PM sticks to his guns on defence spending, despite U.S. pressure

OTTAWA — The federal government has sent its strongest signals yet that Canada does not plan to bow to U.S. pressure to dramatically increase what it spends on defence.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned at his first NATO meeting in Brussels on Friday that the Trump administration wants allies to draw up plans for boosting defence spending to two per cent of GDP by 2024.

“Our goal should be to agree at the May leaders’ meeting that, by the end of the year, all allies will have either met the pledge guidelines or will have developed plans that clearly articulate how,” Tillerson said.

Those plans are to include annual milestones that countries will be expected to meet on their way to attaining the two per cent target, which all NATO members agreed to work toward in 2014.

The Canadian government is working on a new defence policy, which is expected to be released before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets U.S. President Donald Trump and other NATO leaders in Brussels in May.

Officials have said the policy will include a longterm plan for increased funding for the Canadian military, whose $19-billion budget currently accounts for only one per cent of GDP.

But neither Trudeau nor Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland mentioned the pending defence policy when asked Friday about the Trump administration’s calls for a spending plan.

Both Trudeau and Freeland repeated the government’s previous argument there are ways other than money to measure Canada’s military contributions.

“We understand there are different metrics in terms of evaluating how people are pulling their weight and contributing fully to NATO,” Trudeau said during an event in Toronto. “Canada has always done more than its share in NATO and we will continue.”

The prime minister and Freeland pointed to Canada’s upcoming mission in Latvia as proof of its commitment to the alliance.

Meanwhile, Canadian special forces have taken a more active role in the battle for Mosul, Iraq, where weeks of bloody fighting have failed to dislodge Islamic State fighters.

National Defence revealed the shift on Friday as the government announced it was extending the current mission in Iraq until the end of June.

The hope is that the battle for Mosul will be over by then, at which point the government will have a better handle on the long-term needs in Iraq and change Canada’s contribution as required.

In the meantime, some of the nearly 200 Canadian special forces in northern Iraq have entered east Mosul and are now helping the Iraqi military free the western half of the city.

That represents a significant shift as the Canadians had largely avoided Mosul and spent little time with the Iraqi military, working instead with Kurdish forces to the north and east.