National Defence Minister Bill Blair tours the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries annual defence industry trade show CANSEC in Ottawa on May 29, 2024.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
In 2006, the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed to raise annual defence spending to at least 2 per cent of gross domestic product. At the time, just seven of 26 members met the standard. Canada wasn’t even close.
What happened next makes the Paris agreement on climate change look like a paragon of success. By 2014, the number of countries fulfilling the NATO promise had fallen to three. The Russian occupation of Crimea, and later demands from then-U.S. president Donald Trump for allies to spend more on defence, led that number to rise, but only slightly. Just 10 countries cleared the 2-per-cent hurdle in 2021. Canada remained among the bottom-dwelling majority.
Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday that “more than 20″ members of what is now a 32-nation alliance will hit the 2-per-cent target – not in some hypothetical future, but this year.
Canada has been hiding at the back of the class for decades. That’s suddenly a very lonely place.
Last month, 23 U.S. senators sent a blunt letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They wrote that they are “concerned and profoundly disappointed” with Canada, and “we will expect your government and every NATO member that has not met the two per cent defence spending threshold to have a plan to reach this benchmark as soon as possible.”
John Ibbitson: Budget 2024 lacks defence spending needed to meet NATO commitments
And that’s a message from friends. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, polite requests could be replaced by Godfather-style offers we can’t refuse.
The challenge for Ottawa is that spending billions more dollars on defence means finding those dollars. As I wrote last week, the choices involve raising taxes or cutting spending on other public services. There’s no magic money on offer. Doing stuff means paying for stuff.
In 1960, Canada spent 4.2 per cent of GDP on defence – equal to more than $120-billion today, or triple the current budget. We had a relatively large and modern military. But as the 1960s wore on, other priorities took precedence. People wanted health care over new fighter jets, and it’s not hard to understand why. Defence spending fell to 2 per cent of GDP by 1972 and, except for a small bump in the 1980s, it kept falling.
The collapse of the Soviet Union saw most of NATO follow Canada’s lead. In the 1980s, Germany’s large army had 3,500 tanks. By the time of the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014, it had just 225.
Canadian defence spending fell below 1 per cent of GDP at the end of the Harper years. The Trudeau government has quietly raised spending, though some of the increase is a statistical trick. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, a 0.2-per-cent rise in spending in 2017, to 1.35 per cent of GDP, was largely the result of counting veterans benefits as military spending, as NATO rules allow. It makes Canada look less bad, but doesn’t make our military any more capable.
And military capability is the issue. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are showing what new and deadly military technologies are out there. The Canadian Armed Forces are not equipped with, or equipped to defend against, many of them.
The last time Canada went to war, in Afghanistan, the adversary was armed with 19th-century tech: no tanks, no artillery, no air force, no missiles, no electronic countermeasures, no cyber, no drones. Today’s likely adversaries all have 21st-century capabilities.
Consider Yemen’s Houthis. They’re in an undeclared war with the U.S. and other NATO forces in the Red Sea; the U.S. Navy recently described it as its most intense combat since the Second World War.
The Houthis are in some respects better armed than many NATO militaries, including Canada’s. They’ve launched hundreds of long-range attacks using ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. Their anti-aircraft missiles have brought down U.S. drones. They have vast stocks of anti-armour missiles. The Canadian Armed Forces are largely or entirely deficient in all of these, and in the tech to defend against them.
Next month’s NATO summit in Washington has the Trudeau government scrambling for cover. Ottawa aims to get defence spending to 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2030, and last week Defence Minister Bill Blair said there could be more announcements coming that might get Canada to the 2-per-cent target – by the end of the decade.
Unless the Europeans start backsliding (and there are signs of that in Germany), a vague Canadian pledge to get to 2 per cent, maybe, six budgets and two governments from now is not going to cut it. Nor will it give our military the tools to deter and defeat the adversaries they are likely to face.
In an ideal world, the share of our economy going to the armed forces would be zero-point-zero per cent. But that’s not the world we live in.