Blair defends the slow pace of Canada’s defence spending, says some allies have it easier
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Reaching NATO’s defence spending benchmark isn’t about showing up at your local military trade show with a credit card and buying “a whole bunch of stuff,” Defence Minister Bill Blair said Friday following the conclusion of the alliance’s Washington summit.
In an interview with CBC News, he also suggested some allies have it easier than Canada does when it comes to hitting that target.
The Liberal government took a political beating this week from U.S. lawmakers — mostly congressional Republicans — and business community representatives who criticized and questioned Canada’s defence spending plans and its efforts to meet NATO’s goal of setting aside two per cent of members’ gross domestic product for defence.
Blair defended the government’s reluctance to publicly set a date for meeting the NATO spending target — a target most NATO allies already have reached.
As the NATO leaders’ summit wrapped up in Washington, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada will meet the two per cent benchmark by 2032.
At the same time, he questioned the widespread political fixation on the two per cent figure and whether it’s a meaningful measure of members’ contributions to the alliance.
“We continually step up and punch above our weight, something that isn’t always reflected in the crass mathematical calculation that certain people turn to very quickly,” Trudeau said. “Which is why we’ve always questioned the two per cent as the be-all, end-all of evaluating contributions to NATO.”
Blair said he understands Canada committed to two per cent during last year’s NATO summit in Vilnius and he has been focused on delivering it.
The delay, he said, was about coming up with “a realistic timeframe” for meeting the benchmark.
Blair acknowledged there likely was a politically easier path but the government deliberately chose one more difficult — and inarguably noisier.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday that Canada ‘fully expects to hit NATO target by 2032,’ referring to the GDP defence spending target of two per cent. Defence minister Bill Blair said significant investments take time and that this is an investment for Canadians, creating jobs and adding dollars to the GDP.
“It would have been easier for us to just simply put a marker down, put a date down and it probably would have blunted some of the rhetoric and criticism that we faced,” he said.
“But at the same time, I think — as I’ve said a number of times to our allies — I wanted to be able to come to them with a credible and verifiable path to two per cent for Canada.”
That path will include acquiring a number of capabilities the new defence policy suggested were only possibilities: new equipment, such as submarines; an integrated air and missile defence system for Canada and North America; ground-based air defences to protect critical infrastructure from the kinds of attacks launched on Ukraine’s electricity grid; long-range surface-to-surface and sea-launched missiles; modern, mobile artillery; and new tanks.
Canada has announced it will partner with the U.S. and Finland to build new icebreakers in Quebec – a multi-billion dollar deal that could help it meet its NATO defence spending target by 2032.
The Liberal government indicated at the NATO summit that it intends to move forward with a new fleet of up to 12 submarines. Blair said that while he wouldn’t anticipate the federal cabinet’s decisions, he believes mobile artillery and missiles for the army deployed in Latvia, and air defences for infrastructure at home, should be the priorities.
“It’s one thing for a relatively small nation to increase their defence budget to two per cent,” Blair said. “In some of those cases, you know, a few hundred million dollars would bring them there.
“For Canada, it’s a far more substantial investment. And from Canada, that investment actually requires the acquisition of capabilities that most of those other, smaller NATO members do not require.”
Pushing a long list of equipment purchases through the federal government’s notoriously glacial defence procurement system is no small task. Some procurement efforts — such as the acquisition of a fully operational maritime helicopter and a fixed-wing search and rescue plane — took decades.
Blair said he believes the key to moving things along is to focus on equipment that’s already on the market, rather than equipment still under development. He cited the example of the recently announced purchase of Boeing P-8 surveillance planes.
“For some of these very big procurements, I think, greater focus on getting the job done and the path to getting it done — I think this is the way that we’re going to be able to go forward,” he said.
But much of what the Liberal government says it wants to accomplish can’t be done within its existing mandate.
Asked about meeting the NATO target of spending two per cent of Canada’s GDP on defence, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says the Trudeau government has left Canada broke and people are “sick and tired of politicians just announcing they’re going to spend money without figuring out how they’re going to pay for it.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the government plans to meet the spending target by 2032.
On Friday, Conservative Leader Pierre Pollievre said he would not commit to meeting the NATO two per cent goal — and suggested the federal government might not be able to afford it.
“I make promises that I can keep and right now we are, our country, is broke,” Poilievre said. “I’m inheriting a dumpster fire when it comes to the budget.”
A future Conservative government would “buy equipment based on best value, to make our money go further” and would replace the military’s “woke culture with a warrior culture” to boost recruitment, he said.
“When the previous Conservative government was in office, we weren’t hearing these criticisms. Why? Because we were delivering. It wasn’t because we were spending more, it’s because we were delivering more,” Poilievre said.
In fact, between 2012 and 2015 the Conservatives faced substantial criticism for cutting the Department of National Defence budget by $2.7 billion annually in order to reach a balanced budget.
Following the Afghan war, the government of then-prime minister Stephen Harper cancelled or delayed decisions on several high-profile defence programs that it had ordered.
