Canada and Britain’s new Strategic Defence Review
The Memorandum | No. 22.2025
Under much allied pressure to get serious about defence, Canada finally seems to be taking action. At the University of Toronto on 9th June 2025, Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, declared his intent to revive the Canadian Armed Forces, going as far as pledging to spend 2% of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence as soon as March 2026. This rapid investment encompasses improved pay for military personnel, supporting key capabilities across multiple operational domains and building capacity to leverage new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), which will prove essential for developing situational awareness in the Arctic and elsewhere.
Carney gave his speech exactly one week after His Majesty’s (HM) Government published the Strategic Defence Review (SDR). This close timing may be coincidental, but both his pledge and the SDR reflect a shared sense that the fundamental pillars of the United Kingdom’s (UK) and Canada’s international strategies no longer hold amid a worsening international threat environment. For Canada, the concerns expressed in the Review about Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and other hostile actors resonate. Yet, Canada’s anxiety arguably runs deeper, with unsettling protectionism and rhetoric on the part of Donald Trump, President of the United States (US), stimulating an interest within Canada to overcome its reliance on America by improving ties with allies such as Britain.
Despite this interest – one reiterated by Carney – the release of the SDR has been met with crickets within Canada, at least within the public domain. The lack of attention afforded to it could be the result of fatigue with the steady production of defence documents coming out of Whitehall since 2020. It is devoid of specific targets for capabilities and their delivery times, so whether its lofty ambitions will be realised is open to question. It could also just be due to the general indifference in Canada to how foreign militaries, including allied ones, posture themselves.
This is unfortunate, because the SDR is important to Canada. It is not because Canada gets mentioned in it, albeit a buried one in the context of the Five Eyes alliance, but because Canada faces many of the same considerations as the UK does.
Carney’s speech suggests that the time to rearm is indeed short, hence his promise to close the gap to 2% of GDP five years ahead of schedule. Alas, the Canadian record warrants pessimism.
One common challenge that the two countries face, and one evident in the Review, is the tension between the exigencies of the present moment and the need to develop a long-term vision. After all, the SDR articulates a plan for British defence which would come into fruition by 2035. A ten-year timetable would have been reasonable for many of the last 30 or so years. However, to say nothing of the PRC’s possible intent to seize Taiwan before 2030, Russia is waging a high-intensity conflict against Ukraine at present, with a war economy which could reconstitute forces to pose a credible threat to the Baltic region within several years. Britain and Canada provide the military backbone to the multinational brigades in Estonia and Latvia respectively through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), but whether they can fight a protracted war is open to question. The Review suggests that the UK cannot at the moment. Canada certainly is unable to do so, either with or without allies.
Carney’s speech suggests that the time to rearm is indeed short, hence his promise to close the gap to 2% of GDP five years ahead of schedule. Alas, the Canadian record warrants pessimism. Although the Government of Canada’s 2024 Defence Policy statement envisioned step-wise increases in capability acquisition from 2025 onwards, that ambition was already suspect, because delays are endemic to Canadian procurement. The Office of the Auditor General of Canada noted recently that the procurement of Canada’s future fleet of F-35A Joint Combat Aircraft has been beset by delays, and the attendant costs overrun for reasons mostly due to programme management rather than the runaway cost of the aircraft itself. Just as with the SDR, uncertainty abounds over when Canada will field particular capabilities, and how much.
The second, and related, common challenge facing the two allies relates to keeping the Atlantic Ocean free and open, and securing certain maritime approaches to it. To this end, Britain and Canada are both acquiring Type 26 frigates, although the Royal Canadian Navy does not expect to receive its entire first batch before the 2030s. Still, it is not enough and, while neglecting to mention its Canadian counterpart, the Review recommends that the Royal Navy should shift towards a ‘mix of crewed, uncrewed and increasingly autonomous surface and sub-surface vessels and aircraft; and developing next-generation capabilities such as SSN [nuclear-powered] attack submarines via the trilateral AUKUS partnership.’
It is easy to imagine experts making a similar recommendation for the Royal Canadian Navy. Vice Admiral Angus Topshee has remarked that Canada will need to experiment with uncrewed vessels in the near future. Already in 2024, the Government of Canada announced that it would acquire modern maritime sensors to be fitted on its Harry DeWolf class Arctic and Offshore Patrol Vessels. Carney’s recent speech indicates new plans for joint support ships and the development of new drones and sensors to monitor the seafloor and the Arctic. New submarines have been an interest for Canadian defence planners since the government reiterated its aspiration in 2024 to have 12 of them by 2028.
If the Trump administration were to pull back from AUKUS, it would reinforce the perception in Ottawa that long-term defence industrial planning with Washington cannot be future-proofed.
The Canadian defence establishment has been anxious over Canada’s exclusion from AUKUS in view of its long conversation about the value of SSNs, as well as its cooperation with the three members of AUKUS through the Five Eyes and other security arrangements. Yet, there may be some schadenfreude in Ottawa on the question of AUKUS. The Financial Times has reported that the Trump administration might scuttle the partnership. The US Navy and various federal senators worry over the lack of America’s submarine-building capacity to support such an initiative. Key civilian leaders within the Pentagon have also questioned Australia’s commitment to fighting the PRC if war were to break out. If the Trump administration were to pull back from AUKUS, it would reinforce the perception in Ottawa that long-term defence industrial planning with Washington cannot be future-proofed. London may reach a similar conclusion. The problem for both governments is that the US offers military capabilities of such high value and technological advancement that London and Ottawa cannot pull themselves away from it easily.
This issue speaks to the broader problem that the two allied militaries face. There is an acute awareness that the prospect of a profound military crisis involving either of them is no longer an abstraction. There is also a strong sense that the pace of technological development is quicker than ever before, with major repercussions for the ability of those militaries to go about warfighting. The time horizons for dealing with both are misaligned, with a crisis being potentially very near, but the wherewithal for managing it effectively remaining too far in the future. Whether intentionally or not, the Review alerts audiences to this problem. As Canadian practitioners ponder what – if any – changes are to be made to Canada’s own military posture, they would do well to consider how the SDR wrestles with the problem, successfully or not.
Dr Alexander Lanoszka is an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Waterloo.
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