Canada this year will meet NATO’s target of spending two percent of its GDP on defence, the country’s prime minister has announced, calling it a necessary step amid growing global instability and Canada’s over-dependence on the US.
Calling Canada “too reliant on the United States”, Mark Carney told a news conference in Toronto on Monday that it will hit the two percent GDP target “half a decade ahead of schedule. And we will further accelerate our investments in years to come”.
Carney warned that global threats are “unravelling the rules-based international order” and that middle powers like Canada must adapt.
“Threats from a more dangerous and divided world are unravelling the rules-based international order, an order that was fused by the settlements at the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, an order on which Canada has relied for longer than many of our lifetimes,” he said.
Highlighting growing strategic competition and recent controversial steps by the US, Carney said: “Now the United States is beginning to monetise its hegemony, charging for access to its markets and reducing its relative contribution to our collective security.”
Saying that Canada must play a more active role in shaping a secure and prosperous world, he added that Canada “can help create a new era of integration between like-minded partners that maximises mutual support over mutual dependency, a new system of cooperation that promotes greater resilience, rather than merely a quest for greater efficiency.”
“Now we can aspire to such a world, but aspiration without effort is just empty rhetoric,” Carney said.
Carney further pledged reforms in procurement and a focus on domestic manufacturing to strengthen defence capabilities.
“We should no longer send three-quarters of our defence capital spending to America,” he said, adding that Canada “will invest in new submarines, aircraft, ships, armed vehicles and artillery, as well as new radar drones and sensors to monitor the sea floor and the Arctic”.
Carney also announced the creation of a new defence procurement agency “guided by that new defence industrial strategy” and overseen by a new Cabinet-level official.
Noting Canada’s geographic vulnerability, he said: “The long-held view that Canada’s geographic location will protect us is becoming increasingly archaic. Threats which felt far away and remote are now immediate and acute.”
“We want a more reliable world, we need a stronger Canada,” he said, stressing that “there can be no true security without economic prosperity.”
