Front Burner - Canada’s massive military buildup: Part 1

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Mark Carney ran for office promising to spend a whole lot more on the Canadian military. Since being elected, he’s poured billions of dollars into defence, and plans to roughly triple Canada’s defence expenditures in the next ten years. He’s also proposing to grow Canada’s defence industry revenues by 240%. Today, in part one of our two part documentary, senior producer Imogen Birchard heads to Canada’s biggest defence and security trade show in Ottawa to hear what those in the defence industry – and those protesting outside – think about the plan. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Our world is changing. It's becoming or divided and dangerous. Mark Carney ran for office promising to spend a whole lot more on the Canadian military. And that's why today I'm announcing my plan to rebuild, reinvest,

and rearm. Since being elected, he's been making good on that promise, pouring billions of dollars into defense. Carney says he's just getting started. Over the next decade, Canada will unleash a half a trillion dollars. I'll repeat, a half a trillion dollars in defense and defense related investment. From submarines and air... What he's proposing is an astronomical amount of military spending, a level not seen in decades,

and definitely not in peace time. And that's not all. He also wants Canada to produce a whole lot more weapons and military equipment, to sell to our own military and to the rest of the world. It could be a radical expansion of both Canada's military might and its military industry.

And so over the next two episodes, we wanted to take a closer look at the significance of this shift, what's motivating it, how could it play out, and what might be sacrificed along the way. Our senior producer, Imogen Burchard, was at Canada's biggest arms expo in Ottawa last month, and she'll take it from here.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney walked out on stage at Kansack this year, Thank you very much. Wow. The crowd jumped to their feet. Funny, I'm the first Canadian Prime Minister to speak at Kansack. I don't know why the other ones didn't come. This is fantastic. I can tell you that because I saw a recording of them.

I missed the speech itself because pretty much every taxi, Uber and Lyft in the greater Ottawa area was booked up by people going to this giant defense sector trade show. Traffic was so bumper-to-bumper as we approached the convention center that my cab driver was able to pull out his phone and show me one of his music videos on YouTube. A perimeter was set up far back from the venue and after I made my way through security, I found myself in what felt like a parking lot. But instead of cars, there were labs, light-armored vehicles which look like tanks on wheels and M-Raps, short for vehicles that are mind-resistant, ambush-protected. Inside, the room was packed with suits and soldiers.

There were Canadian troops dressed in Cadet that digitized camo pattern and Canadian naval officers in their whites. I saw members of the Mexican, Colombian, and German militaries, representatives from the National Bank of Canada, from Scotia Bank, academics from the University of Alberta and from Ottawa U. Former Conservative Defense Minister Peter McKay was there, former liberal defense minister Harjit Sajin, former conservative leader Aaron O'Toole, former president of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement, all of whom now have some connection to the defense industry.

It felt like a schmooze fest as much as a trade show. But with a lot more weapons of war. So this is a sharpshooter version of the C-25, so a little more accurate. so it gives a marksman a gun that's going to be more precise than a standard military offering. There were guns, of course. The gun boots were really popular. They love it. It is a good stand for photo ops, for sure. I saw what looked like rocket launchers.

The Carl Gustav Weapons System, which is a reloadable shoulder-fired system. So you can see there are various different ammunition loads, depending on the target. One of those ammunition loads was an ADM, and, area defense munition that shoots 1,100 flachettes, basically tiny darts. Another, according to the company's website, releases 800 steel ball bearings as an evenly distributed, highly lethal cloud. This is a joint strike missile. There was a full-on missile, with a looping video beside it of various targets exploding,

debris and smoke filling the screen. So Canada is currently looking at purchasing this for their F-35, so it's interesting. There were drones of all different sizes. Many of our drones have dual use capabilities. They can actually have drop mechanisms to carry effectors. Sorry, what's an effector? Affector is literally something that goes boom. And I saw at least two different mates of robot dogs.

So that thing is a Boston Dynamics Spot Robot. So it's kind of on the cutting edge of quadruped technology. They're really one of the pioneers. I think we're very much, and if you've seen it at the show here, we're very much moving to our robots fighting their robots and trying to keep people out of it. And so for me, I'm not, I guess that's a good thing we're keeping people safe. And what happens when the robots, one side wins? Do we just say, okay, your robots are taking over?

So it's a weird thing that I never thought we would have to think of. But, you know, here we are in 2026. And here in 26 was Mark Carney, the first Canadian Prime Minister to speak among the rocket launchers and robot dogs at Canaan. Over the past year, Canada's new government has worked at an unprecedented pace and scale. We've enacted the largest increase in defense investment in Canadian history. Last summer, Carney promised he'd put 2% of Canada's GDP towards defense spending. This is a promise that all NATO members make, but that Canada had never actually kept before. After all, 2% of GDP is a lot of money for a government to spend.

back in 2014, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been reluctant to sign on to the target at all, and Justin Trudeau had reportedly said it was a target that Canada would never hit. But Carney did it in less than a year. Canada has achieved NATO's 2% GDP defense expenditure target, half a decade ahead of the original schedule. I have to say for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't know if that's an accomplishment or an admission. but we're there. That leap in spending alone is probably enough to explain the warm reception

Carney received that morning. But 2%, 2% was the old target. Now NATO members have a new one, to spend 5% of GDP on defense and security by 2035. And Carney says he's going to hit that too. This is an astonishing leap in spending. But the significance of this commitment isn't just how much Carney plans to spend on defense. It's also where he wants to spend it. Right here in Canada, he says, right here in this room.

Back in February, Carney unveiled his defense industrial strategy. It aims to dramatically expand the Canadian defense industry, create 125,000 Canadian defense jobs, and grow Canadian defense industry revenues by 240%. All this probably explains why Kansack was so packed this year. It's freaking huge. Huge. It's huge. I've never seen one this big before, and I've been coming since 2010. It's busy, it's full, there's crowded, and it's just a great place to be right now.

These aren't the most expressive guys you'll ever meet, and they are mostly guys. But on the convention hall floor, there was the giddiness of a gold rush. I was here last year, and you could shoot a cannon through and not hit anything. It's packed this year. It's new. It's a new client relationship. It's a new, it's a new, it's new relationship with our own government. There's a lot of buzz, right? There's a 5% target. So there's a lot of excitement and hype and there's plenty of opportunities and capabilities to build on. So, yeah, a lot of activity and appetite.

It's very surreal for most of us that have been here, you know, before it was cool, before there's this rush, before Prime Minister Carney, and so you can see. Or if you'd been here, you would see there's a lot of different people. There's investors, there's bankers. There's young people, you know, all kinds of people that you've never seen. This was, you know, for old shady white people in suits. And that's really changed. It's exciting for me.

I'm not sure what it means for the world in general. But yeah, it's, it's very interesting to be here for sure. David Paglazzi's been a defense reporter with the Ottawa citizen for decades now. And he says the whole industry feels like this. I've never seen industry in the last 40 years so energized. It's like the gold rush era where you've got all the, these companies starting to form and everyone seems to be involved in defense in some way or wants to get involved. You have all these generals now moving from, you know, in their retirement. Now

they're on boards of directors. So it's, you know, there's a real energy there thinking that there's going to be a lot of tax dollars spent over the coming years. Outside the venue, there was a different vibe. Shut down, kids. On day two of the show, dozens of protesters showed up. They were confined to a pretty small area near one of the entrances, flanked on either side by cops with riot shields. They had flags and held up homemade signs,

including one with a long list of the names of children killed in Gaza. Many of the largest arms manufacturers in the world had boots inside, and their wares are used by militaries, including the idea. Some of the protesters would heckle the occasional attendee who would walk by. Though honestly, there were other ways into the venue, so I got the sense that the ones who were passing by got a little thrill from the attention.

I'm a physician, and it's been really horrible, you know, over these last year's watching all of our colleagues being murdered with weapons that are traded right here at Khenzak. This is Dr. Kavita Algu. She talked to me about the killing of health care workers in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan. And as you might expect, she didn't share the attendees' enthusiasm for Carney's defense spending or his defense industrial strategy.

And knowing that our government is leaning into militarism, removing funds from Pharmacare, you know, Mark Carney said, well, he didn't say, but they have not renewed pharmacare, which was supposed to expand. All of that money is going into militarism to destroy the future for all of us. So I think in words, he positions it a certain way, but in reality, it is a, you know, stripping our own social health communities resources to go into building a future of militarism. Hi, I'm Tony McQuail. I'm a semi-retired farmer from the Lucknow Ontario area over by Lake Huron, so I've driven about eight hours to get here for this protest of the Kansak weapons of war and

destruction display. You might recognize Tony McQuail if you followed the most recent, NDP leadership race. He was the candidate in the Big Straw Hat. Both the preparation for war, i.e. the manufacture of the weapons and the amount of human resources, material resources, and economic resources that go into that are incredibly destructive for society. They divert huge amounts of resources from things like education, health care. So just the preparation of these things are incredibly destructive. But then when they're used, They're even more incredibly destructive of the environment of society.

This idea that all this money that Carney's government wants to spend on defense diverts money that could be spent elsewhere isn't just the domain of these protesters. Here's Mark Carney talking to Christian Amunpur on CNN last summer, when the 5% spending target was being negotiated by NATO leaders. So how realistic is it in a time when you already have economic difficulty, so to some, you know, Europe and others, to actually, you're at 2%, but now they want 3.5% and eventually 5%. Isn't that just going to cripple your budgets? Well, it's important. These are important questions, and it's important to be clear what we are potentially, and I think likely to all agree tomorrow, which is, and let's take the 5% of GDP figure,

which is a big, big number. How much is it actually for you? 5% of our GDP would be about $150 billion. I mean, that's a lot. It's a lot of number. Per year? That's a lot. Of course it's a lot.

So it means that that stuff that you can't give to your own citizens. Well, okay. The 5% figure is made up of two chunks. 3.5% on core military spending, things like warships and ammo, and 1.5% is for defense-related infrastructure, like ports and air strips in the north. I want to put that $150 billion figure in perspective here. It's more than Canada spent last year on elderly benefits, E.I. benefits, and the Canada a child care benefit combined.

So far, Carney has been pretty vague on what any spending tradeoffs might look like. He's referred to sacrifice. None of these goals will come easily or quickly. All will require ambition, collaboration, and yes, on occasion, sacrifice. And he's also suggested that it's something we'll deal with later. If we are moving to the higher and higher levels of defense spending, because that's necessary, then we will have to make considerations about what less the federal government can do in certain cases and how we're going to pay for it. Those tradeoffs, I'm going to give you false precision around this,

but those tradeoffs happen towards the end of the decade into the next decade. And we will be much, much better informed. There's going to be a very clear and open conversation about that based on facts and based on what Canadians want. But it's true, as Dr. Algu mentioned, that we're already seeing the government pullback spending in areas like Pharmacare. Right now, public opinion polling suggests a lot of Canadians do want more money to be spent on defense, that they support what Carney's doing here. But that clear and open conversation based on facts that Carney promised still feels a long way off. The Parliamentary Budget Office has pointed out that there's not a lot of detail on how the government intends to reach the spending goal. NATO wants to see clear, concrete, credible plans from all member nations when they meet in Turkey next week.

The CD-Hav Institute put out a report saying this would make defense one of the largest components of federal spending, and called it a sea change, not seen for generations. The report finds that unless the plan is to massively increase government debt, Carney is going to have to cut social spending, raise taxes, or they suggest some combo of the two. Defense reporter David Paglazzi again. It's one thing to be, you know, you tell a pollster, oh, yes, I support a strong Canadian forces, but if the question was, okay, well, you're not going to be getting the same level of social services, do you still support spending, you know, all that money on defense?

And you might get a different answer if you formated your question like that. There's going to have to be some way to pay for all this. And, you know, it'll be interesting to see what. Canadians put up with. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen.

If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not. Not everyone in this story is who you think they are. Personally, discount Dave and the fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. The truth is, over the last few decades, Canada has neither spent enough on our defense nor invested enough in our defense industries.

We've relied too heavily on our geography and others to protect us. This has created vulnerabilities that we can no longer afford and dependencies that we can no longer sustain. Being realistic, Canada, we have not properly supported our armed forces personnel for three decades. This is Glenn Lynch. He's the CEO of the drone company, Volatus Aerospace. Now we have a government that said we are going to step up. We are going to meet our commitments. However, we now have tied together our national security with economic independence. So the mission of trying to bring 70% of defense procurement back into Canada so that Canada becomes less of a defense consumer and more of a contributing partner.

I mean, the simple reality is difficult as it is, and I have a son serving in the military. Weapons are a part of modern warfare, and the Canadian military needs their weapons. Hopefully never to have to use them, but for the credible show of force. When I talked to people at Kansak about why they thought this increase in defense spending was so important, I heard a lot about how the world had changed. Because we're just in a very different world than we were. just 24 months ago. Yeah, it's not that the world is changing.

The world has changed as we knew it. I think the geopolitical climate in the world has shifted quite significantly, not just in the last year, but in the last five years. When asked for specific threats, people would talk about Canada's Arctic and China and definitely Russia. Canada is the second largest country in the world. We have a very unfriendly neighbor up north. With the melting of ice, we will need to. to protect our borders of north more than ever.

From a purely militaristic view, I wouldn't say we're under too much threat, but deterrence is a big thing. No one spoke more forcefully of the Russian threat than Robert Hewson. He's a communications director with Saab, the Swedish company that makes the grip in fighter jet, the shoulder-fired Karl Gustav, and much more. We're at war. I mean, there is a direct threat on Canada's doorstep.

Europe has been invaded, a sovereign European country has been invaded. And people are dying there every single day. So collectively, I'm afraid, we are at war. And the threat is not simply restricted to the battlefront in Ukraine. It's a small globe. And if you look at where Canada is in the high north, in the Arctic, you can be fooled by looking at the map. If you look at a flat map, things seem very far away.

but if you look at a globe, things are actually a lot closer. So none of these weapons are here for Canada to go and attack anybody. They are all here for the defence and security of Canada if and when you are attacked and you need to go. And unfortunately, we can no longer say that that's not going to happen. We see right now that there is aggression by the powerful against the weak and the nation deserves, and I think, demands defense. I just want to take a moment here to point out that, of course, everyone wants to keep Canada safe.

But not everyone agrees that more defense spending and a stronger defense industry accomplishes that. Given the kind of current climate, one arguing for restraint will typically be kind of dismissed as a bit naive. And it would be told that, you know, listen, the world is a more dangerous neighborhood than it's been before and so forth. This is Kelsey Gallagher. He's a senior researcher at Project Plow Shares, an institute that does research and advocacy on issues related to peace, security, and disarmament. And I understand those perspectives, but I do not think it's naive to point out the very real threats of simply pushing arms flows into overdrive. Arms proliferation makes conflict more likely to occur. It increases the severity of conflict. It typically makes conflict last longer. all of these negative aspects typically being

by civilians. The protesters I talk to put this perspective more forcefully. Fucking insane. And I would just say insane in case you don't want the fucking insane so it's insane. It's crazy.

War and war industries have not made the world more peaceful. I'm sorry, they have not. They get used and then they build the hatred and the anger and the hurt which then comes back and just cycles around and spirals around. I mean, the world is a more dangerous place because we're making it.

So we're creating an arms race. Like many countries are doing this. And so, I mean, I don't think, I don't think it's naive. When Mark Carney talks about threats to Canada, he does talk about Russia, especially in relation to Canada's north. He also speaks vaguely about how, Our world is changing. It's becoming more divided and dangerous. But especially when he was on the campaign trail, Kearney highlighted another threat.

President Trump wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen. The United States. If you look at Canada and would be cherished as a 51st aid, they don't pay their share of military in NATO. They pay very little for military. They're not protected at all. And the reason is they think we're going to protect them. On the next episode, the challenge of disentangling our defense from our neighbor.

You have a Canadian military leadership that is so ingrained with their U.S. counterparts, so connected, so integrated. And the risks of boosting our domestic defense industry by selling Canadian arms abroad. This would be the most aggressive increase in Canadian arms exports in recent history. President Trump celebrated the attack by releasing this video, which shows the moment a boat was blown up in the southern Caribbean. Eleven on board were killed. Is this the vehicle that I spot? That's all for today. I'm Imogen Burchard, and tomorrow I'll be back with the second part of our two-part documentary on Mark Carney's plans for Canada's defense industry. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.