Can the U.S. finally just shut up about Canada’s defence spending?

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Our trailblazing Prime Minister was at the podium in Montreal. “Over the last few decades,” Mark Carney said, “Canada has neither spent enough on our defence nor invested enough in our defence industries.”

That has to change, he added, setting out plans for far more domestic spending on military hardware because “the assumptions that defined decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy have been turned upside-down.”

His government has budgeted major increases to meet NATO’s spending requirements of 2 per cent of gross domestic product, and pledged to reach the new target of 5 per cent by 2035.

It is a turn that is needed, and one that addresses long-standing reflex protestations by Donald Trump and other U.S. presidents that we are laggards in military outlays. Given Mr. Carney’s spending surge, Mr. Trump might wish to finally shut up about it – though it’s unlikely.

What’s more likely is that he’ll be in high dudgeon over Canada’s plan to diversify military purchases away from his kingdom. As a sign of his imperial control, we should be sourcing from him, he believes – as if paying tribute to Rome. But riskily, the Prime Minister is telling the predator President that it’s not going to happen.

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Mr. Carney’s speech in Montreal struck a lot of right notes. But there were important things left unsaid, especially in regard to our defence-spending record, that previous prime ministers probably would have liked said.

There’s a paradox to be considered. Canada’s history of meagre defence spending leaves much to be desired, but our record on war and peace over time has been commendable.

There has been an obsession in recent times with raw defence spending numbers, as if they are the sole criteria for gauging a country’s war-and-peace performance. It ignores so many other variables, and it has allowed Mr. Trump, whose US$1-trillion Pentagon budget is more than that of the next eight or nine NATO countries’ military spending combined, to lord it over everyone, Canada included.

But where, speaking of variables, did America’s vast superiority in military spending get it in its two biggest wars of the past 60 years in Afghanistan and Vietnam? Losersville. Had leaders in Washington listened to Lester Pearson on Vietnam or to Jean Chrétien on Iraq, they would have been well served. But that’s not something you hear mentioned when Americans impugn our armed forces.

Nor do you hear how Canada, with its lamentably small budget, took the lead role among NATO countries in Kandahar, the central battlefield of the conflict in Afghanistan, and performed effectively. Canada’s peacekeeping missions in Suez, Cyprus and Bosnia should not be forgotten, nor the pivotal role we played in bringing about the treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. When defence budgets were larger, Canada made outstanding contributions in the world wars, and to a strong fight in Korea.

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With his defence-spending strategy, Mr. Carney is correctly heeding the context of the times. But was that not true, too, of Mr. Chrétien and Stephen Harper? When our military spending took a real hit, it was in the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War. Roughly 50 per cent of military budgets had been devoted to countering the Soviet threat. It was entirely logical that deep cuts could be made, and they were - which was critical in ridding Canada of its debilitating deficit. In the U.S., a big peace dividend never came. The cuts were very small. The U.S. national debt there now stands at a staggering US$38-trillion, a lot of it due to unnecessarily astronomical outlays by the Pentagon.

Defence spending increased significantly in Mr. Harper’s first few years in power. But in response to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the focus had to shift toward tackling the deficit. Planned increases never came.

Circumstances, including being located outside of the war theatre of Europe, meant there was less pressure on Canada to spend on arms, allowing budget resources to go toward building a social safety net that is superior to that of the United States.

Canadians are frequently reminded by Trump officials how thankful we should be to have them and their might next door to protect us. There is some truth to that. But it need not be overstated.

We are not a country that has faced foreign invasions; in the event of one, the Americans would have come to our defence, not out of any special favour to us but rather out of their own self-interest in not wanting a hostile power on their doorstep.

If they came in now, they’d never leave. Hence the trajectory in our trailblazer’s speech.