Trudeau taking the heat from NATO allies for cheaping out on defence

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Canada is a cheapskate. We’re that friend who always “forgets” their wallet when they join you for dinner, who never splits the bill evenly because they “only had an appetizer,” who never treats their pals to a round but always drinks when someone else buys. Most us have had friends like this, and after a while, you stop inviting them out, leaving them to stare at the walls of their studio apartments alone.

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Or, if you’re military allies, you don’t invite them to join the AUKUS defence pact. You slam their defence spending targets, like then-U.S. president Donald Trump did in 2019, when he jeeringly asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “What is your number?” And you rip them on the eve of NATO’s 75th anniversary, like U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson did on Monday, when he called Canada “shameful,” and rightly accused us of “riding on America’s coat-tails.”

And it’s about to get a lot worse. This week, Trudeau is in Washington, D.C., for NATO’s 75th anniversary summit. At a time when NATO is essentially at war with the unholy triad of Russia, China and Iran, all member nations must pull their weight to ensure democracy survives. And that means spending the expected NATO target of two per cent of GDP on defence, to both meet existing threats and deter future ones — like China’s prospective invasion of Taiwan — from happening.

So what is Canada doing? You guessed it — cheaping out. In a spending analysis published Monday, Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Yves Giroux revealed that the Liberal government’s military spending projections not only fail to meet the two per cent target, they also grossly overstate our contribution.

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Whereas the government claims it will shell out $57.8 billion by 2029-2030, the PBO estimates that number will be closer to $52.2 billion. And while the government says it will hit 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2030, the PBO estimated spending will actually sit at 1.42 per cent, after a decline from a peak of 1.49 per cent in 2025-2026.

Giroux also found that since 2017-2018, the Department of National Defence has allowed an average of 33 per cent of some of its capital expenditures to lapse. This leaves Canada playing catch up for years of under-funding.

The Liberals claim Giroux used the wrong figures, because he based his analysis on internal GDP forecasts instead of using projections from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which are used by NATO. The OECD’s GDP projections for Canada are lower than the PBO’s, which therefore pushes up our military spending-to-GDP ratio.

But if our economy grows faster — which the PBO believes it will — then the amount budgeted for defence will represent a smaller percentage of overall economic activity. This would be a good news story for Canadians, because a faster-growing economy creates more wealth, allowing more people to pay their rent, buy a home or feed their kids. A faster-growing economy also means the government collects more tax revenue, and thus can more easily increase spending on its priorities — like defence.

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Pleading poverty isn’t going to wash in Washington. In May, a bipartisan group of senators called out Canada for being one of the biggest laggards in all of NATO. This week, Politico called us “an outlier” among the 32 member nations and noted that even Belgium has a plan to get to two per cent by 2035. Canada? We’re still waiting.

Expect world leaders to call Trudeau out this week, as he rightly deserves. But that’s nothing compared to the spanking he’ll get if Donald Trump wins the White House again. This time, Trump won’t ask what Trudeau’s number is. He’ll simply hang up the phone.

Postmedia Network

Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia’s national politics columnist.

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