Canada hikes military spending in wake of Ukraine invasion

REUTERS

Canada will boost military spending slightly over the next five years and review its overall defense policy in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government said on April 7, 2022.

The annual budget promised to spend more than U.S. $6.4 billion extra between 2022-23 and 2026-27 on the Armed Forces. Officials said this meant the defense budget in 2022-23 would be 2.7% higher than had initially been forecast.

Canada currently spends 1.36% of GDP on defense, and a senior government official said the new spending should push that up to 1.5% by 2026-27. That is still well short of a NATO goal of spending 2% of a member’s annual GDP on defense. (Pictured: Members of the Canadian Armed Forces prepare to roll out from a Toronto, Canada, armory in 2020 to respond to government requests for help in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Ottawa said the extra defense money would be used to help boost the military, beef up

cybersecurity and strengthen the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the joint U.S.-Canadian defense organization set up to deter Russian aggression across the polar region.

The defense review would include an assessment of the equipment and technology that the “Armed Forces need to fulfill their missions in a world that has fundamentally changed in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the budget said.

Canada will also spend U.S. $394 million in 2022-23 to provide further military aid to Ukraine and commit an extra 460 troops to a NATO mission in Latvia, which borders Russia, bringing the total number of Canadians deployed there to 1,260.

Canadian defense spending hit a low of just under 1% of GDP in 2014, the year before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals took power from the right-leaning Conservatives. The Conservatives, now the largest opposition party, welcomed the larger budget and the extra military aid for Ukraine but said Kyiv still needs major weapons systems.

“As much as we support anything we can do to help people in Ukraine, there are more things the government could do,” interim leader Candice Bergen told reporters.

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