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Mr Carney wants to change that. He is promising to spend C$82bn ($59bn) over the next five years so that Canada is on a path to devoting 5% of its GDP to defence by 2035. Much of that money will be spent in Canada’s north. Russian submarines and Chinese “research” ships are making increasing forays into Canada’s Arctic waters. “There is a threat coming from the north and we can’t just be a liability,” says General Carignan.
Canada’s Armed Forces have 67,000 full-time personnel and 27,000 reserves. All of them joined voluntarily. In addition to defending the second-largest country on earth, they are stretched to the limit with far-flung operations. In Latvia they bolster the defence of the Baltic states, while a naval mission works to keep the Taiwan Strait open to international shipping.
Those armed forces are spread thin over Canada’s almost 10m square kilometres. Climate change may have dropped down the list of the country’s priorities, but the damage caused by increasingly dangerous weather has not gone away. Troops are regularly called on to help people affected by floods and forest fires. When covid-19 swept through miserably understaffed old-people’s homes in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in 2020, the army was dispatched to care for them. The new civilian-defence force could help with these kinds of emergencies, freeing the army to concentrate on actually defending the homeland.
It may also rouse Canadians from the reverie they have enjoyed since defence spending first drifted below 2% of GDP more than three decades ago. That this meant Canada depended on the United States for much of its territorial defence did not seem to bother anyone. Philippe Lagassé, who studies defence at Carleton University in Ottawa, notes that Canada has never faced threats like those it does today. He says it is “hard for the Canadian mind to wrap itself around” the new reality.
Canada’s Armed Forces have 67,000 full-time personnel and 27,000 reserves. All of them joined voluntarily. In addition to defending the second-largest country on earth, they are stretched to the limit with far-flung operations. In Latvia they bolster the defence of the Baltic states, while a naval mission works to keep the Taiwan Strait open to international shipping.
Those armed forces are spread thin over Canada’s almost 10m square kilometres. Climate change may have dropped down the list of the country’s priorities, but the damage caused by increasingly dangerous weather has not gone away. Troops are regularly called on to help people affected by floods and forest fires. When covid-19 swept through miserably understaffed old-people’s homes in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in 2020, the army was dispatched to care for them. The new civilian-defence force could help with these kinds of emergencies, freeing the army to concentrate on actually defending the homeland.
It may also rouse Canadians from the reverie they have enjoyed since defence spending first drifted below 2% of GDP more than three decades ago. That this meant Canada depended on the United States for much of its territorial defence did not seem to bother anyone. Philippe Lagassé, who studies defence at Carleton University in Ottawa, notes that Canada has never faced threats like those it does today. He says it is “hard for the Canadian mind to wrap itself around” the new reality.
