U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility toward Canada and loose talk of making it the 51st U.S. state has dispelled Canadians of their comforting old belief in the sanctity of the U.S.-Canada security partnership.

Together with his treatment of Ukraine and most recently of NATO ally Denmark, Trump’s actions have shocked Ottawa out of a decades-long complacency that had lulled it into under-investing in the country’s military under the assumption that the United States could always be relied on to stand as Canada’s stalwart protector.

Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose election last year as the new head of the Liberal Party was a direct result of Canadian voters’ desire for a leader willing to stand up to Trump, Ottawa has pushed through a major defense spending increase and undertaken a holistic effort to reduce security dependency on the United States. The ongoing review of previously planned purchases of American-made F-35 fighter jets is part of that undertaking, as is an effort to increase Canadian defense exports to Europe.

The Canadian government has announced an ambitious military spending ramp-up, aiming to triple total defense spending over the next decade to $900 billion and to reach the NATO-wide goal of allocating 5 percent of GDP to core military and security-related investments by 2035. The government anticipates becoming one of NATO’s final members to reach the old benchmark of 2 percent of GDP spending by March.

By now, over a year into Trump’s second term, Canadians’ visceral horror at the U.S. president’s threats to annex Canada has faded, experts say. In its place is a wary resolve to reduce Canadian economic and military dependence on the United States while still preserving, where possible, a strong working relationship with the country’s top trade partner.

“What lingers is an underpinning of distrust that is no longer emotional, it is just factual,” said retired Maj. Gen. Scott Clancy of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who served as director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). “It is no longer going to be a relational approach to the United States” that Ottawa takes going forward, he added, but rather a “transactional” one.

In a forceful speech at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Carney said the longtime “bargain” that Canada and other countries had accepted in tolerating past U.S. transgressions to the post-World War II rules-based order in return for the global public goods provided by American hegemony, such as open sea lanes and a stable international financial system, was no longer worth it.

“Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

Central to Canada’s rethinking of how it pulls itself out of decades of overreliance and subordination to U.S. military might has been a blunt assessment of the country’s own vulnerabilities. These include its sparsely defended massive Arctic archipelago, severe dependence on U.S. intelligence collection abilities for insights into foreign threats (Canada lacks a foreign intelligence agency such as the United States’ CIA or the United Kingdom’s MI6), and serious shortage of military personnel.

On top of that, a late 2023 internal National Defense Department report revealed that in the event of a NATO call to arms, 45 percent of Canadian military equipment designated for such a mission was “unavailable and unserviceable.” The report found that 46 percent of Army assets such as armored fighting vehicles were unserviceable, compared to 54 percent of the Navy’s fleet of frigates, submarines, and patrol ships, and 55 percent of the Air Force’s fleet of fighter jets, transport planes, and search-and-rescue aircraft.

To better help with recruitment and retention, Ottawa last summer announced a significant pay hike for Canadian troops, including a 20 percent increase in starting salary for Regular Force privates. Canada is about 15,000 troops short of its 2032 goal of fielding 71,500 full-time and 30,000 reserve members.

Canada’s top military officer, Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan, is optimistic the military will be able to meet that target, telling the National Post in December, “We’re recruiting more people than we are losing, so we’re going to be catching up to build back our strength.” As evidence, she pointed to Canada surpassing its military recruitment target in the last year by 200 troops.

At November’s Halifax International Security Forum, Canadian Defense Minister David McGuinty touted the ways that the country’s newly approved higher defense expenditures were being put to use—and not just on big flashy items such as advanced fighter jets and submarines, but also on more basic items, such as an entire new system of generators so that Canadian military field hospitals can reliably operate.

“We’re procuring kit, rifles, ammunition, equipment, trucks, labs, ambulances. We are procuring top to bottom. We are rebuilding 33 Canadian bases, water systems, wastewater systems, housing, travel systems, kitchens, dishwashers,” McGuinty said. “We’re rebuilding, we’re rearming, we’re improving the Canadian Armed Forces. … Every day we get up and make progress as a team.”

The Canadian government is framing its efforts to increase its military capabilities as aimed at being a better NATO ally, including through its contributions to NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian command providing territorial early warning and air defense capabilities.

Cooperation and a focus on interoperability within NORAD has meant that Canadian defense firms have historically been heavily focused on developing and producing weapon systems with American defense contractors. In fact, the two countries have “the most integrated defense supply chain in the world,” according to the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service.

The challenge and opportunity now for the Canadian defense industry is how to diversify itself to focus both on producing more for the Canadian Armed Forces’ usage and for export to NATO allies other than the United States.

“From an industry perspective, while the government is certainly making some pretty heavy statements about a pivot away from the United States, or at least an increased pivot to Europe, certainly the industry supply chains are pretty heavily integrated with what goes on in the United States,” said Christyn Cianfarani, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Defense and Security Industries. “So we don’t see it necessarily as a move away from the United States, but more as an investment in our own industrial base in Canada and an increase in our exports to Europe.”

Canada exports 52 percent of all its defense capabilities, and of that, 63 percent goes to the United States, largely in the form of supply chain expenditures, according to Cianfarani. “Canada supplies parts and components, engines, aerospace items or sensing systems that make their way into U.S. platforms like F-35s or P-8s or other aircraft.”

Canadian defense industry strengths include producing aerospace components, armor, light armored vehicles, sensors, electronic warfare capabilities, training simulators, and artificial intelligence, she said.

“We have lots and lots of little niche things that probably may or may not grab the attention of everyone around the world,” Cianfarani said. “We need to be better at understanding what we are going to do here at home, and then we need to be better at looking around the world at where there are capability gaps that our allies are looking to fill.”

The enormous expanse of Canada’s Arctic region is increasingly being pointed to as a strategic vulnerability for NATO. Although the Baltics, and particularly the region’s narrow Suwalki Gap along the Polish-Lithuanian border, have traditionally been a top focus for NATO in terms of guarding against a potential Russian invasion, the reality is that Canada’s Arctic archipelago is comparatively much less defended. And the Russian military in recent years has been steadily building up its own Arctic presence.

The Canadian tendency to de-emphasize its Arctic territory is baked in, according to Clancy, the former NORAD operations director. That’s because 80 percent to 90 percent of the Canadian population lives within 200 miles of the U.S. border, and less than 1 percent of Canada’s GDP is derived from the Arctic.

“What that means is there is a real preoccupation with everything southerly and a quiet apathy or a certain amount of naiveté about the Arctic,” Clancy said.

That’s not the case for Russia, which now gets at least 20 percent of its GDP from its massive Arctic region as climate change has made oil and natural gas resource extraction there more cost-effective. In support of its regional industrial investments, Moscow has also constructed military bases all along its Northern Sea Route, and its Northern Fleet is the largest in the Russian Navy.

In its first federal budget, released in November 2025, the Carney government signaled a priority for plugging both the civilian and military infrastructure holes that have long existed in the Canadian Arctic. The budget includes a four-year, $730 million Arctic Infrastructure Fund to be used on dual-use transportation projects such as airports, seaports, and highways in the far north.

The billions in planned military spending for Canada’s rearmament and Arctic missions will take years of sustained procurement decisions to fulfill. That means future Canadian governments will need to stay the path.

“What Canada is having a problem coming to grips with is when you underfund the military for 30 to 40 years, there is a makeup cost there. It can’t be developed overnight, so you are going to have to take a long-term approach to this,” Clancy said.

But what happens if Trump is succeeded by an American president who wants to quickly reset relations and broader U.S. foreign policy, as former President Joe Biden did in 2021? If there is once again a friendly government in Washington, will Canadian voters still support maintaining a large military budget, particularly amid ongoing concerns about affordability and a strained social safety net?

While much of the future is uncertain, there is evidence that Canadian public resolve to continue the larger military spending levels is not going away any time soon.

An August-September 2025 poll by Nanos Research for Bloomberg News showed that a strong majority of surveyed Canadians favored the increased military spending levels of the Carney government, even if it comes at the expense of social programs or necessitates higher taxes. Only 17 percent of respondents disagreed with the higher defense budget.

A major driver of that public sentiment is distrust in the United States under Trump’s leadership. A majority of Canadians (56 percent) said the United States overall is having a negative influence in the world, compared to 40 percent of Germans and 40 percent of the French who shared that view in a December 2025 survey by Politico-Public First polling.

But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its threats to NATO writ large, and its proximity to Canada’s northern border are also playing a role. An October-November 2025 survey conducted by the University of Calgary and Nanos Research found that while the United States under Trump was Canadians’ top perceived threat at 58.1 percent, Russia came in second at 21.5 percent. Overall, Canadians who said they were highly concerned about international threats increased to 58 percent, compared to 41 percent when the survey asked a similar question in 2020.

“The polls were telling us … that Canadians themselves were very concerned about their safety and security, irrespective of what went on in the United States,” Cianfarani said. “So, I think that thinking will sustain, will persist irrespective of what happens in the United States.”