This article originally appeared in Breaking Defense.
By Jamie Tronnes and Richard Shimooka, May 28, 2024
One has to feel a twinge of sympathy for Canada’s Defense Minister, Bill Blair. On a recent trip to Washington, DC, he was given the unenviable task of selling the Canadian Government’s Defense Policy Update (DPU) to their American counterparts, and Blair knew he was in for a slog.
Cognizant of the moment, Stephen Sackur, host of BBC’s HardTalk, asked the question many of Canada’s NATO allies are thinking: “As Canada’s Minister of Defense, how embarrassed are you that your country is still significantly failing to spend at least 2 percent of your GDP on defense?”
Blair countered saying that he’s “not embarrassed at all” and that Canada is on a “strong and inevitable path” to increasing spending, a statement Blair would have to make multiple times during his DC swing, and one he’ll likely have to keep saying, with as straight a face as possible, moving forward.
Unfortunately, Canada’s DPU is closer to performance art than serious policy. Its primary audience is, surprisingly, not Canadians, but the US Government. It attempts to appease American concerns by being thick on promises while remaining soft on real capacity to address the rot in the Canadian Armed Forces’ capability. One of the only areas of new spending that will arrive within the next five years will be on NORAD modernization, and Ottawa may have quietly acquiesced to drop its concerns around ballistic missile defense and supported it under the rubric of “Integrated air and missile defence.”
Jamie Tronnes is the Executive Director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security.
Richard Shimooka is a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
