In advance of the NATO summit happening today in Latvia, Justin Trudeau was in Latvia to announce that Canada would be doubling our military presence in that country by 2026, which is actually easier said than done with the current state of our Forces. This was, of course, superseded by news that Turkey has agreed to drop their objections to Sweden joining NATO (leaving Hungary as the last to sign off, though they insisted they won’t be the last). Here’s Stephen Saideman to parse what this means.
lacks the procurement experts to buy the stuff.
But if the govt keeps all of its promises, it will get closer–making progress on the ships, buying the planes, doing NORAD modernization, paying more to recruit/retain.the fun part is CPC would cut the mil budget.
2/x
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) July 10, 2023
None of this is easy, it will cost money and effort, and this government almost certainly needs to allocate more $ for defense… not just to fulfill a bullshit metric but to do the things it has promised to do. 4/x
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) July 10, 2023
the Sweden news might make it easier to get to brigade numbers since Canada has to force generate (beg) the rest of the multinational brigade. Comes with being a framework (lead) nationa.
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) July 11, 2023
Of course, as with any NATO meeting, we get the usual lazy tropes about Canada supposedly being a “freeloader,” because we don’t spend the minimum two percent of our GDP on defence. But that analogy doesn’t actually work because NATO isn’t a club where members pay dues and then it does stuff with them—it’s a military alliance that depends on the participation of member countries, and Canada participates. We participate more than a lot of other countries who have a higher percentage of defence spending than we do. And it bears reminding yet again that the two percent target is a stupid metric, because the fastest way to meet the target is to tank your economy and have a recession, and it’s easier for countries with a smaller GDP denominator to meet. But hey, the two percent target is easy fodder for media because they can make hay about it with little regard for the nuance, which is why it has been a fixation for years now.
Yep, again, Greece looks great but is the real freeloader.
The big question today, aside from Sweden?!!, is whether the $2.6b for the Latvia mission is enough. Let's focus on delivering capabilities and not on bs
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) July 10, 2023
And yes, one of our biggest issues when it comes to our military spending and capacity to spend is our ability to recruit, which we have had a hard time doing—it’s a very tight labour market, and it can take a long time for applications to be processed, by which time potential recruits are likely to have found new jobs. It also seems to me that the military has never adapted to the changes that happened about two decades ago, when they could no longer rely on economically-depressed regions (such as the Atlantic provinces) because of the rise of the oil sands and the ability for people to fly out to Fort McMurray on two-weeks-in-two-weeks-out shifts, that changed their fortunes. We’ll see if they can fix their recruiting now that they are allowing permanent residents to apply, but that is one of the major challenges they need to address.
Ukraine Dispatch:
Russia launched 28 drones over Kyiv and Odessa in the early morning hours, 26 of which were downed. Ukrainian forces also say that they have trapped Russian occupation forces in Bakhmut and that they are pushing them out. A statistical analysis shows that as many as 50,000 Russian men have been killed in the fighting to date.
https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1678651881185243137
https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1678332390052098048