Carney says Canada will meet NATO target this year
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Carney vows Canada will meet 2% NATO spending pledge this year
Canada will finally meet its NATO defence spending commitment this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Monday. Carney said Canada will rapidly advance its military spending timeline to hit the NATO target of two per cent of national GDP. The federal government currently is spending about 1.45% of GDP on defence and has not hit the two% target since 1990. Canada has come under intense pressure from its allies to swiftly increase its military budget to levels not seen since the Cold War. Monday’s announcement comes just ahead of a major NATO meeting in the Netherlands set for later this month. Allied nations are expected to adopt a plan at that meeting to hike the NATO member spending target to five per cent of national GDP — a level Canada has not reached since the 1950s. It all amounts to a sharp shift in defence policy from a prime minister who only took on the job in March.
Canada will finally meet its NATO defence spending commitment this year as it confronts an alarming new world of threats, Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Toronto Monday morning.
Carney said Canada will rapidly advance its military spending timeline to hit the NATO target of two per cent of national GDP.
“Canada will achieve NATO’s two per cent target this year, half a decade ahead of schedule,” the prime minister said, promising to accelerate that timeline again within the next few years.
Carney said Canada’s defence is too dependent on an increasingly unreliable United States and his government will look to partner more with European allies it moves to build up the domestic industrial base.
“The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony, charging for access to its markets and reducing its relative contribution to our collective security,” he warned.
The federal government currently is spending about 1.45 per cent of GDP on defence and has not hit the two per cent target since 1990 — despite having promised its biggest allies for years that it would.
Canada has come under intense pressure from its allies to swiftly increase its military budget to levels not seen since the Cold War.
Monday’s announcement comes just ahead of a major NATO meeting in the Netherlands set for later this month. Allied nations are expected to adopt a plan at that meeting to hike the NATO member spending target to five per cent of national GDP — a level Canada has not reached since the 1950s.
Not long ago, Carney was promising only to meet the two per cent target by the end of the decade.
Carney promised during the recent election campaign to move up Canada’s deadline for meeting the target by at least two years, to 2030.
Carney said Monday his government will design a new defence policy and industrial strategy to lift up the defence sector. He said that work will make use of Canadian steel and aluminum — industries currently under threat from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war.
He said Ottawa will also reform military procurement and promised new spending on submarines, aircraft, surface ships and armed land vehicles, along with new radar, sensors and drones.
Carney also said he will “expand the reach, security mandate and abilities of the Canadian Coast Guard and integrate it into our NATO defence capabilities to better secure our sovereignty.”
Carney announced plans to set up a new defence research bureau, to be called BOREALIS, which he said would “advance cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other frontier technologies.”
It all amounts to a sharp shift in defence policy from a prime minister who only took on the job in March.
In 2023, a leaked Pentagon document obtained by The Washington Post said then-prime minister Justin Trudeau had told NATO officials that Canada would never meet the two per cent target.
Under pressure from allies, the Trudeau government later promised to hit the two per cent benchmark by 2032.
In January, then-defence minister Bill Blair told reporters he was trying to speed up the timeline to 2027.
About a month later, he was in closed-door meetings with top industry leaders discussing how they could work together to meet the two per cent target.
Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through access to information law show that in February and March, Blair and two other cabinet ministers met with heads of major defence industry players as his department worked on a new defence industrial strategy.
They convened five roundtables with the CEOs of major defence contractors across the aerospace, shipbuilding, land systems and electronics sectors.
“We are currently looking at options to accelerate our defence investments to the amount of two per cent of our GDP in the next two years,” said one of the talking points written for Blair.
“How can we enable industry to respond to this accelerated timeline?”
Canada vows to meet NATO defence spending target to curb reliance on US
Canada this year will meet NATO’s target of spending two percent of its GDP on defence. PM Mark Carney called it a necessary step amid growing global instability. He warned that global threats are “unravelling the rules-based international order’ Canada must no longer send three-quarters of its defence capital spending to America, he said. Carney further pledged reforms in procurement and a focus on domestic manufacturing to strengthen defence capabilities. He 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.
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.
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“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.
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“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.”