Canada is America’s Least Helpful Ally
By Julian Spencer-Churchill
June 19, 2024
Canada’s defense minister Bill Blair has declared, by strangely including future spending on its arctic surveillance network, that “I believe it brings us inevitably to over 2 per cent of defence spending.” This is an old Canadian trick of appealing to American anxieties of missile attack, satisfying the Canadian public’s fantasies about an Arctic presence, and avoiding deploying anything larger than a brigade, anywhere, ever. The official NATO estimate of Canada’s defense effort is only 1.33% of GDP. Canada is currently the world’s ninth largest economy, and the most productive major manufacturer committed to unilateral disarmament. A combination of incipient anti-Americanism, which creeps in as early as grade school history education, coupled with a federal government focused narrowly on the material well-being of Canadians, disincentivizes political leadership from spending political capital on international relations. From the perspective of a Canadian, U.S. politics oscillates wildly from expensive international engagement to isolationist hostility against international norms and institutions. Canadians, in contrast, proudly embrace joining international organizations that demand little of it. The Liberal Party, the current government in Ottawa, has disingenuously and repeated conjured non-existent economic crises to fend off the mantra-like requests of the U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Cohen, for an outline of Canada’s strategy to contribute to the collective defense of democracy. There is plenty of available money in Ottawa: the number of federal public service employees has increased by an unprecedented 40 percent since 2015, to 357,000, with a commensurate 30.9 percent jump in personnel expenditures between just 2019 and 2022. A month’s worth of Russian or Chinese conventional missile volleys fired at Canada’s vulnerable energy sector, would almost certainly be able to inflict more damage than Ottawa’s entire 2024 defense budget of US$ 24.2bn (IISS Military Balance 2024).
Deploying an army battalion to Estonia, dispatching a frigate to the Straits of Formosa, and updating the Northern Warning System in the Arctic, seems the extreme bare minimum contribution Canada should make. Canada is indeed a middle power, as measured by the size and stability of its economy, but Ottawa’s foreign policy has always been one of free riding on its democratic allies. Nestled safely between the 1867 United States purchase of Russian Alaska, to the relief of the British who could no longer afford to pay for Canada’s security, and Greenland (despite Washington’s 1946 failed bid to buy it from Denmark), Canada has little incentive to make the difficult defense choices. When Canadian Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbacker (1957-63) took the politically risky decision to address the serious issue of nuclear weapons in Canada, a cabinet split led to a vote of non-confidence and his defeat in the subsequent elections. The subsequent Prime Minister, Liberal Lester Pearson (1963-68), simply brought them in without debate. He, and his successor, Pierre Trudeau (1968-79, 1980-84), embarked Canada on a dramatic disarmament during the Cold War, atrophying its contribution to European defense to a weak brigade at Lahr, Germany, and abandoning its two aircraft carriers, the Bonaventure and Magnificent, intended to contribute to the security of maritime trade routes, to scrap.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/19/canada_is_americas_least_helpful_ally_1038913.html
