On Monday June 9, Prime Minister Mark Carney did the unthinkable. He promised to immediately boost defence spending to meet the NATO spending objective of 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) within the current 2025 – 2026 fiscal year.
The original defence budget tabled for this same timeframe was $40 billion or roughly 1.3 per cent of Canada’s GDP. With Carney’s new directive, spending on defence and security is to balloon to $62.7 billion prior to April 1 2026.
