Defence minister’s candid talk
No luck getting cabinet to boost spending
This week, Defence Minister Bill Blair made a rare admission for a federal cabinet minister: He said he keeps trying to get the rest of cabinet to fund the Canadian military to NATO standards, but nobody’s biting.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s important, but it was really hard (to) convince people that that was a worthy goal,” Blair said in a Wednesday address to the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a foreign affairs think tank.
Blair was speaking specifically about boosting Canadian defence spending to the NATO standard of two per cent of GDP, which he referred to as a “magical threshold.”
“Nobody knows what that means, they didn’t know how much that is and they didn’t know what we were going to spend money on, so I couldn’t make a defence policy argument to meet that spreadsheet target of two per cent,” he said.
Only a few years ago, it was typical for NATO members to fall well short of the two per cent threshold. In 2018, for instance, spending 1.23 per cent of GDP on defence put Canada roughly on par with Germany, The Netherlands and Portugal, among others.
But Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked a massive defence-spending boost among the alliance. Germany, most notably, green lit a rearmament plan with the specific goal of hitting the NATO threshold.
The effect is that Canada is now a conspicuous outlier among NATO members, with defence spending that ranks 26th out of 31 nations.
According to a 2023 report by the NATO Secretary General, Canada is the only member of the alliance to fail on both spending metrics tracked by the organization: the two-per-cent threshold and the requirement that at least one-fifth of the defence budget be spent on equipment.
This is a perennial sticking point in Canada’s NATO membership. In February, both NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. ambassador to Canada David Cohen publicly chastised Canada for failing to deliver on its military commitments. Years earlier, then-u.s. president Donald Trump said Canada was “slightly delinquent” when it came to its NATO funding.
While the two-per-cent target is an arbitrary standard, set by NATO member countries in 2014, Canada has faced a number of material consequences for its disproportionately threadbare military.
When NATO members shored up the alliance’s eastern flank against Russia in 2022, Canada was only able to pledge a contingent of 2,200 troops to Latvia, and that deployment initially lacked basic capabilities such as air defence and anti-drone technology.
When a 10-nation alliance mobilized to counter Houthi attacks on civilian shipping in the Red Sea, Canada was only able to deploy two officers to serve aboard a U.S. vessel.
Just last June, Canada was unable to participate in a NATO air exercise over Europe because almost all of the RCAF fleet was in the shop.
While Canadians have traditionally been lukewarm about their military in the post-cold War era, a number of recent polls have shown measurable surges in support for higher defence spending.
A June 2023 Angus Reid Institute poll found 24 per cent of Canadians saying that “military preparedness” should be Canada’s top priority in foreign affairs. In 2015, just 12 per cent of Canadians held that view.
In August 2023, 75 per cent of respondents to an Ipsos poll said that Canada should boost its defence spending. Notably, this support wasn’t sparked by a public desire to meet NATO targets. Rather, it was to ensure the Armed Forces “can protect Canadian territory and sovereignty.”
In April 2024, the Canadian government outlined a major overhaul of its defence spending, including $8.1 billion on new equipment and a plan to purchase new fighter jets. The plan, if followed, will bring Canadian defence spending to 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2029–30.
Blair was at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute to outline a planned $40-billion strategy to fund Norad over the next 20 years, and his prepared remarks focused heavily on the various reasons a country like Canada might need to worry about defence spending, with Chinese and Russian expansionism in the Arctic being one major example.
“Most states are investing in new and emerging military technology, like longrange cruise missiles, modern submarines and hypersonic weapons that move faster and are harder to detect,” he said.