Meeting NATO’s defence spending benchmarks isn’t about taking your credit card to the local military fair and buying “a ton of stuff”, Defence Secretary Bill Blair said on Friday after the conclusion of a NATO summit in Washington.
In an interview with CBC News, he also suggested some allies might have an easier time achieving this goal than Canada.
The Liberal government came under political attack this week from U.S. lawmakers, mostly Republicans, and business leaders who criticized and questioned Canada’s defense spending plans and its efforts to meet NATO’s target of dedicating 2 percent of member states’ gross domestic product to defense.
Blair defended the government’s reluctance to publicly set a deadline for meeting NATO spending targets – targets that most NATO allies have already met.
Speaking at the end of the NATO summit in Washington, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would meet the 2 per cent threshold by 2032.
At the same time, he questioned the widespread political obsession with the 2% figure and whether it is a meaningful measure of member states’ contributions to the Union.
“We have always overachieved, and that is not always reflected in the crude mathematical calculations that some people are quick to turn to,” Trudeau said. “And that’s why we’ve always questioned the 2% mark when it comes to measuring our contributions to NATO.”
Blair said he understood Canada had committed to a 2 per cent reduction at the NATO summit in Vilnius last year and was committed to delivering on that promise.
He said the delay was to determine a “realistic timeframe” for meeting the standards.
Blair acknowledged that there were likely easier political paths, but his government deliberately chose the more difficult and arguably more tumultuous one.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that Canada expects to fully meet NATO’s target of 2 per cent of GDP by 2032. Defence Minister Bill Blair said big investments take time and this is an investment in Canadians, one that will create jobs and add dollars to GDP.
“It would have been fine to simply put a marker and a date on it and that would have mitigated some of the criticism and flak we faced,” he said.
“But at the same time, as I’ve said many times to our allies, we wanted to provide them with a credible, verifiable path to getting Canada to 2 per cent.”
That path would include acquiring several capabilities that the new defense doctrine had only suggested were possible: new equipment such as submarines, an integrated air defense missile system for Canada and North America, a ground-based air defense system to protect critical infrastructure from attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, long-range surface-to-surface and sea-launched missiles, modern mobile artillery, and new tanks.
Canada has announced it will partner with the United States and Finland to build new icebreakers in Quebec, a multi-billion-dollar contract that could help meet NATO defense spending targets through 2032.
The Liberal government indicated at the NATO summit that it would go ahead with building a new fleet of up to 12 submarines. Prime Minister Blair said he could not predict what the federal government would decide, but that he considered mobile artillery and missiles for the Latvian military and air defenses for Latvia’s infrastructure to be priorities.
“It’s one thing for a relatively small country to increase its defence budget by 2 per cent,” Blair said, “and in that case a few hundred million dollars could get you there.”
“This is a much larger investment for Canada. And for Canada, that investment actually requires the acquisition of capabilities that most of the other smaller NATO members don’t need.”
Working a long list of equipment purchases through the federal government’s notoriously slow defense procurement system is no easy task. Some procurements, such as acquiring a fully operational maritime helicopter or fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft, have taken decades.
Blair said he believes the key to moving things forward is to focus on equipment already on the market, rather than equipment under development. He cited the recently announced purchase of Boeing P-8 reconnaissance aircraft as an example.
“For some of these very large procurements, a much greater focus on getting the job done and the path to getting it done, I think that’s the way we can move forward,” he said.
But much of what the Liberal government says it wants to accomplish cannot be achieved within its existing powers.
Asked about meeting NATO’s goal of spending 2 percent of Canada’s GDP on defense, Conservative Leader Pierre Poirierbre said the Trudeau government is bankrupting Canada and that “people are tired of politicians just announcing they’re going to spend money and not thinking about how to pay for it.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said his government is on track to meet its spending target by 2032.
On Friday, Conservative leader Pierre Poilièvre said he would not commit to meeting NATO’s 2% target, suggesting the federal government may not be able to afford it.
“I make promises that I can keep, but right now we, our country, are bankrupt,” Poirierbre said. “As far as the budget goes, I’m kind of inheriting a dumpster fire.”
He said a future Conservative government would “buy the best value equipment to make better use of money” and boost recruitment by “replacing a woke culture with a warrior culture” in the military.
“You didn’t hear these criticisms during the previous Conservative government. Why? Because we were getting results – not because we were spending more, but because we were getting results,” he said.
Indeed, between 2012 and 2015, the Conservative government faced significant criticism for cutting the Ministry of Defence budget by $2.7 billion each year in order to achieve a balanced budget.
After the Afghanistan war, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government canceled or postponed several high-profile defense planning decisions that it had ordered.
