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London, Canada will continue to keep a tight lid on defence spending, but remains committed to military missions aimed at curbing radicalism abroad, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told an audience in London Wednesday.
Harper made the comments during a discussion at Mansion House in London ahead of a NATO summit that gets underway Thursday.
“Canada will stand by its allies to act” to combat terror threats abroad, he said.
However, Canada is only prepared to offer limited funding to specific missions, despite a request from NATO to boost its defence spending by billions of dollars.
Canada’s defence spending represents approximately 1 per cent of GDP, while NATO expects its members to spend closer to 2 per cent.
In 2015, Canada’s military budget is set to shrink to $2.7 billion below what it was 2011.
Harper said countries, like Canada, that are below NATO’s threshold have agreed to “aim to spend more going forward.” He noted that the federal government has focused recent defence spending on re-equipping the Canadian Forces.
However, his Conservative government is not going to make funding promises and figure out how to fulfill them later, he said.
“The bottom line is this: As a Conservative government we have the same philosophy on defence budgeting that we do on any other budgeting, which is we do not go out and just specify a dollar figure and then figure out how to spend it,” Harper said.
“We go out and figure out what it is we need to do, and then we attempt to get a budget as frugally as possible to achieve those objectives.”
Islamic State extremists in Syria, for example, may not only wage a regional holy war, but could turn the territory it controls between Aleppo and Damascus into a global terrorist training base.
“And I don’t think we can sit still for this,” Harper said. “Not that all the actions that we should take are necessarily clear.”
Asked whether Canada will contribute soldiers to an international mission against Islamic State militants, Harper replied: “We will be addressing some of those issues in the days to come.”
The Canadian government’s position remains that, “Where there is a common threat to ourselves and to our allies… and our allies are willing to act… we’re also willing to act and prepared to play our full part,” he said. “And so obviously we’re speaking to our allies about how we can do that and what is the best strategy going forward.”
