Canada’s miserly defence spending is increasingly embarrassing
NATO summit in 2019 when Mr Trump asked jeeringly: “Where are you at? What is your number?" Mr Trudeau had more friends at that summit than Mr Trump. But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Canada’s position as a penny-pinching outlier has become more embarrassing for the country. The statement of Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, before the NATO summit in Vilnius this month that spending 2% of national GDP on defence was no longer to be regarded as the “the ceiling" but “the floor" could have been designed to cause blushes in Ottawa.
According to the alliance’s latest data on defence spending, Canada’s defence budget amounted to just 1.22% of its GDP in 2022. That puts it in the same company as Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey—a country whose commitment to NATO is at best shaky. All spend less than 1.4% of GDP on defence (see chart).
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even former military slowcoach Germany announced its determination to meet its 2% obligation. But Mr Trudeau has not shown much enthusiasm for bridging the gap. Leaked Pentagon intelligence documents, first reported in the Washington Post in April, confirmed that Mr Trudeau had told NATO allies not only that Canada would not reach the 2% commitment but that it “never" would.
When Mr Trudeau was asked to confirm or deny the remark, he blandly replied: “I continue to say and will always say that Canada is a reliable partner to NATO, a reliable partner around the world. And with our military investments, with the support we give to Canadians, we will continue to be doing that." The gulf between what Mr Trudeau intends and what NATO expects is indeed a large one. Last year the parliamentary budget officer, Yves Giroux,
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