Canadian veterans and military personnel take part in the Remembrance Day ceremony and parade at Victory Square in Vancouver, Canada, on November 11, 2013. Canada’s latest defense budget fails to invest in genuine military capabilities. (Shutterstock/Sergei Bachlakov)

Why Canada Keeps Underinvesting in Its Defense

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Despite recent increases in military spending, Canada’s guiding strategy is still based on dependence on US might.

Canada is about to spend more on defense than it has since the end of the Cold War. Washington has noticed, and Washington is pleased. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government’s drive toward its NATO-mandated 2 percent of GDP, pushed along by years of American pressure, has bought Ottawa a reservoir of goodwill in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that it has not enjoyed in a long time.

The goodwill is premature. Someone in Washington should sit down with Ottawa’s new “Defence Industrial Strategy” (DIS) and actually read it, because the document is far less concerned with what the Canadian Armed Forces need, or how fast they can get it, than with where the money ends up: Canadian firms, Canadian intellectual property, and Canadian supply chains. What the DIS really amounts to is an industrial policy that has been handed a military budget, which is a very different animal from a rearmament plan.

The instinct did not appear overnight. It has deep roots, and the roots are worth understanding before anyone concludes that this is simply a matter of bad drafting.

Geography did most of the work. For 80 years, Canada has lived next to the most powerful military on earth, under an umbrella it never had to pay full price for, and a country in that position learns to treat defense as discretionary. The Americans would always absorb the threats that mattered. 

So the defense budget became available for other things—keeping the shipyards in Halifax and Quebec busy, throwing work to the aerospace sector, demonstrating to this region or that one that Ottawa had not forgotten it. When the inevitable capability gaps........

© The National Interest