The long history of Canada failing to hit its military spending targets
In an ever-more insecure world, Canada's federal government has announced it will spend two per cent of its GDP on military spending. That's the standard that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization all agreed to back in 2006, but Canada has long been a laggard, to the extent that other governments, particularly the United States, have browbeaten the country for its meagre military spending.
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In 2024, NATO released a report detailing which nations hit the two-per-cent target. Twenty-three of the defence's group's members were either at or above two per cent. This includes Montenegro, a Balkan country with a population smaller than that of Mississauga, and the two most recent NATO members, Sweden and Finland.
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Eight countries, including Canada, had not. Canada spends less than Italy on defence but more than Belgium. The lowest-spending NATO nation, Spain, puts 1.28 per cent of its GDP towards military spending. In July 2023, the Wall Street Journal editorial board called Canada's military spending 'pathetic.'
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NATO is currently considering bumping its threshold from two per cent to five per cent, something that world leaders are expected to discuss at the annual summit at The Hague in two weeks' time.
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Peter MacKay, who served as defence minister in the former Conservative government, told National Post in 2023 that he regrets that the Conservatives hadn't hit the target while they were in power.
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By 2014, he said, there was a 'great deal of fatigue around defence spending,' due to the years Canada had spent fighting in Afghanistan.
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'We, the (Stephen) Harper government, were putting a lot of money into this effort to reach two per cent. And the department literally couldn't spend it fast enough,' he said. 'They would take the money and we would get wrapped around the axle literally on these big (procurement) projects. And we would, at the end of the year, have to send money back to the Treasury.'
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Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Monday that Canada will spend an additional $9.3 billion on defence during the 2025-2026 fiscal year, for a total of more than $62 billion, or about two per cent of GDP.
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But this isn't the first time that a Canadian prime minister has promised that the country would hit the target. Here's a non-exhaustive list of when Canada has promised to hit its NATO target and where its defence spending was at over the years.
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1970s: At this point, Canada was spending 2.8 per cent of its GDP on its defence budget. While the 1970s were technically a period of détente in the Cold War, there were a number of close calls in the 1960s and the 1970s were a deeply unstable period. Throughout the mid-1970s, Canada's military spending began to decline, averaging about 1.9 per cent of GDP, before growing slightly through the 1980s to 2.1 per cent.
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