It’s interesting that, just one day before the Canadian government’s recent Throne Speech—in which Prime Minister Mark Carney had King Charles announce Ottawa’s intention to “rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the Canadian Armed Forces” and “boost Canada’s defense industry by joining ReArm Europe”—NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte announced that NATO countries will agree at their June summit to increase military spending to 5% of GDP.
Rutte was speaking at a meeting of NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly (PA) in Dayton, Ohio. All members of the military alliance send parliamentarians to participate in the PA, which is a forum for NATO to ensure that governments implement policies that reflect its priorities.
This includes military and foreign policy—like encouraging members to procure F-35 fighter jets or participate in the United States’ National Missile Defense plan—but it goes far beyond that to include domestic economic policies, like ensuring that energy resources are designated as “strategic” and kept available to the U.S. military.
And, of course, PA work also includes pressuring NATO members to commit to implementing the alliance’s completely arbitrary military spending guidelines, whether 2% of GDP or, soon apparently, 5%.
There’s no credible way that Carney didn’t know Rutte was going to make his announcement. For starters, MPs from all parties in Parliament participate in the PA—it operates like a kind of all-party indoctrination camp—so they would already have been exposed to the agenda and priorities of the Dayton meeting.
But perhaps more important, one of the “expert speakers” at the PA meeting was Canadian Senator Rebecca Patterson, whose appointment last year came on the advice of Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Patterson is Rapporteur of the NATO PA Defense and Security Committee, seemingly able to shift seamlessly between the “chamber of sober second thought” of the Canadian Senate and the “tower of obsessive arms spending” that is NATO.
Patterson’s report to the PA, “NATO’s Future Russia Strategy,” bluntly identifies the Russian military as “the single most significant threat to Allied security” and states that “NATO’s future policy on Russia must be comprehensive and address the 360-degree nature of the Russian threat.”
While celebrating the fact that most NATO countries have reached the 2% military spending target, she argues that this baseline needs to be raised and specifically suggests that the new target needs to be somewhere over 3% and as high as 5%.
And, lo and behold, 5% is exactly what NATO’s Secretary-General announced the alliance members will agree to the following month.
So, what was Ottawa’s response to all of this?
During the federal election campaign, Carney pledged to hit the 2% target by 2030—because the GDP tends to increase each year, this alone would mean almost doubling Canada’s current military spending to somewhere around $75 billion. When asked by reporters about Rutte’s new 5% target, Carney cagily replied that Canada would “surpass NATO commitments within five years.”
Speaking the day after the Throne Speech, Canadian Defense Minister David McGuinty pledged to military contractors at the annual CANSEC arms show that the government will accelerate military spending and take “immediate and decisive action to rebuild Canada’s defense capacity.”
Canada’s GDP was estimated to be around $2.2 trillion USD—or $3 trillion CDN—for 2024. Five percent of that is $150 billion. It’s an astonishingly huge figure, which most of us can’t even begin to contemplate. But if we put it into comparison with other kinds of government spending, we get a sense of what kind of money NATO is looking for, and what kind of impact it will have on working people in Canada.
$150 billion could build around 430,000 publicly owned and delivered social housing units each year. That’s more than two million truly affordable units in the space of five years, which is precisely what is needed to confront the housing crisis across the country.
That amount could also be used to build around 3,600 new schools, or 60 new hospitals, each year. Or it could create in the area of 1.7 million full-time jobs paying $40 per hour.
But instead, NATO and the federal government want to put that money into new military hardware, ammunition, and weapons of mass destruction (since NATO is a nuclear power), to fuel more aggression, more global insecurity, more war, and more destruction.
There’s a hideous global implication of Rutte’s 5% proposal as well.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditure reached $2.718 trillion in 2024. More than half of that—$1.506 trillion, or 55%—was from NATO’s 32 member states. The GDP estimates for those 32 countries last year is around $54 trillion, so NATO’s new 5% target (which Rutte feels has already been decided) means $2.7 trillion—equal to the entire world’s current military spending.
At a time of economic and social crisis—with a soaring cost of living, declining real wages, gigification of employment, a looming climate crisis, and an absolute lack of anything resembling affordable housing—how is spending more on the military even remotely responsible?
In the midst of calls to defend sovereignty and independence, how can the government explain allowing a foreign interferer like NATO to have such sweeping and long-lasting influence over political and economic affairs in Canada?
During a year that sombrely marked the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism in Europe—a conflict which caused the deaths of 70 to 85 million people, approximately 3% of the global population—while witnessing ongoing slaughter and genocide in Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and elsewhere, how is it conscionable to deliberately add over $1 trillion to global arms spending?
These are the questions that the people of this country need to be asking of the federal government.
We need to demand of Ottawa that it adopt an independent foreign policy based on peace, disarmament, international cooperation and respect for sovereignty. We need to demand a big reduction in military spending, and for those funds to be dedicated to people’s needs. And we need to demand that Canada withdraw from NATO now.
This article originally appeared in People’s Voice.
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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