Pulling the Goalie By Keith Porteous
At the recent NATO Summit, Prime Minister Mark Carney committed Canada to spending somewhere between $150 to $200 billion annually by sometime in the early 2030s, some 5% of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Carney aims for Canada to meet NATO’s 2% of GDP military spending target by early 2026, from the current $41 billion annually (1.45% of GDP in 2024), five years ahead of earlier plans. These are the biggest increases in military spending since World War 2, and can only result in driving up Canada’s deficits and debt, already growing at alarming rates. Canada Defence Journal labels this a “deficit-fuelled doctrine,” signalling a massive fiscal expansion over the next several years.
While a third of this exploding military budget is to be earmarked for increases in the military’s wages, artificial intelligence, surveillance systems, and infrastructure, two thirds is slated to be spent on aircraft and other weapons systems, about $125 billion each year. And where will Canada buy these weapons systems from? The United States and its arms manufacturers, of course. How this dovetails with Carney’s avowed “elbows up”, “Canada First” rhetoric is anyone’s guess. How this will be paid for by the residents of Canada is the more pressing question. Carney has only said there will need to be “trade offs”, which certainly means spending cuts to health, education, and other human services. Elbows up? More like pulling the goalie!
In a clear demonstration of political posturing, Carney frames these hikes as necessary to counter new global threats (Russia, China, Arctic tension), reduce dependency on the U.S, and assert Canadian sovereignty. In no way will this massive new spending “reduce dependency on the U.S..” And how exactly, are Russia and China a military threat to Canada, or to the U.S. for that matter? With the rise of a multi-polar world, the economic rivalries of Russia and China are a threat to the U.S.’ full spectrum economic and military hegemony around the world. Russia spends about $150 billion a year on its military, China spends $250 billion, while the U.S. currently spends more than $1 trillion each year on its Pentagon budget alone.
Those of us who are concerned with the impact of human driven climate extremes should note that the U.S./NATO is the single largest carbon emitter on the planet. The massive growth in militarism adds to the unfolding climate catastrophe, while Western governments bring forward austerity budgets for the working classes, make hollow proclamations about mitigating climate change, and puts the U.S./NATO on a war footing with nuclear armed “adversaries” of their own making. Climate change will be the least of our concerns should NATO find itself in a direct war in a multi-polar world, where humanity cannot survive the fallout of a nuclear exchange. Currently, the wars between world powers are being waged through proxies.
In Canada’s most recent election, both Carney and the deplorable Pierre Poilievre supported raising Canada’s military spending to 2% of GDP as its NATO commitment, with polls showing about half of Canadians supporting the policy. Carney’s commitment to raising military spending to 5% of GDP, nearly $200 billion, is not supported by a majority of Canadians, and will drive cuts to those budget items that they depend on, while handing out more than $100 billion each year to American arms manufacturers. The theatre of a U.S.- Canada trade war, and fear mongering about the preposterous notion of a U.S. annexation of Canada by Trump, has been used to dupe Canadians into self-harming jingoism.
Prime Minister Carney is “countering” Donald Trump with massive increases to military spending, tax cuts for multinational corporations, fast tracking American owned resource extraction mega-projects, and green-lighting more pipelines. And in doing so, he is lowering the standards of environmental review and First Nations’ consent. With the pernicious policies of Liberals like these, who needs the deplorable Conservatives?
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