Prime Minister Mark Carney took a victory lap Thursday after Canada finally hit NATO’s 2 percent defense spending target, even as new alliance figures show Ottawa at the bottom of the pack.
Defense Minister David McGuinty brushed off the placement, telling POLITICO the "groundbreaking speed" of Canada’s military buildup during the past 10 months has restored its credibility with allies.
“We're just starting. We're inside the club. We're inside the tent. We've got the credibility. People all over the world know that we're moving forward. We're seriously investing. We're putting our money where our mouths are,” McGuinty told POLITICO on Thursday from Halifax after Carney announced C$3 billion in new military-related spending in Canada’s Atlantic region.
The annual NATO spending audit confirmed a milestone Carney campaigned on: ending Canada’s long run as a laggard on the alliance’s old target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. It came 12 years after Canada and its allies first committed to meet that benchmark, and after U.S. President Donald Trump browbeat Canadian and European allies to stop freeloading off the United States.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte trumpeted the fact Thursday’s report showed every member of the 32-country alliance reached the spending target. Canada was at the bottom of the alliance’s ranking, sharing the spot with Belgium, Albania, Spain and Portugal — all at exactly 2 percent.
“That’s the highest level of defense spending relative to the size of our economy since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Carney said in Halifax at Canada’s largest military base.
But the NATO figures released Thursday show the U.S. in seventh place at 3.19 percent, with several Nordic, Baltic and eastern European countries leading the way: Poland and Lithuania cracked the 4 percent threshold at 4.3 and 4.0 respectively; Denmark, which Trump has accused of being a security laggard, prompting threats to annex its autonomous territory of Greenland, outspent the U.S. at 3.34 percent.
Trump has since foisted a 5 percent of GDP by 2035 target on NATO, which Carney’s government says Canada will also meet.
McGuinty said the NATO assessment was based on projections on the Canadian economy by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“All member countries have to basically open up the books,” McGuinty said. “Show what they're doing, what they're spending, how they're spending. Some things are counted. Some things are not counted.”
The Carney government has pledged to spend tens of billions of dollars on heavy new equipment such as a new fleet of submarines, a new class of navy destroyers and dozens of new fighter jets. It also plans to bolster the country’s civilian and military footprint in the Arctic to counter Russian and Chinese incursions. It recently released a defense industrial strategy that it claims will add 125,000 new jobs and generate a half a trillion dollars in new investment in the sector by 2035.
McGuinty said Canada would continue its spending commitments to Ukraine, something Rutte highlighted in the NATO spending assessment Thursday, amid reports that the U.S. might divert some of its Ukrainian military aid to the war in the Middle East.
“Our resolve and our commitment to support Ukraine remains unchanged,” said McGuinty.
“If the Americans have decided to pivot and they want to make investments in the Middle East, that’s their sovereign choice. But the rest of us in NATO, and the United States, are still involved. We’re definitely aligned with Ukraine,” he added.
In a recent interview, Audra Plepytė, Lithuania’s vice minister of foreign affairs, said Europeans are concerned that support could wane for the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List program that allies use to fund military aid to Ukraine.
“We see that all the European partners, transatlantic partners, including Canada, would contribute to the PURL initiative. It started well, now we see it's slowing down,” she told POLITICO on the margins of a major Canadian defense conference in Ottawa earlier this month.
She said the military aid is needed to keep pressure on Russia, which has shown no interest in a negotiated end to the war.
“Knowing Russia for centuries, because we've been living next to them for centuries, we know that the best deterrence is to make sure that we are prepared to fight,” said Plepytė.
Canada announced a C$200 million contribution to the PURL program in December.
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