The insanity of spending two percent of GDP on military

Across the globe temperature records are falling and in western Canada forest fires are raging again. An extreme weather incident recently exposed the weakness of Toronto’s infrastructure. As the climate crisis gathers steam, evermore Canadians are sleeping on streets due to decades of governmentneglecting public housing. At the same time six millionCanadians are without a family physician.

Instead of prioritizing the unhoused, undoctored and climate adaptation, the Justin Trudeau government recently committed to massively increasing military spending. At the recent NATO summit in Washington DC the Trudeau government announced a plan to spend 2% of GDP on the military. Before the announcement the government had already budgeted tens of billions of dollars more for the military in coming years andbetween 2014 and 2024 Canadian military spending increased from $20 billion to $40 billion annually. If Canada were to spend 2% of GDP on its military that would be over $60 billion.

But the 2% of GDP figure is arbitrary and picked by those who profit from military spending and several politicians and commentators have suggested it should be a floor, rising to 2.5% or 3% of GDP.

With more than 10 times the budget of Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Department of National Defence (DND) is by far the largest Canadian government department, employing the largest number and purchasing the most equipment. With 0.5 percent of the world’s people, Canada is responsible for 1.5% of international military spending.

Canada has long ranked among the world’s top military spenders. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Ottawa spent more on its military than all but 15 countries in 2023. Among the 32 members of NATO Canada is the seventh highest military spender. It is one of only five members of the alliance, note Royal Military College professors Christian Leuprecht and Joel Sokolsky, with a “full-spectrum military”.

Still, on Wednesday all of Canada’s provincial premiers demanded the federal government speed up its bid to reach NATO’s 2% of GDP target. Calling on Ottawa to reach the benchmark in four years, Manitoba NDP Premier Wab Kinew “encouraged Canadians to think about this also as an investment in trade”, telling reporters “if we’re not meeting our responsibility to our NATO allies, it is going to have an impact on [the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement] renewal.”

Kinew’s claim that we must spend more on the military to trade with the US should be interrogated. Mexico spends far less on its military in either absolute dollars or percentage of its GDP than Canada. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Canada spent US $27 billion on its military in 2023 while Mexico spent $11.8 billion. Canada devoted 1.3% of its GDP to the military while Mexico spent 0.7%. (Other calculations suggest the divide is wider.)

Yet Mexico is more dependent on trade with the US than Canada is. It ships a higher proportion of its exports and GDP to the US. Despite greater economic dependence on the US, Mexico’s foreign policy is far less pro-US or imperialistic than Canada’s.

So, why can’t Canada trade with the US and spend 0.7% of GDP on its military? 

Or less. Despite the commonly held view that states should have militaries, about 20 countries don’t have an active military force. They are mostly small Caribbean or South Pacific island nations, but the list also includes Costa Rica, Iceland and Panama. If the Canadian Forces were abolished, Canada would still have a coast guard, border services agency, municipal police forces and the quasi paramilitary RCMP.

Many believe countries are supposed to have a military to protect their territorial integrity. But the truth, unpalatable as it may be to some, is that the USA is the only nation that could realistically invade Canada. Yet the scope of the Canadian Forces’ (CF) alliance with its counterparts in that country means it would be difficult for it to defend Canadian soil if US forces attacked.

The Canadian “defence” sector has tied its ship to our southern neighbour’s massive military industrial complex. Canadian arms firms are largely branch plants of US companies and the CF assists their US counterparts through naval missions, special forces deployments, peacekeeping missions, chemical weapons testing, wars and much more. That’s why the US pushes Canada to devote greater public resources to its military. Washington doesn’t push Mexico to spend more on its military because that country doesn’t act as an extension of the US empire in the same way.

Rather than increasing spending, we should be defunding the military. The CF are the institutional embodiment of ‘toxic masculinity’ and a hot bed of white supremacy as well as the largest spying agency and public relations (propaganda) entity in the country. As I detail in “Top 10 reasons to defund the Canadian military” the Canadian military also has an immense negative ecological footprint and has fought in at least nine immoral wars. Most Canadians’ security would be better served by reallocating public resource to mitigating the climate crisis, training more healthcare workers and building social housing.

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