OTTAWA – It’s hard to believe that she didn’t do it on purpose: just on the eve of the visit to Canada by the Secretary General of NATO, the Federal Treasury Board President Anita Anand declared that it makes no sense to pour large sums of money into the Department of Defense National until the latter has the ability to spend what is given to him. Clear words, especially if said by a former Defense Minister like Anand, who intervened “with a straight leg” in the debate on Canada’s inability to meet the NATO parameter of spending 2% of the country’s gross domestic product in the field military.
Anand’s observations arrived on Tuesday, just on the eve – as we were saying – of the visit of the Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg in Ottawa where a meeting between him and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is scheduled for this evening.
In recent times, as is well known, Canada has come under increasing pressure from allies – and domestic critics – to publicly chart a path towards achieving the Western military alliance’s spending target for member states: 2% of GDP. But Canada’s Department of National Defense has for years been unable to spend its entire annual budget from the federal treasury – a fact Anand highlighted, defending the government’s reluctance to come up with a plan to reach 2%.
“I would like to stress to the media that it is fairly superficial to only speak about two per cent without examining how the funding is going to be spent in the short and the long term,” Anand told reporters before cabinet on Tuesday, yesterday, according to CBC. And on Wednesday, today, the visit of Jens Stoltenberg, whose last presence in Canada took place in August 2022, when he and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the Arctic, the fulcrum of Canada’s new defense strategy and an area of growing importance for NATO since Sweden and Finland joined the Atlantic alliance.
This new visit by Stoltenberg comes in the same week that NATO itself released new data showing that Canada is now among the few member countries that do not meet the 2% benchmark. The data, released Monday ahead of Stoltenberg’s visit to Washington, shows Canada is expected to spend 1.37 per cent of its GDP on defense this year. The Canadian federal defense minister, Bill Blair, had already recognized this fact, declaring that “we will inevitably get to 2%, we will do what is necessary”. But now he has to deal with Anand…
In the pic above, Anand visiting the military in a pic published on her X (Twitter) profile for the Canadian Armed Forces Day, on June 2nd (photo from Twitter X – @AnitaAnandMP)
