Can Canada Beef Up Its Military After Decades of Atrophy?

At the end of World War II, Canada boasted one of the world’s largest navies, with 95,000 uniformed members and 434 ships.

The current Royal Canadian Navy is far less impressive — about 11,500 members and 40 vessels.

Only one of its four diesel submarines, which were bought secondhand from Britain in the 1990s, is operational. And Canada’s armed forces as a whole are about 16,000 people short of an approved head count of 101,500, including reserves.

Prime Minister Mark Carney, seeking to reverse what he characterized as the atrophying of Canada’s military, is directing billions of dollars to the armed forces, with the goal of reaching a NATO spending commitment this year, seven years ahead of schedule.

And while the move comes after repeated claims by President Trump that Canada was effectively sponging off the United States to ensure its defense, Mr. Carney also cast the spending as part of his effort to loosen Canada’s ties with its neighbor after Mr. Trump’s repeated comments about making it the 51st state.

Many of Canada’s allies in Europe, including Britain and Germany, are also expanding their militaries in the face of Mr. Trump’s isolationism.

Mr. Carney has yet to say where the 9.3 billion Canadian dollars, about $6.8 billion, he has added to the defense budget will come from. Many people also question whether the armed forces will be able to actually spend that extra money so quickly.

But no one disputes the scale of the new spending.

The last time Canada invested so significantly in such a short period “would have been 1950, when we were mobilizing for the Korean War,” said David Perry, the president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Why has Canada’s military withered?

When it comes to political and financial priorities, areas like public health care have been much higher on the national agenda than military funding.

“There is public support for the military,” said Eric Van Rythoven, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa. “There is not public support for increasing defense spending.”

While Canada spent 2 to 4 percent of its gross domestic product on the armed forces throughout the Cold War, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have not hit the current NATO target since 1990. (The Atlantic alliance’s goal is for each member to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on its own military budget, though NATO members will discuss raising that threshold later this month.)

Some of Canada’s military thinking is based on geography, in particular having a neighbor with the world’s most formidable military arsenal.

“There’s only one country in the world surrounded by three oceans and America,” Mr. Perry said. “Up until recently, that has been about the most safe, the most stable and reliable place to be on the earth.”

Canada has also developed a military procurement system so full of checks and rechecks on potential contractors, Mr. Perry said, that decision making over large purchases can drag on for years.

Major military spending programs have also been vulnerable to politics.

Justin Trudeau, who became prime minister in 2015, promised to scrap the previous Conservative government’s plan to replace Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s, newer American planes, citing soaring costs. Mr. Trudeau’s government later reversed course and finalized a deal in 2023 for 88 F-35s.

Now Mr. Carney has ordered a review to determine if Canada should stick with its plan to purchase all of the fighter jets once it receives the first batch of 16.

Canada’s auditor general, an independent parliamentary official, said inflation, more demand for weapons and foreign exchange fluctuations had increased the estimated cost of the fighter jet deal by almost 50 percent, to 27.7 billion Canadian dollars.

The military’s ability to make a convincing case for more money has also been undermined by scandal, Mr. Van Rythoven said.

Several senior officers, including a former chief of the defense staff, the top military commander, have either been accused or convicted of sexual misconduct.

Last year, Gen. Jennie Carignan became the first woman appointed as Canada’s chief of the defense staff.

Where will the money come from?

Mr. Carney has been cryptic about how he will fund the increased investment in the military, saying there would be no tax increases or cuts to government services. He spoke vaguely about improving government efficiencies and eliminating waste.

The government will probably just borrow the necessary funds, said Cynthia Leach, a top economist at the Royal Bank of Canada. Canada’s low debt levels compared with other industrialized nations, she said, means it can easily handle the additional debt.

“It’s a lot of money but not a huge amount of money,” she said.

But meeting NATO’s 2 percent goal every year going forward would require a sustained level of large spending that could become a burden and force the government to make difficult choices about taxes or spending cuts in other areas, Ms. Leach said.

And while increased miliary spending could provide more Canadian jobs if some of the money goes to Canadian contractors, buying more armaments will not necessarily bolster overall economic output or increase productivity, Ms. Leach said.

Can the military actually spend the money?

Mr. Carney, in introducing his military spending plans, spoke only in broad terms about how the money will be directed. But to meet the alliance’s goal, at least on paper, Canada would have to spend all of the money Mr. Carney promised this year.

Some areas, like bolstering the salaries and benefits of members of the armed forces, can be swiftly and easily achieved.

But investments in new weapons and artificial intelligence systems, which Mr. Carney also discussed, would be much more difficult to complete quickly.

“We have finally gotten religion about investing in the military in a meaningful way at about the worst conceivable time,” Mr. Perry said. “All of NATO — and Europe — is ramping up defense spending. A lot of that’s happening in Asia, and the Americans are doing that, too.”

The result, he said, is that Canada joins long and growing wait lists at defense contractors. And while Mr. Carney emphasized buying more armaments from Canadian companies, Mr. Perry said that also may take years given the limited capacity of Canadian weapons makers.