(Ottawa) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once again defended his government’s record on military spending on Monday, after new criticism that Canada is not respecting its commitments to NATO.
Posted at 12:21 p.m.
Kyle Duggan
The Canadian Press
Speaking Monday morning at the 70e annual session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Montreal, Mr. Trudeau said his government had “made great efforts” after coming to power in 2015.
During his speech, delivered exclusively in English, the Prime Minister declared that Canada was now “clearly on the right track” to devote the equivalent of 2% of its GDP to defense by 2032, an annual target that the Canada had committed to achieving this at the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Trudeau government is once again being criticized these days by American elected officials for the delay it is showing compared to other members of the Atlantic Alliance. Republican Senator Jim Risch (Idaho) said this weekend at the International Security Forum in Halifax that Canada “needs to do better.”
President-elect Donald Trump has often been irritated by the fact that some NATO member countries were not meeting the 2% GDP target. He even declared in 2018 that this target should be increased to 4%.
Canada consistently ranks at the bottom among NATO allies when it comes to the share of its GDP spent on defense. According to the most recent NATO estimates, published last summer, Canada’s military budget should only reach 1.37% of its GDP this year.
Canada
