Carney’s military spending is shrinking our dreams as a nation

All this has redrawn the boundaries of our national ambitions, redirecting vast resources into military firepower, forcing us to shrink our dreams of other things we could achieve together as a nation.

Indeed, Carney’s decision to enormously bulk up our military is a true game changer — perhaps the most far-reaching of all the decisions he’s made as PM — and yet it was made with virtually no public consultation.

Strikingly, his plan to triple our annual military spending — so that we’ll be spending an extra $150 billion a year by 2035 — was never presented to Canadians prior to the April 2025 election that delivered Carney a minority government.

His announcement, less than two months later, that military spending would jump from 1.4 per cent to five per cent of GDP came almost completely out of the blue.

There had long been discussion about reaching the NATO target of two per cent of GDP, and there was popular support for that — largely because the media typically made our military spending look woefully inadequate compared to peer nations.

For instance, we were told that, as a percentage of GDP, our military spending ranked almost at the bottom — 25^th of 30 NATO countries.

However, we were rarely told that, in terms of actual dollars spent, Canada was already the sixth biggest military spender in NATO.

In addition to this distortion, Canadian media routinely downplay the fact that a bigger defence budget requires significant sacrifices; it typically means reduced social spending, which greatly diminishes the quality of life of ordinary Canadians.

Social spending is generally presented as a luxury, while military spending is presented as a necessity — and a particularly urgent necessity in the Trump era.

It’s true U.S. President Donald Trump has made the world more dangerous, but there’s another new reality which is suddenly throwing doubt on the value of huge military spending. The wars involving Iran and Ukraine are demonstrating that easily-assembled drones have an astonishing capacity to damage the world’s most sophisticated weaponry.

“Even the strongest military on the planet cannot eliminate the threat of cheap drones,” writes U.S. political scientist Robert Pape in the journal Foreign Affairs.

It may be that investing in diplomacy and world development does more to make the world safe.

We should recall that the late U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the danger of the weapons lobby, which he dubbed the “military industrial complex.”

Eisenhower, who served as the top U.S. general in the Second World War, was no peacenik. But he advised skepticism about the demands of this immensely powerful lobby which consistently pushes for ever more armaments, whether needed or not.

Eisenhower highlighted that there was a crucial tradeoff: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”

The extra billions Carney is spending to amplify our military means there will be far less money for social programs — programs that are essential in our quest to all lead healthy, well-educated and prosperous lives.

The achievement of those social goals would personally make me much happier and prouder to be Canadian than a new fleet of submarines or fighter jets.

Indeed, if we heed Eisenhower’s warning against being hoodwinked by the military industrial complex, we can start to question whether gigantic military spending is a necessity or rather an enormous expense that leaves us unable to afford other things that really matter in our lives.

The weapons lobby wants us to forget there’s a tradeoff.

Let’s not.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.