U.S. froze joint defence board over Canada’s lack of progress on military spending, official says

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The U.S. government’s decision to freeze a joint defence board with Canada was prompted by Ottawa’s lack of a detailed strategy for increasing military spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 and by its reconsideration of a plan to purchase American-made F-35 fighter jets, a Pentagon official says.

In a background briefing for Canadian reporters in Washington on Thursday, the official provided more detail on the reasons the U.S. announced earlier this week that it would suspend the Permanent Joint Board on Defense. The Globe and Mail agreed not to name the official as a condition of taking part in the briefing.

The initial announcement was made in a string of social-media posts by Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defence for policy, who said Canada had “failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.” He also linked to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s viral World Economic Forum speech from January that was widely viewed as a rebuke of U.S. President Donald Trump.

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Both Mr. Carney and Defence Minister David McGuinty have pushed back on Mr. Colby’s criticism, pointing to the ways Mr. Carney has increased military spending since replacing Justin Trudeau as prime minister. Last year, Canada fulfilled its NATO commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence and announced $80-billion of new money for the military over five years.

Mr. Carney has also played down the significance of the board, which was set up in 1940 at a summit in Ogdensburg, N.Y. Comprising military leaders and civilian officials from both countries, its purpose is to study major defence issues and make recommendations to government. It has not met since 2024.

The Pentagon official said Thursday that Mr. Carney’s actions so far are not enough. Canada and most other NATO members agreed to Mr. Trump’s demand last year to set a 2035 target of increasing direct military spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, with an additional 1.5 per cent for infrastructure and industrial spending that supports defence and national security.

Ottawa has not yet laid out a clear path to reach that goal or committed the money to specific projects that would get the country there, the official said.

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The official pointed to Canada’s F-35 review as a specific complaint. In March of last year, Ottawa announced that it was reconsidering the purchase of dozens of the fighter jets after Mr. Trump launched a trade war against Canada and threatened to annex the country and make it the “51st state.”

More than a year later, Canada is still reviewing the plan and has not said when it will make a decision. Mr. Trump walked away from trade negotiations last October.

Maya Ouferhat, Mr. McGuinty’s spokesperson, said Thursday that Canada was undertaking a “generational uplift” of the military, including modernizing the NORAD early warning system with over-the-horizon radar and buying 12 under-the-ice submarines.

“Canada has made historic investments in continental defence, Arctic security, and military readiness,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole said the F-35 is the best aircraft for Canada’s needs, including collaborating with the U.S. for continental defence in the Arctic. But he said the government should not go through with the purchase while Mr. Trump maintains punitive tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminum, autos and other products.

“I’m glad the government is holding firm on this,” Mr. O’Toole, who served as a captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force, said in an interview. “The reality is, why would we say that we’re buying that when we’re being treated this way?”

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He said Canada was a “free-rider for way, way, way, way too long” on defence, but that Mr. Carney is turning that around.

“This is the Pentagon trying their best to ignore the last year.”

Earlier this week, Mr. Carney defended the lack of a plan to reach the 2035 defence spending target, a gap that has also been highlighted by the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The Prime Minister said that changes in military technology – such as drones controlled by artificial intelligence, which have become ubiquitous in the Ukraine war – mean the government needs more time to figure out what to spend defence dollars on.

“That’s the reason why we don’t just draw a simple line, take a list that was prepared five years ago and say, ‘Yeah, we’ll have all of that,’ ” he said.