By Scott Taylor
On Monday June 9, Prime Minister Mark Carney did the unthinkable. He promised to immediately boost defence spending to meet the NATO spending objective of 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) within the current 2025 - 2026 fiscal year.
The original defence budget tabled for this same timeframe was $40 billion or roughly 1.3 per cent of Canada's GDP. With Carney's new directive, spending on defence and security is to balloon to $62.7 billion prior to April 1 2026.
Now before all those amateur mathematicians start simply subtracting the former from the latter to determine the increase, we need to keep in mind that some creative accounting is being employed by the Carney team.
While there will be $9 billion in 'new' spending the rest of the boost will come from rolling spending from other government departments into the Department of National Defence's accounting ledger. The most prominent among those moves will see the Canadian Coast Guard becoming essentially a fourth branch of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) rather than reporting to the Department of Fisheries.
Other announced spending increases include a 20 per cent pay raise for service members, retention bonuses and special allowances for training exercises. It was also announced that DND will hire an additional 1400 civilian workers to take some of the strain off our overstretched and understaffed combat forces.
Carney also announced that additional medical staff will be hired to improve access to healthcare for CAF members. However given the state of Canada's health care facilities nation-wide, I'm not sure exactly where he believes those personnel are to be found.
In that same June 9 speech Carney repeated his previous statements that Canada needs to move away from our current heavy reliance on the US for our military equipment purchases. This is of course in light of President Donald Trump's continued threats to annex Canada into becoming the 51st State, through economic measures such as crippling tariffs. “We should no longer send three-quarters of our defence capital spending to America,” Carney said. “The transformation of our military capabilities can help with the transformation of our economy.”
For the record, Carney also ordered a review of the acquisition of 88 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin. At present Canada has only contracted to purchase the first 16 of those F-35's.
A clear way to demonstrate to Canadians that Carney is not simply posturing would be to cancel our order for the remaining 62 F-35's on the order book and instead purchase a similar number of SAAB Gripen fighter jets. The Gripen was the last remaining challenger to the F-35 in the competition to find a replacement for Canada's aging fleet of CF-18's.
For anyone about to argue against Canada operating a mixed fleet of fighter aircraft, the RCAF used to do just that only a couple of decades ago. During the transition from CF-104 Starfighters to the CF-18 Hornets, Canada also had several squadrons of CF-116 Freedom Fighters. One also only needs to look at the Australian example. With a smaller population and GDP than Canada, the RAAF presently operates 24 F-18 Super Hornets and 72 F-35 Lightnings.
It has also been argued that the operating and maintenance cost of the Gripen are far less than those of the F-35. While the F-35's are built entirely in the US, SAAB of Sweden has offered an option for Canada to assemble the Gripen's under licence. A similar arrangement was successfully implemented in Brazil.
Now before anyone gets their elbows too far up over this proposed solution, keep in mind that the engines for the Gripen are still manufactured in the US.
In other words, Trump would still be getting a chunk of cheese, just not the whole damn thing.
Also, the review that Carney has ordered into the F-35 purchase is being conducted by the very same Air Force officers who have steadfastly maintained that they want the F-35 and only the F-35 since the outset. Do not expect a different outcome this time around. They are simply going through the motions to appease Carney and stall for time until the current spat with Trump blows over.
