Canada’s plan to meet its NATO targets is better late than never. Or is it?

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Canada at NATO: A farce in three acts.

Act One: As NATO leaders convened at last week’s summit in Washington, the government of Canada was under intense diplomatic pressure to live up to its long-standing commitment to meet the official NATO target for defence spending of two per cent of GDP.

Twenty-three of 32 NATO members have already met the target. Canada is one of the few that has not. What is more, it is the only NATO country that has no announced plan to get there. With war raging in Ukraine and the threat of more breaking out elsewhere, the patience of our NATO partners, notably the U.S., has clearly run out.

Even before the summit, a bipartisan group of 23 U.S. senators had sent the Prime Minister a letter advising they were “profoundly disappointed” at Canada’s failure to “meet its obligations.” Biden administration officials warned their counterparts in the Trudeau government that Canada faced being singled out for criticism at the meeting, possibly publicly.

On the eve of the summit, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, accused Canada of “riding America’s coattails,” a policy he described as “shameful.” The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, chimed in the next day: “It’s time for our northern ally to invest seriously in the hard power required to help preserve prosperity and security.” A Wall Street Journal editorial called Canada “a NATO scofflaw.”

Act Two: All through this barrage, Canada’s Minister of National Defence, Bill Blair, had been assuring everyone that, before the summit was through, Canada would produce a “credible, verifiable” plan to meet the 2-per-cent target.

Indeed, the minister had been insisting for weeks that the target had already been met, implicitly, in last April’s defence policy update. True, it only committed Canada to increase spending to 1.76 per cent of GDP over five years (a number that is itself in dispute.) But, the minister said, if you included various uncosted proposals, such as a plan to buy an unspecified number of submarines, it would probably be enough to put us over.

Nevertheless, he seemed to suggest something more concrete was afoot. Reports emerged that Canadian officials were scrambling to put together a plan at the last minute. This led to some head-scratching, even among sympathetic observers. If you were going to announce a plan to get to 2 per cent, why would you wait until you were actually at the summit to produce it? Why take such a pummelling in the international press if you are going to do what is demanded of you in the end?

At any rate, there was Mr. Blair, on the summit’s second day, announcing the same vague proposal to buy submarines, only slightly formalized. As before, there were no cost figures attached, nor any timeline. And the government still could not say exactly how many subs it planned to purchase, only that it was “up to 12.”

But the announcement, it turned out, was merely to buy time for another. Sources told the media the Prime Minister would unveil the long-promised plan to meet our NATO commitments the following day.

Act Three: On Thursday, just as the summit was wrapping up, the Prime Minister delivered. Canada, he announced, “fully expects” to raise defence spending to its NATO-mandated level – in 2032. Only … there were still no specifics, no detailed plan explaining how it would be achieved – or financed.

Oh that: that’s coming, he said. In 2028. Four years from now, whoever is in government at that time will tell us how they hope to meet a commitment four years later that we signed onto 14 years before.

Or at least, they might. The party leader most likely to be in power then, Pierre Poilievre, would make no commitments to keeping our commitments. Mind you, by then the target may be obsolete. NATO may have raised it to 2.5 or 3 per cent. Or we may be in a world war.

The Prime Minister himself seemed decidedly iffy about the whole thing, referring to the 2-per-cent target as a “crass mathematical calculation” and complaining of having to meet “some nominal targets” based on arbitrary “accounting practices.” He could just give “every Coast Guard member a handgun,” he mused, but what would that accomplish? (It would make them better armed than much of the Canadian military, for starters.)

The policy of the government of Canada, then, after three days of summiteering, after the weeks of back-and-forth that preceded it, and after years of dodging and weaving before that, remains essentially unchanged. We will meet our commitments to our NATO allies on the same timeline, for all practical purposes, as the Prime Minister was reported to have given them a year ago: “Never.”