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Foreign Minister Anita Anand proposed Canada’s new commitment to defense spending and the domestic defense sector and called for a NATO policy in the Arctic, at a major defense and security conference in Ottawa on Wednesday.
“We are reaching two percent of GDP this year and five percent of GDP in 2035,” he said, referring to the NATO alliance’s commitment to spend five percent of GDP on defense within ten years.
That revised target was pushed by US President Donald Trump, who has accused some allies of freeloading the United States. European countries in NATO have also moved to hostilities quickly as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine continues.
At the same time, Anand said, the alliance needs to focus on the North.
“Last August, I raised a point about ensuring that NATO has efforts directed at the security and protection of the Arctic, and my fellow foreign ministers who were around that table, the Nordic Five, agreed with me wholeheartedly,” he said.
The Nordic Five includes Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden – the last two new members of NATO.
Anand said Canada wants to see a broader NATO Arctic strategy than the Arctic Sentry mission launched earlier this year, and that includes a permanent presence in the region.
He said he plans to discuss this topic with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte later in the day.
Military spending, the Indo-Pacific region is also on the agenda
The annual meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is focused this year on how the NATO allies will fulfill their pledge to reach the spending commitment by 2035.
Former defense minister Bill Blair told the same conference two years ago that the military was on a recruitment drive.
Participants in the discussion at the conference on Wednesday said that the military has made some progress in terms of recruitment, due to the increase in salaries and recruitment bonuses introduced by the government this year.
Stefanie von Hlatky, a professor of political studies at Queen’s University, warned that while Canada’s spending commitments “assume that we can grow and sustain the Armed Forces now and in the long term,” there are still significant recruitment and retention challenges.
Maj.-Gen. JJ Major, chief of staff for programs, policy and development of the Armed Forces, said that there are now more people applying to join the army than there are open positions.
“Although we are longer, I think, than anyone would like us to be, we have improved the processing time by about a month,” he said.
Anand, who was defense minister before Blair, told the crowd on Wednesday that he “stopped at this stage in 2023 to show that our commitment to NATO, at two per cent, was very important.”
The Liberal government at the time had no plan to reach its NATO targets.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government recently released a defense industry strategy – something Blair began working on when he was minister – setting out a plan to boost domestic defense production.
Anand said that for a long time governments have looked at defense and security separately from economic growth, but that is no longer the case.
“The defense industry strategy is about opening up small and medium-sized businesses in the country, as well as large companies,” he said.
Conference participants watched a panel discussion Wednesday about Canada’s role in the Indo-Pacific moderated by Vincent Rigby, former national security and intelligence adviser to prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Rigby said Canada has been struggling to find a way in the Indo-Pacific region for the past few years, even after the regional strategy for 2022 was released.
Carney’s efforts to improve relations with China – which his government now describes as a “strategic partner” – appear to contradict the 2022 strategic document, which positions China as an increasingly disruptive global power.
The panelists agreed that Canada may need to renew that strategy – which was supposed to cover a 10-year period – and should link it to the Arctic and Europe.
“It won’t be easy,” said Rigby. “It will test the prime minister’s diplomacy when it comes to countries like China and India and – I would say so – the United States.”
