Coming out of July’s NATO summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the 2-per-cent threshold a “crass mathematical calculation.”Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Eugene Lang is an assistant professor at Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History and a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
About $15-billion, a year: that is the amount that the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates the federal government would have to invest to reach NATO’s defence spending requirement of 2 per cent of GDP.
It is a big number and a major challenge, one made harder in the context of a large federal budget deficit, an affordability crisis, and demands on Ottawa from premiers, interest groups and other Canadians to spend even larger sums in many other areas – not to mention those who want tax cuts. Compounding the problem is that Ottawa has spent 10 years trying to justify why it has not met this goal, rather than developing and executing a plan to get there.
This is why getting to 2 per cent has become such a Herculean task today. Political leaders in both Conservative and Liberal governments over the decades have put Canada in this unenviable position. They now need to get us out of it.
What this challenge really boils down to, then, isn’t so much about the money. It’s about leadership. Canada is a relatively rich country, and it can afford to spend 2 per cent of its GDP on national defence, but doing so requires setting clear priorities.
Coming out of July’s NATO summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the 2-per-cent threshold a “crass mathematical calculation.” In reality, however, it is a clear expression of collective defence, solidarity and burden-sharing among NATO members – an alliance that Canada played a key role in creating. If this measure is as arbitrary and offensive as Mr. Trudeau suggests, one wonders why both he and his predecessor Stephen Harper signed up for it, rather than standing up against it. But that, too, would have taken leadership.
It is now hackneyed to say the world has become a more dangerous place in recent years, but that makes it no less true. That Canadians seem to be slow to wake up to this reality – including the new and direct risks to Canada’s sovereignty in the high north and Arctic – is in part a function of leadership, or lack thereof.
Politicians and governments can choose to follow public opinion, or they can choose to try to shape it. In the last “war” this country faced – the COVID-19 pandemic – the Trudeau government chose to lead by shaping public opinion and influencing public behaviour. By and large, it worked. Canadians were told by the federal government, in clear, strong and frequent terms, that we were up against the wall, that our individual behaviour needed to change for the collective good, and that we will all have to make sacrifices to get through this. That is leadership.
Some suggest that increasing defence spending is warmongering and inevitably leads to war. But it is rather the opposite: The 2-per-cent requirement is designed to show our enemies – and we do have enemies – that the European and North American liberal democracies are strong, aligned, resolute, and not to be trifled with. The requirement is designed, in other words, to prevent war, not encourage it; it is fundamentally about deterrence. This needs to be explained frankly and clearly to Canadians by our political leadership – but it has not been, to date.
We are likely heading into a federal election next year. It now seems clear that none of the Liberals, the Conservatives or the NDP want to talk about this more dangerous world in which we find ourselves. Mr. Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh have yet to put forward any real plan to meet NATO’s requirement. It’s evident that the three party leaders don’t want this to be an election issue.
They are not interested in telling Canadians the hard truth: that spending 2 per cent of GDP is no longer a nice-to-have, but an absolute imperative. They don’t want to say that national defence is the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government and one of its prime responsibilities under the Constitution – and that Ottawa will have to spend less in other areas to meet our 2-per-cent obligations. They don’t want to tell us the truth because, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, they don’t think we can handle the truth.
But Canadians can handle it, just as we did during the pandemic. But we need to hear it loud, clear and repeatedly from Ottawa. Tell us the truth; lead, rather than follow. That is what we need, if we hope to meet our duty to our closest allies and collective defenders.