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U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility toward Canada and loose talk of making it the 51st U.S. state has dispelled Canadians of their comforting old belief in the sanctity of the U.S.-Canada security partnership.

Together with his treatment of Ukraine and most recently of NATO ally Denmark, Trump’s actions have shocked Ottawa out of a decades-long complacency that had lulled it into under-investing in the country’s military under the assumption that the United States could always be relied on to stand as Canada’s stalwart protector.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility toward Canada and loose talk of making it the 51st U.S. state has dispelled Canadians of their comforting old belief in the sanctity of the U.S.-Canada security partnership.

Together with his treatment of Ukraine and most recently of NATO ally Denmark, Trump’s actions have shocked Ottawa out of a decades-long complacency that had lulled it into under-investing in the country’s military under the assumption that the United States could always be relied on to stand as Canada’s stalwart protector.

Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose election last year as the new head of the Liberal Party was a direct result of Canadian voters’ desire for a leader willing to stand up to Trump, Ottawa has pushed through a major defense spending increase and undertaken a holistic effort to reduce security dependency on the United States. The ongoing review of previously planned purchases of American-made F-35 fighter jets is part of that undertaking, as is an effort to increase Canadian defense exports to Europe.

The Canadian government has announced an ambitious military spending ramp-up, aiming to triple total defense spending over the next decade to $900 billion and to reach the NATO-wide goal of allocating 5 percent of GDP to core military and security-related investments by 2035. The government anticipates becoming one of NATO’s final members to reach the old benchmark of 2 percent of GDP spending by March.

By now, over a year into Trump’s second term, Canadians’ visceral horror at the U.S. president’s threats to annex Canada has faded, experts say. In its place is a wary resolve to reduce Canadian economic and military dependence on the United States while still preserving, where possible, a strong working relationship with the country’s top trade partner.

“What lingers is an underpinning of distrust that is no longer emotional, it is just factual,” said retired Maj. Gen. Scott Clancy of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who served as director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). “It is no longer going to be a relational approach to the United States” that Ottawa takes going forward, he added, but rather a “transactional” one.

In a forceful speech at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Carney said the longtime “bargain” that Canada and other countries had accepted in tolerating past U.S. transgressions to the post-World War II rules-based order in return for the global public goods provided by........

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