Canada Pledges to Hit NATO Military Spending Target by 2032
Long seen as punching below its weight, Canada, the world’s second-largest country by area and one of its seven wealthiest economies, said it would meet its NATO pledge to significantly bolster its military spending by 2032.
But everything about the commitment, which NATO is pushing all alliance members to make, is fraught.
Some have criticized the timeline as too protracted, though it is actually compressed if seen through the lens of the slow pace of global military hardware production.
Canadians, much like many citizens across the developed world, are concerned about housing and public services. Convincing them that it is necessary to dedicate billions of dollars to military equipment will not be easy.
And Canada is expected to hold elections some time before October 2025, meaning that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s defense pledge will not be binding if he loses to his conservative opponent, Pierre Poilievre, who is considered a serious challenger.
“I make promises that I can keep and right now we are, our country, is broke,” Mr. Poilievre said last week, declining to abide by the spending target.
NATO members have pledged to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their militaries.
Canada is far from the only NATO spending laggard. About a third of NATO’s 32 members exceed the 2 percent target, but most of them have security concerns at their borders that motivate them to expand their militaries.
Another third say they will reach that target by the end of this year.
But Canada, much like France, Germany and Italy — which are all members of the Group of 7 industrialized nations — have been slow to catch up and spend below the target.
“We are rich enough that we should be able to do more, and have typically done just enough to keep our allies’ frustrations with us in check,” said Adam Chapnick, a professor of defense studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, although he also stressed that Canada is the seventh-biggest spender in the alliance in absolute dollar terms.
At the margins of a NATO summit in Washington this month, Mr. Trudeau and his defense minister, Bill Blair, announced a plan to spend 2 percent of the country’s economic output on defense by 2032.
Canada currently spends roughly 1.4 percent of its economic output on defense and has plans to increase that to 1.7 percent by the end of the decade.
“We wanted to be able to provide a credible and verifiable response to our allies about what Canada will do to reach the 2 percent and the time frame,” Mr. Blair said in an interview with The New York Times this week.
But the country could not spend faster than its military industry can produce, he said. “We were limited in part by how quickly it takes to actually acquire these big things that we had to procure.”
The possibility of a second Trump presidency adds urgency to the matter. As president, Donald J. Trump browbeat NATO allies for overly relying on American military largess to guarantee post-Cold War peace and demanded that they spend more. The Biden administration has consistently, if more politely, delivered the same message.
But the war in Ukraine has depleted NATO allies’ stocks, and the military industry requires vast investments to ramp up production.
As he seeks to reclaim the White House, Mr. Trump has said that he will not continue to support Ukraine’s war efforts and will instead push for peace. This would most likely leave other NATO members having to either support Mr. Trump, or break with the United States, the heart of the alliance, and back Ukraine without Washington as a partner.
Mr. Blair did not comment on the possible link between the increased spending announcement and the prospect of a second Trump presidency. Instead, he said Canada’s military needs were “urgent,” especially in modernizing and ramping up its presence in the Arctic, which has become a source of tension among major powers.
The importance of reaching the spending target, Mr. Blair added, was to “get the capabilities that we require.”
Still, experts said, declaring a sense of urgency does not necessarily expedite military procurement.
“Military procurements are multiyear projects and therefore threats that are a decade away must be treated as urgent so that the procurement process is finished by the time the need moves from hypothetical to real,” Mr. Chapnick said.
Canada also said it would buy 12 conventionally powered (meaning not nuclear) submarines, a key part of its strategy to expand its military presence in the Arctic, which it sees as an important theater of competition with Russia and China.
Mr. Blair said he expected to have the first submarine delivered by 2030.
On Thursday, the newly appointed chief of the Canadian Armed Forces, Gen. Jennie Carignan, said Canada needed to step up defense to face new risks.
“We are much more open now to both conventional threats and unconventional threats, all at the same time,” she told the news media after officially taking on her position. “So I think that Canadians need to understand that if we are not ready, we might not be able to react appropriately in defense of them.”
“I say we have about five years to get us close enough to be ready to counter those long-range type of threats,” she added.
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