Sapped of both hard and soft power, Canada needs action to keep up in a dangerous world

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Charles Burton

Ottawa’s vexing indifference toward national defence and security will not serve or protect Canada.

Speaking to an international crowd of leaders, ministers and other representatives who had gathered earlier this month in Beijing for a forum that marked 10 years of China’s Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure program, Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared that “changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before.”

Quite right. Will the Russian invasion of Ukraine be resolved without war with NATO? Will armed conflict in the Middle East, fomented by Iran, spiral into a regional war? Would China open a third front by invading Taiwan? If the atrocious provocations to war by Iran, Russia and China develop simultaneously on three fronts – setting off a world war in Asia, the Middle East and Indo-Pacific – where will Canada stand?

Canada should be a respected and resonant voice in the international arena. We are both an Atlantic and a Pacific nation, and our heralded history of peacekeeping involvement in the Middle East dates back to the Suez Crisis of the 1950s and Lester Pearson’s Nobel Prize. In the Second World War, prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King sat down for four power meetings with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

Canada once mattered. But those days are long gone.

Years of underfunding defence and freeloading on the U.S. for our national security are leading to Canada being phased out. The significance of the Group of Seven and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance has become equalled or overtaken by that of organizations from which Canada is excluded, such as the Quint and AUKUS, which is aimed at Indo-Pacific security even though Britain is not a Pacific nation. Despite reportedly telling Western leaders and officials at the G20 summit that it had credible intelligence that India’s government was involved in the assassination of a Canadian citizen, no leader was willing to publicly criticize Narendra Modi. Our soft power authority has faded.

Given our pathetically depleted hard power capabilities, Canada needs a reality check on what we can actually do with the limited resources at our disposal.

First of all, it is time to stop mouthing hollow bromides about “our” north, and actually reorient our defence to establish a meaningful presence in the Arctic. China now defines itself as a “near-Arctic nation,” with increased investment in the region and plans around a potential shipping route – a “polar silk road” – that could emerge between melting ice caps; Russia, meanwhile, has argued that much of Canada’s Arctic waters actually belongs to them. If a major conflict were to arise with Russia and China allied against the U.S. and Canada, our unprotected Arctic could be quickly lost to Beijing and Moscow’s ambitions to expand their territory beyond Europe and East Asia.

Secondly, Canada must protect its northern stores of critical minerals. We talk a good game on this, but so far that has mostly been political bafflegab. Beyond making an obvious statement about our sovereignty, developing our northern resources is a productive way to create economic opportunities for northern Indigenous communities, and shows our allies that we are serious about stopping China from monopolizing valuable minerals in Canadian soil that are vital to the world’s high-tech future.

Finally, Ottawa needs to step up and meet the challenge to Canada’s security from Iran, Russia and China. There was tough talk in Parliament earlier this year about foreign actors manipulating our democratic institutions, but there has yet to be legislation tabled to create so much as a foreign agent registry. The federal government’s response to the 34 well-considered recommendations of a House of Commons special committee on Canada-China relations released in May was dismissive.

Even the Commons subcommittee on international human rights’ report on Tibetan residential schools in China was effectively ignored. One would have thought this issue would be something Canada could take a lead on, considering our history in this area. But in responding to the report, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly didn’t even acknowledge the recommendation that Canada sanction Chinese Communist officials complicit in their residential schools policy.

What is the point of investing considerable resources into parliamentary committees if the government sees them only as an irritant to be checked, rather than a positive contributor to national policy development?

We are facing an axis of cold-blooded dictators determined to destroy Western-supported stability and order. With global tensions more combustible than at any time in a generation or more, Ottawa’s vexing indifference toward national defence and security will not serve or protect Canada.

We need to refocus what remains of our military and security resources to what really matters, and fast.

Charles Burton is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, non-resident senior fellow of the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague, and former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing.

Related Topics:#CharlesBurton #MacdonaldLaurierInstitute #NationalDefence

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Mark Carney Thinks He’s Cinderella At The Ball

Published on June 26, 2025

Todayville

Trish Wood is Critical

And we all pay when the dancing ends

How to explain Mark Carney’s obsession with Europe and his lack of attention to Canada’s economy and an actual budget?

Carney’s pirouette through NATO meetings, always in his custom-tailored navy blue power suits, carries the desperate whiff of an insecure, small-town outsider who has made it big but will always yearn for old-money credibility. Canada is too young a country, too dynamic and at times a bit too vulgar to claim equal status with Europe’s formerly magnificent and ancient cultures — now failed under the yoke of globalism.

Hysterical foreign policy, unchecked immigration, burgeoning censorship and massive income disparity have conquered much of the continent that many of us used to admire and were even somewhat intimidated by. But we’ve moved on. And yet Carney seems stuck, seeking approval and direction from modern Europe — a place where, for most countries, the glory days are long gone.

Carney’s irresponsible financial commitment to NATO is a reckless and unnecessary expenditure, given that many Canadians are hurting. But it allowed Carney to pick up another photo of himself glad-handing global elites to whom he just sold out his struggling citizens.

From the Globe and Mail

“Prime Minister Mark Carney has committed Canada to the biggest increase in military spending since the Second World War, part of a NATO pledge designed to address the threat of Russian expansionism and to keep Donald Trump from quitting the Western alliance.

Mr. Carney and the leaders of the 31 other member countries issued a joint statement Wednesday at The Hague saying they would raise defence-related spending to the equivalent of 5 per cent of their gross domestic product by 2035.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the commitment means “European allies and Canada will do more of the heavy lifting” and take “greater responsibility for our shared security.”

For Canada, this will require spending an additional $50-billion to $90-billion a year – more than doubling the existing defence budget to between $110-billion and $150-billion by 2035, depending on how much the economy grows. This year Ottawa’s defence-related spending is due to top $62-billion.”

You’ll note that spending money we don’t have in order to keep President Trump happy is hardly an elbows up moment, especially given that the pledge followed Carney’s embarrassing interactions with Trump at the G7. I’m all for diplomacy but sick to my teeth of Carney’s two-faced approach to everything. There is no objective truth to anything our prime minister touches. Watch the first few minutes of the video below.

Part of the NATO top-up we can’t afford is more billions for Ukraine which is pretty much considered a lost cause. NATO must keep that conflict going in order to justify its existence and we will all pay dearly for it.

The portents are bad. This from the Globe:

We are poorer than we think. Canadians running their retirement numbers are shining light in the dark corners of household finances in this country. The sums leave many “anxious, fearful and sad about their finances,” according to a Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan survey recently reported in these pages.

Fifty-two per cent of us worry a lot about our personal finances. Fifty per cent feel frustrated, 47 per cent feel emotionally drained and 43 per cent feel depressed. There is not one survey indicator to suggest Canadians have made financial progress in 2025 compared with 2024.

The video below is a basic “F”- you to Canadians from a Prime Minister who smirks and roles his eyes when questioned about his inept money management.

He did spill the beans to CNN with this unsettling revelation about the staggering numbers we are talking about:

Signing on to NATO’s new defence spending target could cost the federal treasury up to $150 billion a year, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday in advance of the Western military alliance’s annual summit.

The prime minister made the comments in an interview with CNN International.

“It is a lot of money,” Carney said.

This guy was a banker?

We are witnessing the political equivalent of a vain woman who blows her entire paycheque to look good for an aspirational event even though she can’t afford food or rent. Yes, she sparkled for a moment, but in reality her domaine is crumbling. All she has left are the photographs of her glittery night. Our Prime Minister is collecting his own album of power-proximity photos he can use to wallpaper over his failures as our economy collapses.

The glass slipper doesn’t fit.

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It’s not enough to just make military commitments—we must also execute them

Published on June 26, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

To reach 2 per cent of GDP this year, the federal government is committing an additional $9.3 billion towards the military budget. Moreover, to reach 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, it’s estimated the government will need to raise yearly spending by an additional $50 billion—effectively doubling the annual defence budget from $62.7 billion to approximately $110 billion.

As part of this year’s NATO summit, Canada and its allies committed to increase annual military spending to reach 5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035. While this commitment—and the government’s recent push to meet the previous spending target of 2 per cent of GDP—are important steps in fulfilling Canada’s obligations to the alliance, there are major challenges the federal government will need to overcome to execute these plans.

Since 2014, members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have committed to spend at least 2 per cent of GDP (a measure of overall economic output) on national defence. Canada had long-failed to fulfill this commitment, to the ire of our allies, until the Carney government recently announced a $9.3 billion boost to defence spending (up to a total of $62.7 billion) that will get us to 2 per cent of GDP during the 2025/26 fiscal year.

However, just as Canada reached the old target, the goal posts have now moved. As part of the 2025 NATO summit, alliance members (including Canada) committed to reach an increased spending target of 5 per cent of GDP in 10 years. The new target is made up of two components: core military spending equivalent to 3.5 per cent of GDP, and another 1.5 per cent of GDP for other defence-related spending.

National defence is a core function of the federal government and the Carney government deserves credit for prioritizing its NATO commitments given that past governments of different political stripes have failed to do so. Moreover, the government is ensuring that Canada remains in step with its allies in an increasingly dangerous world.

However, there are major challenges that arise once you consider how the government will execute these commitments.

First, both the announcement that Canada will reach 2 per cent of GDP in military spending this fiscal year, and the future commitment to spend up to 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, represent major fiscal commitments that Canada’s budget cannot simply absorb in its current state.

To reach 2 per cent of GDP this year, the federal government is committing an additional $9.3 billion towards the military budget. Moreover, to reach 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, it’s estimated the government will need to raise yearly spending by an additional $50 billion—effectively doubling the annual defence budget from $62.7 billion to approximately $110 billion. However, based on the last official federal fiscal update, the federal government already plans to run an annual deficit this year—meaning it spends more than it collects in revenue—numbering in the tens of billions, and will continue running large deficits for the foreseeable future.

Given this poor state of finances, the government is left with three main options to fund increased military spending: raise taxes, borrow the money, or cut spending in other areas.

The first two options are non-starters. Canadian families already struggle under a tax burden that sees them spend more on taxes than on food, shelter, and clothing combined. Moreover, raising taxes inhibits economic growth and the prosperity of Canadians by reducing the incentives to work, save, invest, or start a business.

Borrowing the money to fund this new defence spending will put future generations of Canadians in a precarious situation. When governments borrow money and accumulate debt (total federal debt is expected to reach $2.3 trillion in 2025-26), the burden of this debt falls squarely on the backs of Canadians—likely in the form of higher taxes in the future. Put differently, each dollar we borrow today must be paid back by more than a dollar in higher taxes tomorrow.

This leaves cutting spending elsewhere as the best option, but one that requires the government to substantially readjusts its priorities. The federal government devotes considerable spending towards areas that are not within its core responsibilities and which shouldn’t have federal involvement in the first place. For instance, the previous government launched three major initiatives to provide national dental care, national pharmacare and national daycare, despite the fact that all three areas fall squarely under provincial jurisdiction. Instead of continuing to fund federal overreach, the Carney government should divert spending back to the core function of national defence. Further savings can be found by reducing the number of bureaucrats, eliminating corporate welfare, dropping electric vehicle subsidies, and many other mechanisms.

There is a fourth option by which the government could fund increased defence spending, which is to increase the economic growth rate within Canada and enjoy higher overall revenues. The problem is Canada has long-suffered a weak economy that will remain stagnant unless the government fundamentally changes its approach to tax and regulatory policy.

Even if the Carney government is able to successfully adjust spending priorities to account for new military funding, there are further issues that may inhibit money from being spent effectively.

It is a well-documented problem that military spending in Canada is often poorly executed. A series of reports from the auditor general in recent years have highlighted issues with the readiness of Canada’s fighter force, delays in supplying the military with necessary materials (e.g. spare parts, uniforms, or rations), as well as delays in delivering combat and non-combat ships needed to fulfill domestic and international obligations. All three of these cases represent instances in which poor planning and issues with procurement and supply chains) are preventing government funding from translating into timely and effective military outcomes.

The Carney government has recently made major commitments to increase military funding to fulfill Canada’s NATO obligations. While this is a step in the right direction, it’s not enough to simply make the commitments, the government must execute them as well.