Canadian Defence Policy: Playing The Percentages?

There are a number of times when I get suspicious about unanimity – when everyone seems to agree about something and there is no real dissent or criticism, except for voices so extreme or untrustworthy that most people automatically tune them out.

Canadian defence policy seems to be one of those areas, where even the NDP no longer seems to be a bunch of peaceniks calling for Canada to leave NATO and NORAD. The consensus seems to be that Canada needs to raise our defence spending to at least 2% of national GDP as fast as possible. Others are calling for even higher spending, like 2.5%.

Now, I am not going to argue against raising defence spending, but it seems that hitting some arbitrary number is the wrong way to look at things – quantity or quality of spending. What spending do we really need for a coherent defense policy? This is especially relevant now. Because of Trump’s tariff threats and other comments, Canadians have realized that our economy is overly dependent on the US, and perhaps we need major economic changes so as to enhance our sovereignty and ensure we maintain a high standard of living.

Canada’s standard of living has become a major issue, with GDP per capita growth not only falling farther behind the US, but actually declining. Even Canada’s National Bank wrote a report in 2024 attributing this to a “population trap” due to high immigration. Canada’s productivity has fallen because we lack the capital needed per worker, with too much capital going into housing or infrastructure that is built to accommodate population growth.

Should the priority of the federal government be more defence spending, or raising GDP per capita? Could we try to do both by becoming a major arms manufacturer and exporter, since spending on defence likely means spending billions of dollars on things likely to be imported from the US? Of course, we don’t want to reward the Americans with military purchases at the same that they are applying tariffs to our goods and bullying us in every way imaginable with the dubious intent of making us a state or otherwise making the relationship even more one-sided to their advantage.

In the Liberal leadership race and elsewhere, there seems to be an acceptance of the 2% number, but the ideas of how to meet it seem undeveloped or half baked. Will adding a couple of military bases and having more Rangers stationed in the Arctic actually do much to make us safer or ensure our sovereignty?

We are told that Russia and China are major threats to our country in the far north. I’ve been to Iqaluit, which even in September was like December in Toronto. But the northern tip of Ellesmere Island is still another 2,000 km to the north of Iqaluit. There is over 2,000 km from Ellesmere Island to the mainland of Russia, almost directly across the North Pole. China does not even have any coastline closer than the Yellow Sea – even South Korea is closer. China is not one of the eight countries with claims in the Arctic – Canada would probably have a greater claim to the unclaimed parts of Antarctica than China has in the Arctic Ocean.

Canada’s rights and sovereignty are likely most threatened by the US – as we have a dispute over the waters and seabed north of the Yukon/Alaska border. The rights of Canada over the Northwest passage are more likely to be violated by the US than China.

The US is also looking to acquire Greenland. Canada’s only land borders with other nations or territories are with Greenland, since we amicably agreed to split ownership of Hans Island with Greenland, which is of course part of Denmark and not yet a sovereign nation. Our border with Greenland is perhaps one kilometre long.

Even if Russia were awarded large areas of the Arctic seabed, is Russia likely to invade Ellesmere Island and try to make it a colony? I think not, but we should be spending money to secure our claims nonetheless. But having an air base in Iqaluit, 2,000 km away, with a couple expensive F-35 fighter jets occasionally stopping by is not going to do it. Spending on icebreakers and research will. And if, like Australia, we wanted nuclear submarines that could last over a decade at best – they might patrol under the ice, but could do little other than fire torpedoes at mysterious blips on a screen.

I am no military expert, but it is hard enough for Canada to man bases or supply towns on our Arctic islands, let alone for a hostile power to try to set foot on them most of the year, even with global warming. But if other countries want our resources, invading an island and setting up a mining operation doesn’t sound like even a remote possibility… just try and keep it running without our help.

So, let’s accept that Canada needs to spend some money on icebreakers, patrol aircraft, destroyers, and probably drones and robotics to monitor and deal with our claims to the Arctic as well as patrolling our air and oceans to the east and west of the continent. Is that really where our defense spending mainly needs to increase?

Part of the problem right now is that the Canadian Armed Forces cannot recruit enough people to spend all that is allocated for personnel. Raising pay levels will obviously help, and the Forces are changing the standards to accept more people with minor health issues, like allergies or ADHD. Spending more money on equipment makes no sense if there aren’t enough people to run and repair the stuff. We can always start with new planes for the Snowbirds!

First, other than defending our airspace and coastal waters, there is little point in thinking we need to defend our land border against invasion, other than from smuggling and illegal immigrants. But the Armed Forces do provide help in domestic emergencies, such as flooding, fires, earthquakes, snow and ice storms, and hurricanes as needed. The Armed Forces can also help in cases like the trucker convoys or Indigenous blockades where police need help and lack the equipment or personnel to enforce court orders.

Peacekeeping was once the main role and source of pride for our military – we never missed an opportunity to volunteer to go to places like Cyprus, Vietnam, or the Middle East to play a helpful role. With the end of the Cold War, there are fewer peacekeeping missions left, or they are in Africa and often dealing with internal conflicts that few Canadians understand or care about. Still, we need to maintain a capacity for peacekeeping – but that is a matter of training rather than massive investments in equipment.

The Canadian Armed Forces do need planes to move cargo and people, often even including ferrying the prime minister and government officials around Canada or elsewhere. Canada has C-130s and some other aircraft to serve roles such as delivering food or aid, and we can always beef up this fleet a little.

So, let’s get to the crux of the matter. What capabilities in the land, sea, and air should we invest in for operating outside of Canadian territory, that might justify spending 2% or more?

The US, UK, France and even Australia have – or will have – nuclear submarines that can patrol outside their own waters. These are expensive, and most can launch missiles. Are such submarines really a good investment beyond patrolling under the Arctic ice? Doubtful. Canada bought used conventional diesel submarines from the UK, which turned out to be unreliable and expensive.

One of the main roles our current destroyers have played is in fighting piracy off of the coasts of Africa and Asia. Having more destroyers, particularly ones that carry helicopters, is useful for this. These are also useful if we want to help enforce embargoes against nations on the seas, like the 1962 American embargo of Cuba during the October Missile Crisis.

I will assume that Canada will not invest in an aircraft carrier, which usually requires other ships to defend it as part of a carrier group. Canada did have an aircraft carrier once, three actually. The last one was the British built Bonaventure, which Canada operated from 1952 until 1970, when it was sold for scrap.

Ships are incredibly expensive, and in an age of satellites, jet aircraft, and particularly cheap drones, may be a dubious investment. Ukraine has successfully damaged or sunk Russian ships, and unlike Britain or Japan, Canada is not as dependent on imports by ship for vital supplies like oil, food, or natural resources. Our waters are adjacent to the waters of Greenland and the US, and tiny St. Pierre and Miquelon. The main role of our fleet is likely helping our coast guard stop illegal fishing or patrolling our own waters.

Canada is building up to 15 River Class destroyers, a derivation of a British design. They will serve from the 2030s to 2050s. The ships are being built in Canada, with a program cost of over $77 billion, which means over $5 billion per ship.

Building these ships in Canada is more expensive and helps to ensure we maintain the capacity to build our own ships, but I question if this is really cost effective, particularly if we wanted to have more than 15 ships. Maybe we should commission hulls to be built in South Korea, or use simpler designs that are not “state of the art” given that the chances of us facing other “state of the art” ships from Russia or China are remote. Most of the duties of our ships are facing fishing boats, pirates, or cargo ships – more along the lines of cheaper coast guard vessels.

Which brings us to jet fighters.

I was never a fan of the controversial F-35. A November 2024 Bloomberg story summarized the problems of the F-35 under the headline “Declassified Pentagon F-35 Study Details Reliability, Security Woes for America’s Costliest Weapon”. I am not a fan of Elon Musk, but he opposes F-35 on the basis that drones and technological change is making the F-35 obsolete.

Canada is buying 88 F-35s for about $74 billion. The contract also included industrial benefits for Canada, and it is probably too late to cancel the contract entirely. I would definitely not buy more, and if anything, reduce the contract down to the minimum number of planes that makes sense, including allowing for some attrition.

My problem with the F-35 is that, for use in Canada, a cheaper twin engine plane without stealth is ideal. The current F-18 has been one of Canada’s best defence investments of the last 50 years. A twin engine fighter has the advantage that if one engine fails, it can still return to base or find another plane to land within a far distance, whereas a single engine jet will likely not. Not only will we lose a plane, but the pilot will likely be in trouble and need to be recovered. The same is true of cheaper planes like the F-16, which was passed over for the current F-18.

The improved F-18 Super Hornet, or a competing twin engine plane, is far better for flying in Canada’s north or over our coastal waters. But for deployment in Europe, the F-35 makes more sense, and even the F-16 would be a good replacement for current F-18s as they are retired.

The F-16 is still in production, but the F-18 is ending production. If we are going to spend more on aircraft, we should acquire F-16s, and then there is the opportunity to license F-18s and build them here, as we did prior to the F-18s with the CF-100 in the 1950s, the aborted Avro Arrow, and then its replacement, the CF-104 Starfighter in the 1960s.

Canada needs to be a player in aerospace, particularly since Bombardier was broken up and most of its production transferred to Airbus and Mitsubishi, with only a few planes now being built by Viking, in addition to Bombardier’s remaining operations. Building F-18s might be an opportunity to both spend more money on defence, spend it in Canada, and maybe rebuild our domestically owned aerospace industry and even export fighter jets.

With defense procurement, as with some other decisions, there is the question of quantity versus quality. The war in Ukraine has shown that fighter jets, artillery, and even tanks are still useful – though the massive increase in the use of drones has certainly been the major issue in how wars are fought and what equipment is needed.

In World War Two, the most feared tanks were the German Tiger and Panther tanks. But the cheap, often roughly built T-34 was also considered one of the best tanks of the war. The Sherman tank used by US and Canadian forces was not up to the standard of the Tiger or even the Panther, but the advantage of the Sherman was that it was cheap, reliable, easy to maintain, and could be produced in massive numbers.

In a tank-on-tank battle, the Sherman would lose, because it had a less powerful gun, thinner armour, and a taller profile with less sloped armour (unlike the T-34) – but the Sherman was a key part of the Allied success because of the large numbers and reliability (and it used gasoline, as did trucks and jeeps).

The tendency in the US has been to develop expensive state of the art military equipment, which minimizes the risk of losing soldiers, sailors or air crew. This is to avoid death notices rather than a cost/benefit calculation aimed towards what is actually more efficient. Quality and high tech over quantity. The Pentagon tried for years to retire the A-10 Warthog – a relatively simple jet airplane that ended production in 1984 but is superior at providing ground support in battle – but it managed to survive in service. The F-35 is supposed to replace it – even the F-16 or F-18 would likely be better. Canada has had to use F-18s for ground support since it was our only option, and the F-18 is flexible enough for such tasks. Maybe Canada should develop a plane like the A-10, and sell it to our allies.

Canada does make light armoured vehicles, namely the LAV III by General Dynamics in Ontario, but we do not make tanks, and in the past we acquired Leopard tanks from Germany. The Leopard I tanks were sold for scrap. Canada did donate some Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.

Should Canada buy new tanks, likely from Germany or the US, particularly given their vulnerability to drones as shown in Ukraine? Some can always be used in Canada for training our troops or helping in training troops, but maybe Canada should just buy used M-1 tanks from the US and give all of our Leopards to Ukraine.

Buying used didn’t work out well when it came to British submarines, but buying used is cheaper and faster, and a good short-term means to boost defense spending. Unfortunately, our stock of used airplanes and some other equipment is likely low, given all the sales or donations to Ukraine – but it should be a priority.

Canada should also be spending more on cybersecurity, and moving more of it from civilian spending to being classified as defence might help. Things like foreign interference in elections are a national security issue. Protecting our infrastructure from cyberattacks is critical. These jobs might not mean training people to be soldiers, but using civilians in work classified as military spending.

The country is still littered with airstrips built in World War Two. Early in the war, Canada’s key role was in training people of other nations, under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, a role we also played in World War One. We trained 130,000 air crew between 1939 and 1945, and Canada still has the advantages of large open spaces of land and air for training others.

Canada’s real challenge will be around combat troops – how many, where to find them – and in particular, when and where to send them outside of Canada for anything other than war games or training exercises with our allies.

As a personal note, I support the military because as a Boomer, so many adults I grew up around had been in the military in WW2 – Canada, Britain, or even South Africa. My father served in Italy and was wounded four times. Our family name is Germanic, and though our roots in Canada go back to between 1828 and 1848, some of the people on the enemy lines could have been distant cousins. My mother was born in the United Kingdom and was a Wren. She signed the official secrets act and worked as a radio operator intercepting U-Boat messages that were then passed on to Bletchley Park.

Both of my parents lost friends and knew people who died because of war, or who were wounded and survived. I also knew Holocaust survivors or people who lost family. I am no warmonger, and war is horrible, but sometimes it has to be fought.

The forces are under strength. We currently have about 2,000 troops deployed to Latvia, and were hard pressed to provide even that, when we have about 53,000 members of our military and 22,000 reserves. In contrast, Canada had about a quarter of our current population in WW2 (11.3 million) but had a military of 1.1 million, about 15 to 20 times the current level.

Canada could pay our soldiers better, or lower the standards. Either would make recruiting easier, but are there other things we could do?

It occurred to me that France has the French Foreign Legion. Non-citizens are recruited and offered citizenship once they served honourably for a period of time. Getting landed immigrant status to Canada is very easy, and citizenship comes with only three years of residency out of five years. Making citizenship harder to get and creating a Canadian Foreign Legion could be useful.

Similarly, some Canadian born Indigenous people end up serving in the US military, while many others serve in our forces with distinction. Unemployment in Indigenous communities is high, and often Indigenous people fail to finish high school. Perhaps a program to encourage more Indigenous Canadians to serve in the military, combined with efforts to ensure they meet the standards to serve, could help.

A more dramatic solution might be mandatory military service or public service for kids graduating from high school. Countries in Europe or Israel have had mandatory programs that may actually provide other benefits in helping kids become independent adults, as opposed to living at home and going to a local college or university and remaining tethered to their parents.

Perhaps we should charge higher tuition and provide fewer grants, but provide greater breaks for students who serve in the Reserves in the summer and after graduation. This might also be paired with other forms of community service, like the old Katimavik program, in which young people spent time living in a different part of the country.

The Mormon Church (Church of Latter Day Saints) has its young people going on missions (two years for men, 18 months for women) where service likely includes travel to foreign countries – though it seems that only about 25% of Mormon youth (in the US) participate.

Canada has about 2.6 million people aged 20 to 24, or about 500,000 people a year turning any age. Even getting just 10% of young people a year into a one-year program would mean 50,000 people a year (many of whom would likely remain in the reserves for a number of years).

The US was only able to continue its campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan by relying on the Reserves and National Guard Troops. Having people on full time military service when there is no pressing need is expensive and wasteful, and means lower productivity and standard of living for those serving and the country as a whole.

There is one other area where we can spend money. In WW2 and since, the US was referred to as “the arsenal of democracy”, because it was so adept at producing everything needed to fight the war, including providing equipment to its allies. Of course, in 1939-41, the US had not recovered from the Depression, and still had factories and industrial capacity that had not been fully used since 1929.

Canada can become stronger if we orient our economy towards manufacturing, including arms exports. But as we saw with the war in Ukraine, many things like airplanes were simpler and could be mass produced easier and faster in WW2. Canada’s manufacturing capacity increased dramatically, in large part under programs created or managed by the great C.D. Howe, but at the end of the war, much of that capacity was obsolete and the buildings and machinery sold off cheaply.

If Canada is to increase its capacity as an arms supplier to other nations, this comes with the issue that many buyers are somewhat unsavoury authoritarian countries, dictatorships, or just illiberal democracies. Even countries like Saudi Arabia are controversial because what we sell them might be used to suppress human rights and democracy. We might have to lower our standards, or find a way to have common standards on arms sales with our allies, like Sweden and Germany.

In the Ukraine war, Canada and other countries have sold or donated supplies, armaments, ammunition, and equipment to Ukraine. If Canada is going to increase military spending, maybe a major role for Canada could be to become an arsenal. We could stockpile new or refurbished equipment, arms, and ammunition for the next Ukraine, much as Canada recognized the need to stockpile things for pandemics after SAARS, then dropped the ball so we were short when COVID struck.

So, Canada has lots of ways to get military spending to 2% of GDP, or even go far beyond, but just picking a percentage makes no sense in isolation without considering the economic challenges we now face with a US president, and possibly future Republican presidents, that have thrown away the last 80 years of US foreign policy and economic policy.

Canada could even toy with the idea of isolationism, if the economic challenges are too great. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina are not members of NATO or any similar alliance like NORAD (and Brazil is part of the BRICS group, which is somewhat nebulous in its goals and purpose other than to not be tied to the US). Canada’s commitment to Europe in WW1 and WW2 really came out of our close ties to the UK and the Empire – many Canadians wanted us to not be involved (particularly in Quebec) much as the US was more heavily isolationist. We got involved in NATO because of the Cold War, including our involvement in the Korean War which was done through the UN.

But is Canada really threatened directly by Russia, China, or any other country?

It is actually the US that is a bigger threat to our land and waters, in many respects. Trump seems to be returning to an older perception of the US as only a hemispheric power, which imposes its will on neighbours or even takes them over by direct or indirect means (taking land from Mexico, getting Panama to break away from Colombia, war with Spain to get Puerto Rico, etc.).

The attitude in Canada is generally to not just put our own interests first or be isolationist, but to be involved in global affairs with our allies in Europe – and to a lesser extent, across the Pacific. Canada has been described as a “Boy Scout”, and this is unlikely to change. Canadians want to work to promote democracy and human rights and to oppose bullies who use force or subterfuge to control other countries, much as Russia has been doing with Ukraine and other neighbours.

There is now a widespread consensus that the 1988 Free Trade Agreement with the US was naïve, and Canada needs to become less dependent on the US. But the US is the world’s main power when it comes to the manufacturing of things like airplanes, tanks, and other equipment – and of course, we are not going to buy directly from Russia or China. The US has bought military equipment from Canada, but given “America First” policies, our major export market is gone, unless we can sell more to India, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and allies like Japan, South Korea, and most of Europe.

In the next year, Canada needs to do a serious review and figure out what our economic and defense policies should be in a world where the US is no longer a reliable partner on trade or defence. Just picking an arbitrary percentage for military spending fits the cliché of “putting the cart before the horse”.