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<\/p>\nCanada\u2019s $8.7B defence spend: Who\u2019s getting in line<\/p>\n
After decades of moving slowly, Canada is suddenly pouring billions into defence \u2014 and fast. For The National, CBC News chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault looks at how the industry is gearing up and meets the companies eager to show off what\u2019s for sale.<\/p>\n
Champagne touted the new budget as \u201ca blueprint to defend our sovereignty\u201d but given the lack of detail on how the historic investment will be spent, one expert suggests, it might be better described as a rough sketch.<\/p>\n
The budget paints, in broad strokes, stepped-up investment in the defence industry \u2014 $6.6 billion over five years \u2014 and it has set aside money for the establishment of the recently announced Defence Investment Agency.<\/p>\n
The budget doesn\u2019t offer a precise list of the military equipment the government intends to buy, including, significantly, submarines. The government has signalled it wants to move swiftly to deliver a contract but federal officials confirmed no money has been set aside for the program.<\/p>\n
However, the budget delivered by Champagne doesn\u2019t say precisely how big the defence appropriation will be in the coming year. At the moment, the federal government is projected to spend $62 billion on defence.<\/p>\n
There is, unlike previous budgets, no year-by-year breakdown of defence spending for the fiscal horizon. The numbers are presented as lump-sum projections over five years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Federal officials were asked for the breakdown for the 2026-27 budget year and subsequent years, but said they couldn\u2019t provide them.<\/p>\n
The new budget also doesn\u2019t offer a comparison of the planned spending to the country\u2019s projected gross domestic product (GDP), the metric by which allies measure defence expenditures.<\/p>\n
In response to relentless pressure from allies, notably the Trump administration, Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged to raise Canada\u2019s defence spending to two per cent of GDP by the end of the current fiscal year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the NATO summit last summer, he further committed to raising the level to five per cent of GDP (3.5 per cent directly spent on the military and 1.5 per cent for defence infrastructure).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of the $81.8 billion included in Tuesday’s budget, roughly $9 billion was previously announced by Carney last June when he first pledged to reach the two per cent target by March 31, 2026.<\/p>\n
Defence Minister David McGuinty, speaking in South Korea last week, said the budget would \u201cbegin laying track to meet the five per cent target by 2035.\u201d<\/p>\n
The absence of detail makes it hard to know \u2014 except in the most general of terms \u2014 whether the government can actually meet the ambitious goal, said one defence expert.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s really kind of curious to me that a government that has made so much of wanting to commit to NATO targets has really only provided a book end,\u201d said Dave Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762293795_269_default.jpg\")
Navy commander Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, left, and Cmdr. Nicole Robichaud, are seen at HMCS Margaret Brooke’s commissioning ceremony in Halifax on Oct. 28, 2022. HMCS Margaret Brooke is the second Arctic and offshore patrol ship delivered under the National Shipbuilding Strategy. (Andrew Vaughan\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey say we’re going to be at two per cent this year and 10 years from now we’ll be at three-and-a-half per cent. Where it sits between this year and 10 years from now is completely unclear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interestingly, the budget does say that the defence infrastructure portion of the NATO spending commitment is already covered by the current combined spending plans of the federal, provincial and municipal governments when it comes to emergency management and the telecommunications network that knits them together.<\/p>\n
The overall budget is sprinkled with references to defence, whether it is retooling the federal Export Development Corporation to support Canadian defence industry exports or support for extracting critical minerals to the new Buy Canada Policy.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s even a defence reference in the portion of the budget that deals with the $1 billion Arctic Infrastructure Fund.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur work on defence will strengthen Canadian research centres, and Canadian communities in the North, working with our Inuit and First Nations partners, by building dual-use infrastructure \u2014 like ports and airport runways,\u201d Champagne said in his budget speech. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe will further build our security and defence capabilities, right here at home \u2014 creating new jobs for our engineers, technicians and scientists in sectors such as aerospace, shipbuilding, cybersecurity and AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
CBC News chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton hosts special coverage of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first federal budget, on CBC-TV and CBC News Network at 3 p.m. ET. \u00a0<\/strong>Power & Politics<\/strong>\u00a0will provide further analysis on CBC News Network at 5 p.m. ET.<\/strong><\/p>\n On radio,<\/strong>\u00a0Your World Tonight<\/strong>‘s Susan Bonner and Catherine Cullen of<\/strong>\u00a0The House<\/strong>\u00a0host special coverage beginning at 4 p.m. ET on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app.<\/strong><\/p>\n Coverage will also stream live on CBC Gem, the CBC News App and on the CBC News YouTube (3 to 7 p.m. ET) and TikTok (3 to 5 p.m. ET) channels.<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Liberal government has set aside an additional $81.8 billion over five years to rearm the Canadian military,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":355963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2147,50],"class_list":{"0":"post-355962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115493694047924837","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}