I don’t find it at all surprising that Canada’s current Minister of National Defence hasn’t been able to persuade Justin Trudeau and the rest of cabinet that we should live up to our treaty commitments to our NATO allies. I do find it surprising that he’s allowed to say anything on the topic that implies criticism of Justin’s tame ministers:
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 pretty typical for NATO members to fall well short of the two-per-cent threshold. In 2018, for instance, Canada spending 1.23 per cent of GDP on defence put it 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, greenlit a massive rearmament plan with the specific goal of hitting the NATO threshold.
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 Sec.-Gen. Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. ambassador to Canada David Cohen publicly chastised Canada for failing to deliver on its military commitments. Years earlier, U.S. president Donald Trump said Canada was “slightly delinquent” when it came to its NATO funding.
