NATO pressure won’t stop Canada’s piggyback on US defense spending

Commentary

According to a newspaper, not this one, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, “pressure will be applied” this week to make a meaningful contribution to the alliance. Pressure is a colorless, odorless gas whose only known effect is to make journalists write headlines.

We’ve piggybacked on US defense spending ever since Trudeau Sr. disdained “pressure” to be less frivolous peacenik. It doesn’t matter who’s in power, mostly the Liberals, we’ve never achieved our oft-promised 2% of GDP on defense, mostly because we’ve never tried. We neither.

Trudeau Jr. is not averse to spending money. This February he allocated $46 billion to revitalize Canadian health care by not reforming it. During the pandemic, he injected $260 billion into the 2021 budget to turn from lurking in your house, masking even to peering through the curtains, into productive activity.

He’s spending $30 billion in EV battery subsidies in no time, more than we spend on defense, which isn’t even separately listed in federal budgets as undersized, tatty, and infrastructural. Our leaders are busy reshaping our economy, values ​​and characters, and military force has been passé among snobs since 1909 bestseller “The Great Illusion.”

Besides, Canadian politicians don’t beef up the defense because it’s not an efficient vote buyer. I’m pretty sure Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney wanted to boost our weak military capability and diplomatic credibility. But they were in a bidding war with the (other) social democratic parties over health care, education, welfare and other popular dysfunctional government money pits.

Harper, who presented defense spending primarily as job creation, had a cunning plan to make Canada politically conservative by default through leftist policies. Or so Tory agents patronized me whenever I objected that campaigning from the right but governing from the left would fail as usual. When that happened, and he was impeached after a futile majority run, he wrote a book about conservatism that secretly is big government populism anyway, so he secretly succeeded.

With Trudeau it’s a little different. The vote-buying dynamic works, though he has even less awareness that resources are actually limited than Harper or Mulroney, both of whom also ran huge Keynesian deficits to stimulate the economy so that the budget would self-balance.

Between modern monetary theory and economic ignorance, Trudeau seems even more convinced that printing money creates wealth. But the main reason he doesn’t spend on defense is that he finds it tasteless. He told our NATO allies that we would never keep our 2 percent pledge. Certainly not on his watch.

Okay, one big reason. Another is his record of not delivering. From drinking water from native supplies to planting trees against climate breakdown, dossiers I’m highlighting because he clearly cares, he didn’t get the job done.

The Canadian press story of “pressure” claims: “For the countries that are lagging behind [on the 2 percent spending target], there will be more and more pressure to step up.” But it immediately blurts out: “Canada spends about 1.3 percent of its GDP on defense and has no public plan to meet the current target.” And not private either. Trudeau doesn’t care, and it wouldn’t matter if he did.

As CP adds to our vaunted commitment in Latvia: “It’s been over a year [Defence Minister Anita] Anand promised to expand the battlegroup into a combat-ready brigade, and detailed plans are still being negotiated. We jumped into committee as usual.

So what can our allies threaten us with? Shyness? We’re long past that, and there’s not a recorded instance of Trudeau being ashamed of anything, no matter how creepy.

Economic sanctions? Even the United States is too busy with the green subsidy war to twist our trade on security. And apart from the United States, the UK and some days France, the only NATO allies that take security seriously are small peripheral allies exposed to aggression. Plus non-NATO Australia, uncomfortably close to our Chinese communist buddies. Well, Trudeau’s.

Don’t defend us? They have to, as a long line of compassionate prime ministers know.

Mainstream Canadian journalists still think the world takes us seriously, one of the reasons it doesn’t take them seriously either. The Globe and the Mail headlined that CP story, “Prime Minister Trudeau goes to NATO summit as Canada expected to play key role in discussions.” Expected by whom? Not even our foolish allies.

Meanwhile, our seriouss allow Trudeau into meetings and photo ops, hoping he doesn’t show up in a suit. But NATO to us is like Robert Frost’s “Home is the place where if you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

And pressure is the thing that if you have to apply it, nothing happens.

The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.