John Robson: NATO Pressure Won’t Stop Canada’s Free-Riding on US Defence Spending

A Canadian soldier wears the NATO Battle Group patch as he listens to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speak at the Adazi Military base, in Adazi, Latvia, on July 10, 2023. / The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

Commentary

According to a newspaper, not this one, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week “pressure will be on” to make a meaningful contribution to the alliance. Pressure being a colourless, odourless gas whose only known effect is to cause journalists to write headlines.

We’ve been free-riding on American defence spending since Trudeau Sr. scorned “pressure” to be less of a frivolous peacenik. No matter who’s in power, usually the Liberals, we never reached our oft-promised 2 percent of GDP on defence, mostly because we never tried. Nor will we.

Trudeau Jr. isn’t averse to spending money. This February he allocated $46 billion to revitalize Canadian health care by not reforming it. During the pandemic he injected $260 billion into the 2021 budget to make lurking in one’s house, masking even to peer through the curtains, into productive activity.

He spends $30 billion on EV battery subsidies at the drop of a sock, more than we spend on defence which isn’t even listed separately in federal budgets as too small, tatty, and infra dig. Our leaders are busy reshaping our economy, values, and characters, and military force has been passé among snobs since 1909’s best-seller “The Great Illusion.”

Besides, Canadian politicians don’t bolster defence because it’s not an efficient vote-buyer. I’m pretty sure Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney wanted to boost our feeble military capacity and diplomatic credibility. But they were in a bidding war with the (other) social democratic parties over government health, education, welfare, and other popular dysfunctional money pits.

Harper, who mostly presented defence spending as job creation, had a cunning plan to make Canada politically conservative by default through left-wing policies. Or so Tory operatives patronized me whenever I objected that campaigning from the right but governing from the left would fail as usual. When it did, and he was ousted after one futile majority term, he wrote a book about conservatism secretly being big-government populism anyway, so he secretly succeeded.

With Trudeau it’s a bit different. The vote-buying dynamics operate, though he has even less sense that resources actually are limited than Harper or Mulroney, who both also ran huge Keynesian deficits to stimulate the economy so the budget would balance itself.

Between Modern Monetary Theory and economic cluelessness, Trudeau seems even more convinced printing money creates wealth. But the big reason he doesn’t spend on defence is he thinks it’s tacky. He told our NATO allies we’d never keep our 2 percent pledge. Certainly not on his watch.

OK, one big reason. Another is his record of not delivering. From aboriginal-reserve drinking water to anti-climate-breakdown tree planting, files I highlight because he clearly cares about them, he didn’t get the job done.

The Canadian Press “pressure” story claims, “For the countries that are lagging behind [on the 2 percent spending target], there will be increasing pressure to step up.” But it immediately blurts out, “Canada spends about 1.3 per cent of its GDP on defence and has no public plan to get to the current target.” And no private one either. Trudeau doesn’t care, and it wouldn’t matter if he did.

As CP adds of our vaunted Latvia deployment, “It’s been more than a year since [Defence Minister Anita] Anand pledged to expand the battle group to a combat-ready brigade, and detailed plans are still being negotiated.” We leaped into committee, as usual.

So what can our allies threaten us with? Embarrassment? We’re long past that, and there is no recorded instance of Trudeau being embarrassed over anything, however cringy.

Economic sanctions? Even the United States is too busy with the green subsidy war to twist our trade on security. And apart from the United States, UK, and on some days France, the only NATO allies who take security seriously are small peripheral ones exposed to aggression. Plus NATO non-member Australia, uncomfortably close to our Chinese communist buddies. Well, Trudeau’s.

Not defending us? They have to, as a long succession of free-riding prime ministers have known.

Mainstream Canadian journalists still think the world takes us seriously, one reason it doesn’t take them seriously either. The Globe and Mail headlined that CP story, “Prime Minister Trudeau heads to NATO summit as Canada expected to play key role in discussions.” Expected by whom? Not even our silly allies.

Meanwhile, our serious ones let Trudeau into meetings and photo ops, hoping he doesn’t show up in a costume. But NATO for us is like Robert Frost’s “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

And pressure is the thing that, when you have to exert it, nothing happens.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.