Wheels up for Washington !
Professor Anessa Kimball's interview is part of an article, written by Kyle Duggan & Zi-Ann Lum, published by POLITICO in its Ottawa Playbook, yet a daily look at politics and power in Canada.
(Cliquez ici pour avoir la version française)
What are you watching for?
“Two percent” is going to come back. Canada is expected to bring a plan to the table. It’s expected to demonstrate to allies [how it will go about meeting its commitments] even in the short to mid-term. Most other allies at this point, even those like Italy and Spain that were on the naughty list, they’ve been able to do this.
One of the challenges is that the Canadian public hasn’t really demonstrated a willingness to invest that much. It’s a political issue. Bill Blair and Anita Anand and other [past] defense ministers have noted it’s uphill to convince parliamentarians of this need for 2 percent.
Why is that so hard?
We can point to a level of naiveté with respect to the relationship with the United States — there is a belief that if there ever really was a crisis, the U.S. would be there.
We had four years of Donald Trump, and it would seem as though Canada should have learned from this, in similar ways we’ve seen our European allies learned. They are worried about potential Trump disengagement from NATO and from Europe in ways we don’t necessarily see Canada being worried. Canada appears to be more worried about possible trade disturbances from a second Trump administration than a breakdown in the security and defense relationship. I think this is because we do take it for granted.
Canadians are also not convinced … the threat is here. For example, it’s easier to sell to Canadians that we should spend on defense when it comes to combating climate change or those types of disasters because that’s in Canada. It’s a real challenge to explain that we have to do this because of NATO.
The reality is, this is how Canada manages to get a lot of its defense policy done, basically, by tying its hands internationally and then saying, ‘Look, we made this promise, so we have to do it.’
What are we talking about when we talk about the 2 percent metric?
NATO defense expenditures — 2 percent of a country’s annual GDP on military spending, which is what we call it, even though NATO defense expenditures can include a little bit more stuff.
The definition that NATO agreed upon dates to the 1950s. So, there may be room to kind of maneuver or expand what might be included. Other countries are better at doing this functionally and legally.
In Belgium, they have legislated so that their rail system is part of defense and national security. Something like 90 percent of everything that’s going through Ukraine has gone through the rails of Belgium, but it also means that all the spending it does to maintain that is national defense spending.
So there could be an argument made that, for example, the spending Canada will be doing on infrastructure in the Arctic will be used for defense, ergo this could be national defense spending. Canadians don’t think like this because we don’t want to mix those things together.
But the reality is, these are ways in which Canada can help itself reach 2 percent. And I don’t think that it would be difficult, particularly because now we have more Arctic partners in NATO, to get these things to become acceptable to other allies to get the allies to consent to these things.
Where does the conversation go from here?
We’ll have to do some defense economics numbers crunching. One of the challenges is that recruitment is broken in Canada, so even if we were able to allocate the money, we know that we can’t spend all the money we even get now.
I explain in my book that with 2 percent, one of the challenges for Canada is that we are the smallest of the large economies, or the largest of the smaller economies. Either way you slice it, we would have to spend in real dollars the most of any other partner in the alliance.
People don’t appreciate what that would mean domestically, politically to an electorate. To give you an idea, based on the 2023 budget, Canada would have to identify as much money as currently funds the entire ministry of science, technology and innovation and give that to defense.
