It seems that everyone has an opinion on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poor showing at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit this month, where a skittish performance of wartime authority gave fodder to allies and critics alike. Naturally, strong voices in the movement for peace denounced the very occasion of his address, and working people should remain incredulous of his renewed commitment to a bloating military budget as standards of living decline at home. But Trudeau’s appearance elicited revealing feedback from within the foreign policy consensus of Canada’s major political parties as well.
As the Conservative opposition led by Pierre Poilievre continues to portray the Liberal’s prodigal war budget as a “dumpster fire” for unearned political points, many of Trudeau’s American accomplices balk at his already enormous investment in defence, taking his failure to meet the alliance’s mandated spending threshold as a sign of complacency. In the lead-up to the summit, the NATO Observers Group of the U.S. Senate was particularly stern with Trudeau regarding his debt to their endless wars. This perspective has also disgraced Canada’s provincial leadership. Virtually every premier has since joined in a chorus of one-upmanship, challenging Trudeau to meet a nearly impossible spending goal—with Manitoba’s NDP Premier Wab Kinew leading the charge.
As a condition of entry, NATO members are obliged to contribute two percent of their GDP to military capacity, a conservatively valued goal of $64 billion that Trudeau promises to meet by 2032. At present, Canada spends approximately 1.37 percent of its GDP on defence, counting itself “among the top five NATO Allies when it comes to absolute spending increases on defence.” This has been a banner commitment of the Trudeau years, which have seen a steady growth in military spending since 2015, alongside an increasingly hawkish approach to foreign relations.
From these numbers, it is difficult to second-guess Canada’s accord with NATO. Even so, speaking in Halifax on the last day of the premiers’ annual Council of the Federation, Kinew urged Trudeau to reach the two percent spending quota in four years instead—half of the Liberal’s proposed timeframe. “I want Canadians to see this as a national security thing,” Kinew said.
It’s an investment in the Canadian Armed Forces, but I encourage Canadians to think about this also as an investment in trade.
Whose security?
What does windfall spending on NATO, an unelected supranational military organization, do for Canada’s national security? As the militarization of the North proceeds against an inflated eastern threat, eroding Canadian sovereignty through Cold War aerospace programs such as NORAD—notably headquartered in Manitoba—it remains difficult to portray Canada’s increasingly assertive global deployments as a matter of national defence. Whether placing naval surveillance off the coast of Haiti or in the Indo-Pacific, effectively enforcing U.S. sanctions against North Korea and tightening the military encirclement of China, Canada’s pursuit of NATO’s global itinerary has actually increased instability around the world.
Canada’s positions are aggressive in spite of their typical obscurity. From 2015 to 2022, our military trained thousands of Ukrainian troops for deployment in the Donbas region, where a bloody prelude to the present war transpired with little commentary for almost a decade. As Trudeau boasts, Canada has participated in nearly every NATO mission since the organization’s founding, and at present, has 1,500 troops deployed in Latvia as one of NATO’s “Framework Nations”—a key strategic concept in an all-but-unattributed military occupation of non-member states in Eastern Europe. This continuous presence costs Canadians billions of dollars annually. Just yesterday, Defence Minister Bill Blair announced another $35.8 million investment in light tactical vehicles to coincide with the swelling of troops over the next two years.
This outlay enacts a large transfer of wealth, and not only to GM Defense, the military product subsidiary of General Motors that has been contracted to deliver the vehicles. As the NATO war quota obliges Canada’s working class to subsidize ceaseless military expansion, the conflict in Ukraine opens up new markets for foreign investors—not just in the arms trade, but in private contracts for devastated infrastructure, from roads and railways to hospitals and housing. Last June, the government of Ukraine passed laws overseeing sweeping privatizations of state assets for as long as martial law remains in place, and has even set up a government-run website to facilitate foreign investment and cut-rate bidding on public assets.
This fits a pattern. The 1999 NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia specifically targeted state-owned enterprises for destruction, and in the aftermath of the attacks, organizations such as the Kosovo Trust Agency set about the “completion of the privatisation of Socially-Owned Enterprises” which represented “90 percent of Kosovo’s industrial and mining base, 50 percent of commercial retail space, and 20 percent of agricultural land—including all prime commercial agricultural land and the vast majority of Kosovo’s forests.”
In the case of Ukraine, NATO needn’t carry out the bombing directly, but its allies indirectly reap the benefits of a war they are too happy to prolong. In Washington, Trudeau committed over $500 million in further military support in order to ensure Ukraine’s “interoperability” with NATO; a key criteria for membership in the alliance, alongside a host of domestic reforms. But NATO allies continue to stall Ukraine along this path, as Canada’s investment actively delays a diplomatic solution and our government hemorrhages money—$19.5 billion since 2022—into a seemingly interminable proxy war between nuclear powers.
In Ukraine, in the former Yugoslavia, in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, NATO has contributed to conflicts that have killed hundreds of thousands of people since the end of the Soviet era. And as NATO continues to oblige its member countries to follow U.S. foreign policy, it becomes clear that the Cold War never ended from the standpoint of its primary aggressor.
War for trade
This is the legacy that Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew affirms when he trumpets the value of NATO to both national security and trade—always in the same breath. His keenness for military expansion defies the heritage of a better, alternative NDP, which opposed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA), and even pushed for Canada to withdraw from NATO throughout the early 1970s—a demand reaffirmed by members at countless conventions but roundly disregarded by leadership.
What is the value of the NATO budget line to the provinces? It’s interesting to observe the tension between jurisdictions, where most premiers perceive Trudeau’s contribution to lag, even as Poilievre refuses to commit to a spending quota that Jagmeet Singh has otherwise called “arbitrary.” No federal leader is anxious to sign this blank cheque. But in his demand that Canada intensify the NATO toll of its own volition, Kinew echoes Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston, British Columbia Premier David Eby, and others. It is hard to track these drifting interests, where subnational governments have increasingly assumed an activist role in matters of foreign policy over several decades, amplifying lobbying groups and advocating for provincial interests amid a rapid expansion of markets due to free trade. But these regional economies have little in common save for dependence on the export of raw materials and energy products to our southern neighbour. For Manitoba’s part, the NDP is heavily committed to a U.S. market in the province’s lithium, cobalt, silica, and nickel deposits, following the lead of Tory Premier Heather Stefanson, who had boasted to investors that Manitoba is “the Costco of critical minerals.”
Earlier this year, Kinew and former Premier Gary Doer escorted business delegates on a trade mission to New York and Washington, hoping to open up new markets for Manitoban exports. And today, facing a likely Republican victory, Kinew sounds remarkably like Doer in 2016, when as outgoing ambassador to the U.S., he held out for Trump to “exceed expectations” as a business partner to Canadian firms, defended NAFTA (since rebranded) as a framework for mutual benefit, and boasted of Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan as if exchangeable for credit. Doer was more strident in recent remarks to a Directors Dinner of the C.D. Howe Institute, where he stressed the importance of greeting whichever incoming administration as “good customers” above all else. Canada’s military contribution to U.S. war economy remains key to this relationship. “We have to step up to the plate before the July meeting of NATO and get to two percent,” he said. “That’s the Canadian way.”
By their own account, Canada’s premiers clearly expect an incoming Republican administration to penalize trade partners who move out of lockstep with the White House. Trump has threatened as much, and while the Democrats are only differently coercive of Canadian policy, it looks as if the provinces have placed their bets. “The next administration in the U.S. is likely going to not look favourably on that really important economic relationship if we’re not looking after our obligations to NATO,” Kinew said, mimicking Eby and others: “There’s a strong case that hitting the two percent target would benefit our province domestically and act as an investment in our trade relationship with the United States.”
But where either the stick of tariffs or the carrot of investment work equally well to enforce the NATO spending goal, this is business as usual. Kinew will continue Doer’s flagship project of energy export to the U.S., alongside his own catalogue of critical minerals and agricultural products, just as he expects the federal government to smooth the way with an unprecedented stimulus to the global arms industry.
On this point, even military boosters have expressed concern that Canada’s armed forces simply cannot absorb the kind of spending that Kinew and other premiers are demanding, and not on the timeline that they propose. But this is quite beside the point of a proposed tithe to a system of free trade imperialism that was never intended at employment or security to begin with. In this respect, Kinew is an honest opportunist, where his demand to fast-track NATO’s war budget and his courtship of U.S. markets are one and the same. In either guise, his input proposes a serious setback to Canada’s political and economic independence, already all but nominal—to say nothing of values like wealth distribution or peace. These are the moves for which right-wing social democrats are typically rewarded, and as Trudeau’s star descends, we can be certain that our premier has a brilliant career ahead of him—just not among progressives.
Cam Scott is a poet, writer, and organizer from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 territory. His books include ROMANS/SNOWMARE and The Vanishing Signs, both published by ARP Books.