Canadian defence policy experts say the federal government’s military spending commitments have yet to see meaningful follow-through and lack a coherent goal, with no indication that the armed forces are being adequately prepared for a future conflict.
The criticisms, heard Monday at a meeting of the House of Commons national defence committee, echo comments made last week by a senior U.S. Defense Department official after the Pentagon paused a decades-old joint military advisory board with Canada, which was accused of not being a “credible” defence partner.
Although Ottawa has defended its ramp-up in defence spending over the past year, as well as the launch of the new defence industrial strategy, researchers said Monday those investments and strategies mean little without a clear national security plan that shows where Canada’s military is heading.
“If we picture sovereign defence as a 100-metre run, current investments and the (defence industrial strategy) barely get us out of the starting blocks,” said Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College and associate director of the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations at Queens University.
Robert Huebert, a professor at the University of Calgary, said the defence industrial strategy is based on the assumption that “the geopolitical environment gives us the time to do what the strategy calls us to engage upon,” which is a dramatic build-up of Canada’s military industrial sector that will be prioritized for procurement contracts.
“I will argue that we do not have that time,” he told the committee.
“We may find ourselves in conflict much sooner than we anticipate, (and) any industrial strategy has to take that into account.”
That means setting a clear objective for what the Canadian Armed Forces needs to deploy for such an international conflict and finding the fastest route to getting that equipment, said Richard Shimooka, a senior research fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, where Leuprecht and Huebert also serve as senior fellows.
While diversifying from the U.S. and reshoring domestically were admirable policy goals, the experts said, they stressed that partnering with the U.S. where necessary for interoperability, cost and speed was also critical.
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“I think that we should have been looking at a modernization and a rearmament of our military since 2017 or ’16 or so,” Shimooka said. “And we’ve basically spent the past decade not doing so.
“You saw the comments last week by Department of Defense officials in the United States. I think that these are comments that are made privately by our allies and partners internationally, (who) say that our actual capabilities, that we are able to deploy out of the country, (are) actually very, very low.”
Last week, after the U.S. undersecretary of defence policy Elbridge Colby announced his department was pausing the Permanent Joint Board on Defense, several Canadian reporters were given a lengthy phone briefing by senior Pentagon officials, which was off the record.
In written background comments given to reporters after the call, a senior U.S. Defense Department official said Canada “has yet to make the hard decisions and tradeoffs needed to put it on track to become a credible partner in the mutual defense of our continent and hemisphere.”
Of particular issue was the long-delayed review into Canada’s contract to purchase a fleet of F-35 fighter jets from the U.S., and the lack of a clear roadmap to achieving NATO’s new target of spending five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035.
In additional comments from the call provided to Global News, the U.S. official said the Pentagon was in technical talks with Canada last year on some sort of action plan for achieving its defence commitments. However, “this year we just didn’t have any follow-up” from the Canadian side, the official said.
“They promised us the moon last year and are not delivering,” the official said.
“We never saw them come back with a position that was credible. What they said was they’re going to try to align with the U.S. position. We’re not just looking for ‘alignment,’ we’re looking for a real defense plan.”
The pause of the joint advisory board, the U.S. official added, came after the Pentagon “got to a point where we have to say something” after waiting for further talks set for early this year.
“The Permanent Joint Board of Defense is only useful if we continue productive discussion. If we can’t get past this point, then that’s not a useful dialogue,” the official said.
Asked about those comments and the progress of talks with the U.S., a spokesperson for Defence Minister David McGuinty’s office provided the same statement given to Global News last week in response to the original Pentagon official’s comments.
The statement listed the slew of defence spending announcements made since Prime Minister Mark Carney took office over a year ago, as well as the launch of the defence industrial strategy and new Defence Investment Agency, and procurement plans including a future submarine fleet.
“Increased defence spending is already strengthening warfighting capabilities by moving projects forward across ammunition production, space surveillance, small arms, military communications, naval support, submarine modernization, and long-range patrol aircraft,” McGuinty’s communications director Alice Hansen said.
“Progress is also being made on major Canadian capability projects and domestic procurements, helping equip the Canadian Armed Forces while supporting Canadian industry and jobs.”
In testimony Monday, the defence experts said those comments and the pause of the advisory board showed the U.S. is willing to to make unilateral decisions on North American defence if Canada doesn’t step up quickly — particularly in the Arctic.
“We can either partner with the United States by making investments necessary to have a sovereign political and economic voice in partnership, at eye level, with the United States, or we can let our capabilities atrophy, and the United States will do it on its own,” Leuprecht said.
“It will come at the expense of our sovereignty.”
The researchers agreed that further delaying the F-35 review, or cancelling the contract altogether, would not only risk interoperability with the U.S. through NORAD but also further set back readiness capabilities, costing additional resources on retraining and equipping airbases for an alternative fighter jet fleet.
Shimooka added that the upcoming U.S. midterm elections in November may add further urgency to Canada’s military rearmament needs, with the possibility of a Democrat-led Congress creating gridlock for the Trump administration in getting Pentagon budgets and policies approved.
“Canada will need to actually increase its defence spending and actually have outputs, military outputs, in a meaningful way that can help undergird the existing security system that is in real trouble,” he said.
Huebert said Canada needs to figure out how to work with the U.S. no matter which party is in charge.
“The geopolitics means we are going to have to work together if we have any realistic hope of being able to maintain deterrence … and being able get our mind back on terms of where the real threat is coming in the long term.”
—with files from Global’s Reggie Cecchini