Mark Carney just gave Trump a big win that the prime minister masked with anti-US rhetoric. And Carney looks set to hand the Donald another militarist win.
As climate-change-fuelled forest fires displace tens of thousands of Canadians, Carney announced a massive increase in military spending Monday to overcome “threats which felt far away and remote [that] are now immediate and acute.” In announcing an immediate $9 billion boost to a military budget that’s doubled over the past decade, the PM wasn’t citing the fires driving Canadians from their homes, but Russia and China.
Whatever one thinks about their internal politics or Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, those two nations don’t pose a military threat to Canada. That’s abundantly clear from a quick glance at the geopolitical map. Canada has a thousand troops on Russia’s border in Latvia while Canadian warships and spy planes regularly pass near China’s territorial waters and airspace. Those countries don’t do anything remotely as threatening to Canada.
The US is the only country that could realistically invade Canada. Its president has repeatedly raised annexation but there’s no indication ‘our’ military has lessened its subservience to its US counterpart since Trump began his threats. Despite appeals, the Canadian forces have maintained a slew of aggressive international deployments alongside the US.
While announcing his big win for Trump, Carney criticized the US. “We stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans throughout the Cold War and in the decades that followed, as the United States played a dominant role on the world stage,” Carney said. “Today, that dominance is a thing of the past…. It is time for Canada to chart its own path and to assert itself on the international stage.” The aim of the rhetoric was to mask the gift to Trump, which the Wall Street Journal aptly reported thusly, “Canada plans to boost military spending this year, aiming to catch up to its NATO commitments and try to placate President Trump amid sensitive trade talks.”
In his military spending speech Carney declared, “We should no longer send three-quarters of our defence capital spending to America.” That’s also rhetoric designed to mask the benefits the US military industrial complex is likely to derive from the boost in military spending. According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Canadian officials have been making the pitch to U.S. negotiators that Canada will be in a position to make big deals with U.S. defense contractors, the people said.”
That could include Trump’s Golden Dome. On Wednesday CBC reported that the Carney government has expressed its willingness to participate in Trump’s missile “defence” system in exchange for tariff relief. The cost of participating in this initiative that will weaponize space and spur an arms race would likely be in the tens of billions of dollars.
Reaction in the media to an increase in war spending has largely been positive. The National Post, which is generally hostile to the Liberals, has been effusive with praise. The Conservatives and Bloc Québecois are basically on board.
The NDP has offered modest criticism. In their initial statement the strongest criticism was the “New Democrats are also concerned that this year’s $9 billion funding increase in defence will come at the expense of other programs and services that Canadians rely on.” The next day the party went a bit further in a press conference in which NDP interim leader Don Davies rejected the F-35 purchase and Golden Dome. He talked about an independent foreign policy but Davies also mentioned “NATO commitments”. It’s difficult for the NDP, especially foreign critic and likely leadership candidate Heather McPherson, to push back on increases to military spending when they part largely endorsed the US/NATO position on Russia and China.
Donald Trump has succeeded in getting Ottawa to massively increase military spending. Canadians will be worse off as a result. But it’s not too late to resist.
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