Descend the false news, check the statements of politicians, find the real figures: our investigation office, based in Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa, specializes in the art of restoring the facts. Our echoists present their finds to allow you to see more clearly in the news of the electoral campaign.
The statement
In a press conference at the Bombardier factory in Dorval on Monday, the head of the Liberal Party of Canada, Mark Carney said that “under the last conservative government, when Pierre Poilièvre was minister, Canada spent less than 1 % of his GDP in the Defense”.
He has also added that “since the end of the conservative government harfer-poilièvre, defense expenses have more than doubled. More than doubled ”.
The facts
In both cases, Mr. Carney is wrong. During the last year of the Harper government, expenditure investments represented 1.15 % of GDP according to the World Bank data. Two years earlier, these investments represented 1 %.
During his ten years in power, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has never doubled his expenses in defense, as Carney claims. He reached a 1.4 % summit of GDP in 2020 before dropped slightly to 1.3 % in 2023. The Liberal government was therefore barely better than the previous conservative government.
-The Liberal Party of Canada, for its part, uses data from 2014, at 0.99% of GDP.
In terms of total expenditure, these were 23.9 billion in 2015 against 31.4 in 2024 according to NATO data, in constant dollars of 2015. We are therefore far from the double, as Carney claimed. Note that the PLC uses budget budget forecasts for 2024-2025 from the budget, $ 41 billion.
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