, we’ve treated it as the one sector we’re not allowed to get serious about.

Open this photo in gallery:

That’s why the 5-per-cent announcement is more than a budget pivot. It’s a cultural confrontation. Because you cannot spend that kind of money and still pretend defence is marginal. You cannot train 50,000 workers for defence-adjacent industries and still tell venture capitalists not to invest in them.

This moment demands honesty. We are no longer a sideline country with sideline responsibilities. We are a G7 economy with advanced technological capabilities and growing regional responsibilities – in the Arctic, in the cyber realm, in aerospace and in global energy security. Pretending otherwise is no longer noble. It’s negligent.

That doesn’t mean public concerns don’t matter. Canadians are right to ask where this money will come from – and what it will displace. Defence spending at this scale must not be an excuse to hollow out the social contract or starve urgent domestic priorities such as health care, housing or education.

This isn’t a binary choice. It’s a design challenge. If we treat defence like a closed ecosystem – one that imports platforms, sidelines Canadian suppliers and piles on cost overruns – then yes, it will drain public trust and fiscal room. But if we treat defence as a public investment strategy – anchored in domestic capacity, workforce development, IP development and retention and dual-use technology – then it doesn’t just complement social priorities, it supports them.

Skilled jobs. Local production. Regional infrastructure. Training programs that create mobility, not dependency. These are not side effects. They are deliverables.

To be clear: This doesn’t mean militarism. It means capacity. It means regarding defence the way we treat health care, housing and energy – as a pillar of national resilience. It means acknowledging that the ability to act in one’s own interest is not unethical, it’s essential.

Let’s stop stigmatizing defence work and instead treat it like aerospace, energy or AI – a complex, dual-use sector where Canada can lead, not lag. Innovations such as the internet, GPS and even duct tape began with military investment.

Defence is no longer just about survival. It’s a test of whether we intend to matter.

Let’s act like we do.