What Canada’s Recent Rearmament Means

(Photo by Mosbo6 via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

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For decades, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have been a low priority. Yet, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has changed this.

For the first time since the Cold War, the Canadian government has met the NATO target of spending 2% of GDP on the military. In the fiscal year 2025–2026, Canada is projected to spend more than $60 billion on military expenditure, and the proportion of the budget allocated to the armed forces is expected to rise to 5% of GDP in the coming years.

An increasingly volatile and uncertain security environment, marked by threats of annexation by President Donald Trump, has changed Canadians’ views on the importance of a robust defence sector. Polls suggest that Canadians are increasingly supportive of defence spending. Furthermore, 2025 was the first time in the past 30 years that the CAF met its recruitment goals.

Although it is only natural that threats of annexation by its much larger and more powerful southern neighbour have prompted Canada to rebuild its defence sector, it is key to take a critical approach to exploring the costs and consequences of pursuing rearmament. What sectors of civilian spending will have to give and how can a revitalized Canadian military be contained to self-defence?

A History of Wasting Money

Every dollar spent on defence is a dollar not spent on social services. “Guns and butter” is a model used to illustrate this trade-off. The first round has already been felt, with the Federal Government’s 2025 budget introducing sweeping cuts across multiple departments but sparing the armed forces from the brunt of it. As new funding is being directed to defence, a look into the recent past will reveal the military’s long history of wasting taxpayer money.

A 2024 report from the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on National Defence revealed many issues affecting the military’s procurement process, such as over-regulation, risk aversion, and staff shortages. With fewer qualified staff capable of evaluating the “labyrinth of procedures and processes”, the ministry has faced decades of delays in finalizing purchases for new equipment. 

Time is money, and delays mean increased costs, often running into the billions as inflation gradually reduces the purchasing power of the budget. For example, a 2024 investigation of planned spending over the next 20 years under Canada’s Defence Policy warned of the dangers of delays. What had originally been a $163 billion capital spending project in 2022 had increased to $214 billion in only 2 years — a $51.5 billion cost increase.

For his part, Prime Minister Carney has introduced initiatives to make the process more efficient by establishing a new Defence Investment Agency, which will be responsible for coordinating projects over $100 million. 

To fund this highly efficient military machine, the government will slash funding to a wide range of services, particularly those meant to support the most vulnerable, such as First Nations, refugees, and — ironically — veterans. Another victim of the funding cuts will be the Tri-Council of agencies responsible for funding Canadian research and scholarship.

Despite the cuts to Canadian research and scholarship grants, the government still plans to attract investment in that area, with a particular focus on defence. 

A New Military-Industrial Policy

Canada has long boasted a small yet robust defence industry, capable of producing critical military components in a wide variety of fields from ammunition to aerospace technology. In 2024, Canada’s defence industry earned $17 billion in revenue, an 84% increase since 2014.

As part of Canada’s military rearmament plan, the government unveiled a recent $6.6 billion Defence Industrial Strategy. The strategy outlines their aims to increase weapons exports by 50% over the next 10 years, a plan which they hope would create 125,000 jobs. 

Large procurement projects for major military hardware, such as new submarines and fighter jets, are tied to investment in local Canadian manufacturing capacity. This is one of the ways the government plans to develop the country’s military industry to meet its target to increase exports over the coming decade.

(Photo by U.S. Navy Mass Communication Specialist Nicholas Russell via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

An increase in weapons exports will inevitably mean that Canada will become ever more complicit in human rights abuses all over the world. Even now, Canada’s limited defence industrial sector has already armed chronic abusers of human rights in conflict zones across the world. 

From sniper rifles in Yemen, Sudan, and Libya to armoured vehicles in Saudi Arabia and ammunition to Israel, Canadian weapons have frequently made their way into the hands of human rights abusers, particularly in the Middle East. 

Loopholes to Weapons Regulations

Although Canada does not directly sell weapons to foreign buyers, it does regulate any transaction by providing export permits. Although current legislation bans the export of weapons to countries under United Nations Security Council arms embargoes, few other controls exist to restrict arms exports.

Current regulations allow weapons and other military components to be exported without restrictions to the United States. From the U.S., these components can be either integrated into other weapons systems or forwarded to their final destination. This loophole has been called out by multiple human rights organizations and described as “deceptive” by the United Nations itself because it has allowed Canadian products to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

This loophole was so permissive that in 2024, Israel was Canada’s fourth largest customer of military equipment. This included ammunition, spare parts, and radar equipment. 

A recent attempt in parliament to close this loophole and strengthen Canada’s arms export controls was defeated, leaving the door open for Canadian weapons to continue flowing to Israel and other violators of human rights across the world. 

NORAD and the Deep Ties Between the U.S.

The most immediate impetus for the re-prioratization of Canada’s defence sector was President Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats of annexation. From this perspective, Canadian rearmament can be framed as a defensive response to American provocations. With Russia to the north and the U.S. to the South, a revitalized Canadian military will be used — supposedly — to purely protect Canadian territorial integrity. 

Unfortunately, the deep ties between the American and Canadian Armed Forces are hard to loosen due to the deep level of integration between them. This is most notable through NORAD, a joint command between the U.S. and Canada allowing both nations to share resources and intelligence to monitor the North American continent.

NORAD does not own any military assets; they are instead owned by the two countries. Due to the U.S. military’s superiority in resources, Canada relies on American-owned equipment to monitor its own airspace. Collaboration between the U.S. and Canada is not restricted to North America, though; it is global. 

The Canadian Armed Forces and the World 

Canada has long participated in American-led military action in the Middle East. The 1991 Gulf War saw the participation of 5,100 Canadian troops, and between 2001–2014, Canada committed 40,000 military personnel to Afghanistan. 

Even when Canada is not directly involved in American-led wars, the deep level of integration between the two countries makes it impossible for Canadian troops to not participate. A case in point is the 2003 Iraq War. Although then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien refused to participate in the invasion, leaked diplomatic cables show that even as the government publicly condemned the war, Canadian diplomats offered “to be as helpful as possible in the military margins.”

Canadian surveillance helped direct American aircraft and even allowed 100 Canadian troops on exchange to participate with American, British, and Australian units. One of these soldiers on exchange was a Canadian general. Eight months later, he became a deputy commander of 35,000 American and allied troops in Iraq.

(Photo by PFC Leslie Angulo, The U.S. National Archives, via NARA and DVIDS Public Domain Archives/PDM 1.0 DEED)

Similarly, when Israeli and American jets began to bomb targets across Iran — including civilian infrastructure — the Canadian government found itself supporting the intervention and condemning the Iranian government. Approximately 200 Canadian troops were stationed across the Middle East in support of six different operations, including 18 in Qatar and Bahrain attached to CENTCOM — the U.S. military command in charge of the war against Iran.

Despite the government’s statements that Canada was not consulted beforehand and has no plans to participate, it refused to rule out the possibility. Yet, experts point out that it is “highly likely”  that Canadian troops on exchange were involved with the planning and coordination of the attacks. 

The Future of the Canadian Armed Forces 

Despite the popularity of Canadian rearmament among the public and intuitive logic needing to defend itself from potential threats from the U.S., defence spending will come at a high financial and moral cost to the country.

At the lowest point of U.S.–Canada relations in centuries, despite its economically crippling tariffs and its repeated threats to make Canada the 51st state, the most recent one made on June 2nd, 2026, the Canadian government finds itself unwilling or unable to decouple itself from the American war machine and in support of yet another destructive and unjustifiable American intervention in the Middle East.

Canada’s history of supporting American foreign policies and its current involvement in Iran should raise concerns about the role a larger and better-equipped Canadian military will play globally. In all likelihood, a stronger Canadian army will simply be better positioned to support American interventions abroad.

Canadians must now seriously question rearmament to ensure that the significant cuts to social services will not simply end up contributing to global instability. By introducing stricter export controls on military components, the government can ensure Canadian–made weapons will not find themselves supporting genocide in Gaza. 

Edited by Khushi Mehta