Trudeau marks NATO’s 70th anniversary

Prime minister to highlight Canada’s contributions, while defending questions on share of GDP spending

LONDON — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will seek to deflect questions about Canadian defence spending when he meets with fellow NATO leaders starting Tuesday by pointing to Canada’s numerous other contributions to the military alliance. Leaders from all 29 NATO member states have started to gather in London to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the alliance, which was created at the start of the Cold War to defend

North America and Western Europe from the Soviet Union.

More recently, the alliance has fought in Afghanistan, ousted Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, patrolled for pirates off the Horn of Africa and established a line of defence in Eastern Europe against Russian aggression.

Canada has been involved in all those efforts and more, including leading a NATO training mission in Iraq and contributing fighter jets to patrol Romanian airspace and frigates to patrol the Mediterranean and Black seas.

The prime minister will repeatedly highlight those contributions starting with a roundtable discussion with his Dutch counterpart on Tuesday, before leaders formally meet behind closed doors Wednesday to discuss NATO’s future.

“We are going to talk about the things we are already doing and why those things matter and why the contributions we are making are real and are concrete,” a senior government official said in a background briefing on Friday, given to reporters in Ottawa on condition the participants not be identified.

Yet the message will have an air of defensiveness about it as Canada has been facing pressure from NATO and the U.S. to spend more on its military.

All NATO members agreed in 2014 to move toward spending two per cent of their national gross domestic products — a measure of a country’s total economic output — on defence, a target to be reached within a decade. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg describes this as “burden-sharing.”

Yet Canada is set to spend about 1.31 per cent of its gross GDP on defence for the second year in a row. While that is more than several years ago, it still ranks in the bottom half of alliance members, at 20th out of 29 countries.

Canada’s spending levels, which are expected to peak at 1.4 per cent in 2024-25, come despite strong pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to spend more, with the Americans having previously sent letters to Ottawa demanding Canada step it up.

The threat is that the U.S. at some point might no longer see Canada as serious about defence and start to take unilateral steps to secure the Arctic, the border or other shared areas of concern — with its own forces, on its own terms.