We can no longer get away with merely paying lip service to doing our part to defend this continent and meeting our North Atlantic Treaty Organization obligations.Īfter finally conceding in March that Canada would purchase 88 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets – the same plane Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had dismissed as a lemon during the 2015 federal election campaign – Ottawa committed $8-billion in new defence spending over six years in last month’s federal budget. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, has forced Canada to put up or shut up.
Sajjan’s replacement as Defence Minister, Anita Anand, was handed the urgent task of restoring trust in a Department of National Defence plagued by sexual misconduct scandals.
Not only had Canada put off buying new fighter jets for years, but we had long acknowledged the need to modernize NORAD without doing anything about it.Īlas, the federal election came and went, as most do, without much discussion about revamping Canada’s defence policy. President Joe Biden’s administration and at the Pentagon at the lack of seriousness with which Canada seemed to be taking its responsibilities for the continent’s shared defence. The statement, released on the eve of Canada’s 2021 federal election campaign, came amid signs of increasing frustration within U.S. counterpart Lloyd Austin issued a joint statement vowing to modernize the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) in the face of “a greater and more complex conventional missile threat.” Last August, then Liberal defence minister Harjit Sajjan and his U.S.
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