Prime Minister Mark Carney greets Canadian troops of the 4th Canadian Division as he attends a tour of the Fort York Armoury on June 9, in Toronto.Cole Burston/Getty Images
Compared to where we have been, the increase in defence spending Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Monday is huge news: $9-billion in new spending, starting this year, taking total spending, including the current Defence budget of $39-billion and $14-billion scattered across other government departments, to more than $62-billion. At a stroke that gets us to two per cent of GDP, the NATO target to which we first committed ourselves in 2006, but which until this week had been pencilled in for 2030 at the earliest.
But compared to where we need to be? It’s table stakes. Twenty-three of 32 NATO states already meet or exceed the two per cent threshold, some by wide margins. At the NATO summit in The Hague later this month, discussion will focus on a proposal to increase defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, plus another 1.5 percentage points in defence-related spending. Had Mr. Carney not announced, prior to the meeting, that Canada would at least make good on its past pledges, it’s doubtful they would have let him in the door.
So the commitment that was considered impossible not so long ago – as recently as 2023 Justin Trudeau was reported to have told NATO officials Canada would “never” get to two per cent, a figure he called a “crass mathematical calculation” – is suddenly not just doable, but, it would seem, done. The abruptness of this reversal warrants a degree of skepticism about how real it is. Part of the increase, for example, is the result of moving the Canadian Coast Guard from Fisheries and Oceans to National Defence.
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Similar reclassifications appear to be under way across the government: that $14-billion in non-Defence defence spending was $9-billion not so long ago. But never mind. Mr. Trudeau was right, up to a point: there is no objective significance to two per cent of GDP, as if the country’s defences would collapse if we did not precisely hit it. Rather, it represented the alliance’s best guess at the time as to the scale of the undertaking that was required to safeguard its security; the updated estimate of 3.5 per cent is in view of the growing aggressiveness of Russia, China and their allies (and, left unstated, the growing unreliability of the United States).
The point of it is not the specific number chosen, but rather that it was agreed upon. It represents our commitment to each other, as allies. It is to Canada’s shame, as one of the founding members of NATO, to have been found among the laggards. By the same token, it is enough that the new spending estimates pass muster with NATO: there is no objective standard of what counts as defence spending, either.
It matters, nevertheless, how well the money is spent. To say that Canada’s track record in procurement is poor would be to understate matters by a wide margin. Projects typically come in years late and billions over budget. The associated long-run operating and maintenance costs are haphazardly accounted for.
So it is something of a relief to report that much of the new money is to be spent on improving the Canadian Armed Forces’ existing capacity, rather than enlarging it: raising military pay, repairing infrastructure, and so on. If this were an ordinary government department, this might be put down to the usual public sector disease of “starving the capital account to feed the operating account.”
But Defence has traditionally suffered from the opposite ill. As the Prime Minister said in his speech announcing the new spending, “only one of our four submarines is seaworthy. Less than half of our maritime fleet and land vehicles are operational.” Bringing our existing forces up to speed is a more urgent priority, in the short term, than expansion.
It’s also easier to manage. Pumping more money into military pay is a matter of changing the numbers on the cheques. Acquiring new military hardware – the Prime Minister listed “submarines, aircraft, ships, armed vehicles, artillery, radar, and drones” – is harder: so much so that Defence often fails to spend its annual allotment.
All of which makes it a mystery why the government would have made it even harder, declaring that it will insist that much of what is procured be built, not only in Canada, but with “Canadian steel [and] Canadian aluminum.” It is precisely this tendency to use procurement, not for the purpose of obtaining the best hardware at the lowest price, but as a make-work program for the Canadian defence industry – and as a way of distributing the loot in favoured constituencies – that landed the Canadian military in its present state.
So: spend more on defence? Hurrah. But let’s save the remaining cheers until we see some sign it will be spent better.