“CAF – Canadian Armed Forces”

Mark Carney went to Montreal on Tuesday to announce a new push for defence spending.

The prime minister was announcing Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy a week later than planned after his initial announcement was delayed due to the shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

OTTAWA — Days after she retired in January, the former top bureaucrat at the Department of National Defence warned that the billions in additional defence spending promised by the Carney government is “nowhere near what we need” and is only serving to “plug in the holes in the wrong way”.

Stefanie Beck, the deputy minister at DND until her retirement on Jan. 23, shared a surprisingly blunt assessment of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s record defence investments during a conference on Feb. 2.

Canada’s defence industry got a $6.6 billion boost Tuesday, as Prime Minister Mark Carney formally unveiled Ottawa’s new Defence Industrial Strategy. The plan promises to create 125,000 new jobs over 10 years and award 70 per cent of defence contracts to Canadian companies, through a “Build-Partner-Buy” framework that prioritizes domestic industry. It is part of the government’s plan to increase Canadian military spending to five per cent of GDP by 2035, in line with NATO targets.

Canada’s new defence industrial strategy sets out a series of important, extraordinarily high benchmarks for the country to achieve over the next decade, including buying and maintaining most of the military’s equipment domestically.

The long-awaited plan, which was developed more as a response to NATO’s call for industrial clarity among allies than to annexation threats by the Trump administration, sets a goal of awarding 70 per cent of federal defence contracts to Canadian firms within a decade.

Unless you have spent long hours flying over Canada’s Arctic, it is difficult to grasp its scale, its harshness, or its emptiness. And yet this forbidding territory is becoming one of the most strategically important parts of our country’s future.

Why does it matter? Who else is interested in it? And what must Canada do to protect its sovereignty?

The supply flight from the air base in Trenton, Ont. to Canadian Forces Station Alert, the northernmost station on Ellesmere Island, takes roughly the same time as to fly from Trenton to Ireland. And from about an hour north of Trenton onward, there are almost no settlements to see; only rock, ice, water, and wilderness.