Canada moves to 2% GDP end of FY25/26 - PMMC

[ytz]

I will note too that it's unique in how he's deploying political capital into defence. And actually pursuing real capital as well. Trying to get that rearmament bank here. Lecturing Bay Street to invest more in defence companies. Putting Doug Guzman (former banker and exec at Goldman Sachs and RBC) as head of the new investment agency. I think a lot of this is an approach unique to Carney. I literally can't imagine any other Canadian politician doing this.

 

[Navy_Pete]

By all means Carney is more committed to defense and to shoring up the global world order than JT ever was. I suspect Carney has forgotten more than JT ever knew. But I suspect we would see similar movements if we had someone like Harper in as PM. Both strike me as somewhat similar and would likely both make the same moves.

I'm not entirely sure about Harper; he did some great things for the active Army during Afgh, but a lot of it was at the cost of operations and maintenance of everything else, and fucked the navy and all infra for a decade in a hole we never dug out of.

Aside from the big, sexy investments in fancy gear, we are fixing a lot of things on the bases that have been rusting/rotting out since the Cold War to an extent I never thought I'd see in my career, and also getting support to make sure that we don't just get the fancy gear, we get the infrastructure, training, parts and maintenance on top of people to actually operate it properly.

The downside is it's coming too fast for us to keep up with after decades of being hollowed out, but in theory we'll go from 'more with less', which was trending to 'even more with almost nothing' to 'enough to do your expected capabilties in a sustained way'. It's a pretty insane shift, and is the kind of thing that makes me want to stick around and maybe avoid some of the lessons we've learned the hard way as things were falling apart.