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

[The Bread Guy]

Interesting split in a recent survey: on the one hand ....

... yet on the other:

More here:

Defence, aid or trade? Canadians’ shifting international priorities now lean toward economic opportunity -

Percentage saying Canada is ‘falling behind’ militarily rises as Carney commits to increased spending June 24, 2025 – Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Europe this week for a NATO summit that has only increased in importance after escalations in the Middle East that have seen Israel, and the...

angusreid.org

 

[PrairieFella]

Interesting split in a recent survey: on the one hand ....
View attachment 94225
... yet on the other:
View attachment 94226
More here:

Defence, aid or trade? Canadians’ shifting international priorities now lean toward economic opportunity -

Percentage saying Canada is ‘falling behind’ militarily rises as Carney commits to increased spending June 24, 2025 – Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Europe this week for a NATO summit that has only increased in importance after escalations in the Middle East that have seen Israel, and the...

angusreid.org

Neither are mutually exclusive. We essentially are inheritors of the British tradition, trade and economics above all else. The Royal Navy's dominance was borne out of that trade dominance. A strong Canada is a middle power with outsized trade and economic influence globally with the military power to back that up and support our allies (with whom we trade haha). So 1946-mid 60s haha.

 

[Halifax Tar]

Interesting split in a recent survey: on the one hand ....
View attachment 94225
... yet on the other:
View attachment 94226
More here:

Defence, aid or trade? Canadians’ shifting international priorities now lean toward economic opportunity -

Percentage saying Canada is ‘falling behind’ militarily rises as Carney commits to increased spending June 24, 2025 – Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Europe this week for a NATO summit that has only increased in importance after escalations in the Middle East that have seen Israel, and the...

angusreid.org

For your first graph, It's interesting that the gap has been so big for long but couldn't get any action.

 

[Kirkhill]

Interesting split in a recent survey: on the one hand ....
View attachment 94225
... yet on the other:
View attachment 94226
More here:

Defence, aid or trade? Canadians’ shifting international priorities now lean toward economic opportunity -

Percentage saying Canada is ‘falling behind’ militarily rises as Carney commits to increased spending June 24, 2025 – Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Europe this week for a NATO summit that has only increased in importance after escalations in the Middle East that have seen Israel, and the...

angusreid.org

I summarize: What do I have to do to get a job? Pay more for defence? Or pay more for aid? The market is asking that I pay more for defence.

Meanwhile, Carney's pal Starmer, having agreed to reach 5% in 10 years time, having said the week earlier that he aspired to, he hoped to, achieve 3.5%, has got some bright ideas on how to get to that number without buying tanks.

Starmer’s pledges to Nato on defence are no more than creative accounting

Much of the supposed ‘increase’ is just a case of renaming existing spending

www.telegraph.co.uk

The Prime Minister says that the new definition means 4.1 per cent of GDP will be spent on national security by 2027 but getting to 5 per cent would not happen until 2035 at the earliest. These airy-fairy promises make a mockery of the pressing need to boost defences as the world lurches towards potential global conflict. Moreover, the Prime Minister says the extra spending is intended to make “working people” more secure, a fatuous phrase whose use is becoming increasingly tiresome.

Carney's initial statement too emphasised the primary benefits of the Canada EU strategic agreement were for "working people".

.....

The UK is at about 2.1% and was dragged kicking and screaming to 2.5% by the end of this parliament. Then aspirational goals of 3, 3.5 and 5% were declared in short order but with long horizons.

Now, magically, Starmer has jumped 2.1% to 4.1% by 2027.
Equally magically Carney has jumped 1.4% to 2% this year.
With the same aspirations as Starmer.



The dates didn't reproduce but the scale is 2014 to 2022 with the final point of inflection on the Polish line being 2022.

Lithuania, Latvia and Finland, along with the rest of the Nordics and Balts, are all parts of JEF. Boris Johnson parlayed JEF to bring Sweden and Finland into NATO and JEF entered into bilateral agreements with Poland and Ukraine.

Macron was still trying to make nice with Putin.

France, Germany, Italy and Spain all had other priorities. Macron led the parade.
Starmer has joined the Macron parade.

Canada has always inclined to the Franco-German position.
Carney has just reaffirmed that.

....

Trump is being played. The game plan is to keep telling the drooling kid in the corner what a good boy he is to prevent a tantrum.

The rest of us are along for the ride.

I doubt that there has been any substantive change in the agenda since Trump's election.

The Anglosphere is done.

 

[Navy_Pete]

Its interesting how deck plates and 6th floor HQ can see such different pictures. (Not actually sure what floor your on but if your deck plate time was in HFX you might get the reference).

I have experienced nothing nor heard tell of any of your information and I sit with Snr MARTECH Structures (HTs) every day where DC and this very topic has been discussed in C&POs. What does come up is the loss of the HT expertise and their SMEness in DC, I think this is the bigger issue. But with RAT and HCFR now built into the TPs I think we have overcome this.

I split time between 280s and CPFs, so get the reference.

A lot of the stuff on the portable FF gear isn't apparent to most of the ship, and most people don't know about it because frankly most people are completely unaware of the requirements (even the departmental maintainers) but is something that is seen consistently for years across MSDCs and is getting worse as HTs phase out.

The frequency of hot work fires comes from the RCN reporting, and again, isn't obvious from the ship, but is when you are looking at the fleet level data.

A lot of our training is passed on via mentoring and OJT, and we actually just wrote the first official HCRFF SOP for MAR to do the RIMPAC last year; before that it was just a PPT maintained by the DC schools. It worked, but ended up being similar to what we had prior to CFCD 132 where each crew had a slightly different understanding of the procedures, and there were a lot of people that didn't understand the 'why' behind different things, which is what you really want to know if you want to develop SOPs for new classes, as well as adapt to new equipment, training standards etc.

The issue with a lot of that kind of OJT where there isn't a reference is that something that's completely wrong can seep in, and once it's repeated often enough, it's become gospel, and really hard to dispel the myth. Run into that a lot with things like people thinking halon displaces oxygen and will kill you if you're in the compartment (it won't), or that if your bunker gear is wet you'll steam like a lobster fighter fires (you won't). Also a lot of 'I saw this on youtube' things, taken completely out of context, that don't actually work with the ship design, FF equipment, or physics/geometry of the scenarios.

This becomes a problem when people who think they understand something complex from the training they have (which is fire science in crayon format) try and come up with solutions, when they don't really understand the problem or tools enough. Most FFs know enough to at least know what they don't know, but the pool of people in the RCN that fall into that is shrinking.

The big problem I see coming down the pipe is we've fucked about with so long getting the 'structures' MARTECH specilization back in place (which is still years out) is that we'll have lost most of the institutional knowledge of HTs, and FFs won't have any relevant marine FF experience, and that's hitting around when we're supposed to start getting CSCs. We've made enough changes to the design where we can't just directly copy the RN SOPs, but should be a really good starting point, as long as we have some people who ask 'why' they do things the way they do to adapt to the gaps we'll have in crew structure, personnel training levels and specific equipment.

But we completely ignored the RN when they recommended we keep an HT stream when going to Martech, so who knows.