At a Hinge moment

Or, speeding cash out the door to build a stronger Canada

I received a somewhat mysterious message from DND on Sunday afternoon inviting me to attend a briefing on defence and security on Monday. Last minute buggers, I thought. Little did I know. The truth began to dawn on me on Monday morning. This was to be a biggee, led off by a speech by the Prime Minister at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

You can see Mark Carney’s address here (running time 21 minutes; no media questions). It’s a major pronouncement, not to be missed.

https://www.cpac.ca/headline-politics/episode/pm-mark-carney-makes-a-security-and-defence-announcement?id=7298a938-27ef-4b82-acc3-eafc2184edf9

The speech positions Canada ahead of a whirlwind series of key meetings, including with the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, (Ottawa, June 14); the G-7 summit hosted by Canada in Kanaskis (June 15-17); the Canada-EU summit (June 23); and the NATO summit in the Hague (June 24-25). Top of the agenda in all these meetings is global security and the demands that an unravelling world order is placing on Canada.

The PM’s speech had an underlying theme: to prove that Canada is no longer a passenger, a free-rider, when it comes to defence and security. He spun a nice phrase: that Canada will have to move from boasting about the strength of our values, to stressing the “value of our strength.”

The headline from the speech will be a determination to meet the existing NATO commitment of 2% of spending on defence relative to GDP in this fiscal year, accelerating the objective by a half-decade. A total of, wait for it, $9 billion is to be spent in 2025-2026, with the largest boatload of cash ($2.6 billion) going into recruitment, retention and support of military personnel. A further billion will go into military capabilities, especially related to Arctic security. This will build on commitments in the 2024 defence policy, “Our North, Strong and Free” and mostly involves existing capabilities or commitments, such as the purchase of “over-the-horizon” radar for early warning of missile threats, rather than completely new programs. The sum of $2.1 billion is earmarked to strengthen the Canadian defence industry, and another $2 billion to diversify defence partnerships beyond the US. This last sum is a down-payment, in part, on Canada’s efforts to be made a party to the EU’s massive “ReArm” Europe spending program.

These are big sums and the details are not immediately apparent. But they align with what the Prime Minister called the “four pillars” of Canada’s defence strategy: people and infrastructure; military capabilities; the defence industrial base; and new defence partnerships to reduce historic Canadian over-dependency on the US.

There will be a new orientation to Canadian defence policy driven by concerns about the direction of US politics under Donald Trump. At one point in his speech the PM decried the ways in which the US is “monetarizing” its position as a global hegemon, while drawing away from commitments to collective security. He even warned about a “new imperialism” stalking the world.

This new Canadian defence orientation is aspirational for the moment, but is likely to set quickly. It involves deepening partnerships with democracies and like-minded partners. It involves some loosening of the bonds of the Canada-US security relationship as the US fits less and less well into the world of democracies and the like-minded. It will involve a reinforcement of our Euro-Atlantic strategic focus, not least in the context of the developments in the Russian war against Ukraine, now in its third year. Canada’s involvement in NATO will be a big part of our new strategic posture, with a Canadian contribution to Arctic security seen as a new and fundamental NATO role. The PM signalled that whatever the new NATO goalposts will be on future defence spending, determined at the NATO summit at the end of June, Canada is in.

We will get a further sense of all this with the “immediate design” of a new Defence policy, drawing on the recent experience of our allies and partners, including Ukraine. Whether this will be a stand-alone, or be folded into the promised national security strategy, along with a foreign policy review, remains to be seen. Either way it is an important step, especially if it can be used to foster greater public awareness of the “hinge” moment Canada confronts.

There are two big unknowns ahead. One is the question of the extent to which defence modernization and huge spends in the defence sector can actually boost the broader Canadian economy. The PM acknowledges that it will be “challenging” to protect Canadians while growing the Canadian economy to become, as he has pledged, the strongest G7 economy. But these are the “imperatives” of a more dangerous world.

The other unknown is whether Canadians will answer the call. Will Canadian industry, and not just the old guard defence contractors, be able to take full advantage of these new opportunities for a Canada-first defence manufacturing approach? Will a new generation of young Canadians look to the military for a fulfilling career. Will there be a space in the new military for “digital warriors,” as the UK Strategic Defence Review describes them?

Will we turn in unison to confront the dangers to Canada? That may be the biggest unknown of all.