Canada yesterday, Tuesday, launched its billion-dollar program aimed at strengthening its military by further relying on national enterprises to reduce its dependence on the United States.

“We’ve relied too much on our geography and others to protect us,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said during a visit to the offices of CAE, a firm specializing in simulation technologies for the defense and aviation sectors.

“This has created vulnerabilities that we can no longer allow and dependencies that are no longer sustainable,” he added.

This Canadian defence industrial strategy is part of the country’s commitment to spend $82 billion over five years on defence to bring Canada in line with NATO’s defence spending targets of 2 per cent of GDP by the end of the year and 5 per cent by 2035.

Carney has not stopped repeating for months that the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place and that the US is no longer a reliable partner that Canada can count on for its protection, as AFP points out.

The plan calls for strengthening defence capabilities on land, sea and air, noted Carney, who felt that “the world has changed and that Canada must change with it.”

The Canadian prime minister is particularly concerned about Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic as rising temperatures due to climate change lead to melting ice and open up the appetites of major powers for this land, rich in critical minerals.

Carney has become one of the most authoritative voices globally criticising the administration of US President Donald Trump, AFP notes. In a speech in Davos for the World Economic Forum in January, which was widely broadcast, he opined that the global order of the past decades had “crumbled”.

Yesterday he returned to his vision for the world, explaining that Canadian nationalism is at the antithesis of the Trump administration’s American perspective, which extols the Christian roots of Western civilization.

“Canadian nationalism is a political nationalism” and Ottawa’s mandate is to defend the rights of every person in a vast and diverse country, Mark Carney noted.

“There is a struggle between Canadian nationalism and the kind of nationalism the United States is for,” he ruled.