Prime Minister Mark Carney, centre, during a tour of a Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Ont., in August, 2025.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press

It is doubtful any country has ever been in quite the national security dilemma Canada now finds itself in: with so much land and so few people to defend it; wedged between two expansionist superpowers, one of which was until very recently our best defence against the other, but which has since become more or less aligned with it.

The dilemma is particularly acute in light of our charmed history. A country that had always considered itself invulnerable to attack – because of the oceans that surround us, because of the forbidding climate in our North, because of the Americans – wakes up to discover that it has suddenly become peculiarly vulnerable.

We have no experience with this, psychologically. Other countries have long lived in the shadow of invasion, past or potential. Canada is unique, not only in the degree of our exposure, but in our utter unpreparedness to deal with it. It had literally never occurred to us until now that we might be a target.

That psychological unpreparedness is reflected in our security arrangements. Again, what is striking is not just how weak they are, but how uniquely weak. We are an outlier among nations in almost every respect: not only with regard to national security narrowly defined – the military, intelligence and police forces – but in the broader sense of our ability to withstand coercive pressure: things like economic resiliency, political cohesion, and, increasingly, state capacity.

Carney says Canada too reliant on U.S for security as he announces major boost in military spending

Let’s go down the list. Canada has, by any measure, the weakest military of any major democracy, certainly one with comparable security needs, alliance responsibilities, and international pretensions. In the most recent fiscal year for which we have actual data, we spent 1.47 per cent of GDP on defence (we may or may not reach the 2 per cent of GDP the Carney government has promised for the current fiscal year). That put us 27th out of what were then 31 NATO members.

We spend less, relative to GDP, than any other G7 country. We spend less than non-NATO democracies like Australia, South Korea and India. You can find countries that spend less than us. But they are smaller, and strategically sheltered: surrounded either by friendly buffer states, as in the case of Spain, Portugal and Belgium, or by oceans, as with the small island states of Ireland, Iceland or New Zealand.

Spending is only one measure. With 68,000 active forces (plus 27,000 reserves) we field the smallest military relative to population of any comparable democracy. A single brigade-level commitment (such as the current mission in Latvia) is about all we can........

© The Globe and Mail