Canada has launched a multibillion-dollar program to strengthen its military by further relying on domestic companies to reduce its dependence on the United States. “We have relied too much on our geography and on others to protect ourselves,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said during a visit to the offices of CAE, a company specializing in simulation technologies for the defense and aerospace sectors. “This has created vulnerabilities that we can no longer tolerate and dependencies that are no longer sustainable,” he added. The Canadian defense industrial strategy is part of the country’s desire to allocate $82 billion over five years to defense, to align Canada with NATO’s goals of defense spending of 2% of GDP by the end of the year and 5% by 2035.
Carney has been repeating for months that the world is becoming increasingly dangerous and that the United States is no longer a reliable partner that Canada can count on for protection, as AFP points out. The plan calls for strengthening defense capabilities on land, sea and air, Carney noted, who considered that “the world has changed and that Canada must change with it.” The Canadian prime minister is particularly concerned about Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic as rising temperatures due to climate change lead to melting ice and whet the appetites of major powers for this land, rich in critical minerals. Carney has become one of the most authoritative voices on a global level criticizing the administration of US President Donald Trump, AFP notes.
In a widely broadcast speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he said the global order of the past decades had “broken down.” On Tuesday, he revisited his vision of the world, explaining that Canadian nationalism is the antithesis of the Trump administration’s American perspective, which extols the Christian roots of Western civilization. “Canadian nationalism is a political nationalism,” and Ottawa’s mandate is to defend the rights of every person in a vast and diverse country, Mark Carney noted. “There is a struggle between Canadian nationalism and the one that the United States stands for,” he said.
