Canada faces ‘massive challenge' as NATO eyes new 5% spending target: expert
OTTAWA - When representatives of NATO nations meet in The Hague late next month, they're expected to dramatically hike the alliance's defence spending target for members — the one Canada is failing to hit already.
At the last NATO summit in Washington last year, allies lined up to call out Canada for failing to meet the alliance defence spending target of two per cent of national GDP.
When Prime Minister Mark Carney attends the NATO summit next month, he'll likely be under pressure to commit to a new defence spending target of five per cent of national GDP.
'We're such an outlier now,' said David Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He said Canada will face a 'massive challenge' in meeting the new target.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said for months he wants to see NATO countries increase their defence spending to five per cent of GDP.
On Monday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said he believes allied nations will agree at next month's gathering to a new target of five per cent.
Annual NATO data shows Canada is still failing to reach its current commitment; defence spending amounted to just 1.3 per cent of GDP in 2024. Canada also failed to meet the alliance's target for equipment spending.
'The last time that there were reported stats, we were one of only two not meeting either (pledge). Everybody else meets at least one,' Perry said. 'We're increasingly, extraordinarily isolated in how far behind everyone else we are.'
Laval University international relations professor Anessa Kimball said Canada should be preparing to argue that investing more in the military becomes much harder in the middle of a trade war.
Kimball said Ottawa should prepare to leverage Trump's calls for higher military spending in the alliance and use that to press the case against his tariff agenda.
Kimball, who wrote a book on defence burden-sharing among NATO members, also said Carney may have a ready-made excuse for missing the NATO target.
As governor of the Bank of England, Carney was busy in the U.K. managing the economic fallout from Brexit when Justin Trudeau was in power and directing Canada's military spending.
'While I think that gives him an important level of macroeconomic credibility, it also gives him a little bit of an out. Essentially he can say, 'Trudeau and the Liberal Party left me a bit of a mess and they've known that they had to do this,'' Kimball said.
'Carney couldn't do worse at being convincing as Trudeau was. Trudeau was entirely unconvincing last year.'
At the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, after a series of U.S. politicians blasted Canada for failing to meet its commitments, Trudeau pledged to reach the two per cent target by 2032.
His government suggested this could be done by buying up to 12 new submarines — a procurement project for which no deadline was ever given.
Trudeau said at the time that Canada's defence spending was based on its needs, 'not some nominal targets that make for easy headlines and accounting practices, but don't actually make us automatically safer.'
During the spring election campaign, Carney pledged to reach two per cent by 2030.
But Perry said Carney likely will have very little wiggle room at The Hague, even in a room full of allies who know he's new to the job.
'I think, unfairly for him, there's probably not a lot (of room),' he said. 'Even though he's brand-new, this commitment for Canada isn't. It's over a decade old.'
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 27, 2025.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
What Washington can learn from a legendary London meltdown
In a city where allegiance and proximity to power is everything, the leader's closest adviser portrayed himself as an outsider. He began the year by hiring a bunch of 'weirdos and misfits' and ordering them to rip up the entire 'rotten' system of government. The adviser loved to put noses out of joint and 'own the libs,' while building up his profile in the media as the real power behind the throne. Then, having realized that his easily-distracted and impulsive politician boss wasn't actually committed to building a tech-heavy, libertarian future, the disillusioned adviser quit — dedicating himself to publicly destroying his former employer. If you're British, watching the collapse of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's uncomfortable marriage has echoes of the end of the relationship between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings in 2020. How that psychodrama played out in the UK could have lessons for the US — not least because Cummings eventually succeeded in undermining Johnson's political career, ultimately defenestrating the prime minister through relentless briefings and leaks. When someone who was inside the room and was perceived to be central to a political project says it's all a sham, the damage can be significant. For those who don't know, Cummings was the chief strategist of the successful Brexit campaign in 2016 but then largely disappeared from view when it came to actually defining what Brexit should look like. Unlike Musk, Cummings was a lifelong political operative, albeit one who cultivated a reputation for actually reading books. Three years later, with his political standing inflated by a film in which he was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch as an insane genius, Cummings returned to maneuver Johnson into Downing Street. Once inside government, Cummings broke all the standard operating procedures of the British state to finally 'get Brexit done' and sever the UK's relationship with the EU in January 2020. When I look back at my occasional text exchanges with Cummings from that era, usually while trying to check stories about the funding of the Brexit campaign or his desire to defund the BBC, they mirror what he said in public. He held a seemingly sincere belief that most of the British media was fake news, that the British state was not fit for purpose, and that the political party he was nominally working for, the Conservatives, was little more than a helpful vehicle for an insurrection. One ally approvingly described the chief of staff of a Conservative government to the BBC as a 'Leninist.' Ultimately, both Musk and Cummings believed that you can run the government as a high-performance start-up and that the defining failure of past civil service reforms was that they hadn't smashed enough things quickly enough. Both also have the fatal flaws of being undisciplined, delighting in picking public fights and getting bored easily. Their independent means also meant they were not as beholden to their political masters as other advisers. Cummings might not have Musk levels of money but he was wealthy in British terms (his father-in-law Sir Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield, owner of a 13th century castle, would write letters in support of his proto-DOGE policies) and connected (his wife was deputy editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine). The overwhelming impression Cummings gave was that politicians were the useful idiots who should give him the runway to remake the state. Iconoclasm was the point. When Cummings quit he took to publishing lengthy Substack posts portraying Johnson as a broken supermarket 'trolley' who veered all over the place based on the last thing someone said to him. Even more effectively, Cummings helped to leak stories about Johnson's pandemic lockdown-busting in a scandal known as Partygate. In an echo of what's happened with Musk, left-wingers who previously thought Cummings was the devil incarnate began cheering him on as he stuck the knife into Johnson. The attacks rang true among Tory MPs and Johnson's ratings never recovered, ultimately leading to his early departure from politics. Many people leaked against Johnson and his circle, but when Cummings did, the pair's previous closeness gave it the ring of truth. Musk and Cummings got opportunities because they went in to bat for fundamentally untrustworthy but opportunistic politicians, in the hope that they would be given the freedom to enact policies with limited scrutiny. The two men have even exchanged notes and acknowledged the similarity of their programs. Ultimately, these were political shotgun marriages — the very thing that made the attachments so powerful at a particular moment in time was ultimately their undoing: In each case, the leader learned that there was no real love there. As Cummings and Musk found, if you hitch yourself to an anti-establishment hero who eschews patronage and loyalty then it's only a matter of time before you find yourself the target. There is a case that a less bellicose, less in-your-face flavour of DOGE could work better — and that such changes are easier when they're not associated with a controversial figure. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year, is pinning its hopes on widespread use of AI technology to improve productivity, for person. And there are even people in Downing Street who quite envies the idea of taking a Musk-style wrecking ball to parts of the state; Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently abolished one of the main administrative levels of the National Health Service in an overnight raid. Attempts by the insurgent, right-wing populist Reform party — headed by Nigel Farage, who has courted Musk's funds — to launch a 'British DOGE' and find excess spending in local government have hit the rocks. Announced on Monday, the program's first leader had quit by Thursday. Cummings said in November that he was hopeful Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley. Cummings was long on diagnosis but short on prescription, the London-based Institute for Government think tank wrote in November 2021. It sought to fill the gap with ideas of its own for civil service reform.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Team Trump's new ‘patriotism' tests for federal job-seekers shouldn't fly under the radar
About a month after Election Day 2024, it became clear that Donald Trump's team had embraced a problematic approach to new employee screenings. The New York Times, for example, reportedly spoke to several people involved in the hiring process for high-ranking positions who were asked whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The Wall Street Journal reported soon after that the Republican operation was imposing 'loyalty tests' on job applicants, even asking candidates about their views on NATO and tariffs for jobs that had nothing to do with international affairs or economic policymaking. Two weeks after Inauguration Day, The Washington Post reported on similar tests being applied to candidates for top national security positions, including questions about whether the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was secretly 'an inside job.' Against this backdrop Politico reported this week: As President Donald Trump moves to slash the size of the federal workforce, his administration unveiled a plan to ensure that any new hires are 'patriotic Americans' who vow to advance the president's policy priorities. The White House and the agency that serves as the government's human resources arm Thursday released directives for departments to use when recruiting employees in a memo that represents a dramatic shift in federal hiring procedures. At first blush, a story like this might seem dry and bureaucratic. The Office of Personnel Management last week issued a memo outlining the administration's detailed 'merit hiring plan,' and I can appreciate why this could come across as boring. It's not. Under the new policy, everyone seeking a job at the GS-5 pay-grade or above — a group that would include everyone from firefighters to food inspectors to air traffic controllers — will have to submit four essays as part of the application process. The essays are supposed to provide answers to specific questions: 'How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the Federal government? Provide a concrete example from professional, academic, or personal experience.' 'In this role, how would you use your skills and experience to improve government efficiency and effectiveness? Provide specific examples where you improved processes, reduced costs, or improved outcomes.' 'How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.' 'How has a strong work ethic contributed to your professional, academic or personal achievements? Provide one or two specific examples, and explain how those qualities would enable you to serve effectively in this position.' Imagine people who are applying to be rangers at a national park being asked to write essays about how they'd 'advance' Trump's executive orders. Then imagine the president himself trying to write an essay about his 'commitment to the Constitution' — a document he's talked about 'terminating' in response to one of his election conspiracy theories. The goal, according to the memo, is to recruit 'patriotic Americans' with a 'commitment to American ideals,' which also sets a bar that the incumbent president would likely struggle to clear. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and Catherine Fisk, a professor of labor law at the same school, explained, 'The government can and should ensure that federal employees, from administrative assistants to air traffic controllers, have the skills and aptitude to do their jobs. But their views on the administration's policy priorities are irrelevant, as is their patriotism — however that is defined. Allowing someone in the government to screen applicants for patriotism is reminiscent of the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era, which were arbitrarily applied to unfairly deny employment to many.' Chemerinsky and Fisk added, 'No modern presidential administration has undertaken such an effort to staff the entire government with political loyalists. It is plainly inconsistent with good government, with federal law and with the Constitution.' There was a time in the recent past that 'patriotism tests' for federal employees would've generated a significant controversy and an intense backlash. But in 2025, against a backdrop of countless other White House outrages, the OPM memo doesn't appear to have made much of a splash. This article was originally published on
Hamilton Spectator
3 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Canadian, European space agencies reaffirm relations amid political, economic anxiety
LONGUEUIL - The Canadian and European space agencies say economic and geopolitical turmoil are forcing them to work closer together. Leaders at both organizations signed a joint statement today at Canadian Space Agency headquarters south of Montreal reaffirming their co-operation. Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, says space programs are having to contend with economic uncertainty and global conflicts. His visit comes as the United States is pressuring NATO members to increase their spending on defence — a sector of the economy that is tightly linked to space. As well, Aschbacher says the United States' space agency — NASA — could be facing deep budget cuts. Canadian Space Agency president Lisa Campbell says that in uncertain times it's important to reaffirm relationships with like-minded allies. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2025.
