Carney heads to Europe on Sunday for NATO, Canada-EU summits

Carney will head to Brussels on Sunday to meet with European leaders.

The Prime Minister’s Office said the leaders will work to “deepen the Canada-EU relationship across all sectors,” including trade and defence.

Carney will then head to The Hague in the Netherlands for the NATO summit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Prime Minister’s Office said Carney will engage with allies at the summit to “meet evolving threats in a more dangerous and divided world.”

The NATO meeting likely will focus on defence spending. NATO allies are expected to adopt a plan to hike the defence spending target for members to five per cent of national GDP — a level Canada has not reached since the 1950s.

Carney announced last week that Canada will rapidly advance its military spending timeline to hit the current NATO target of two per cent of national GDP by adding $9 billion to the fiscal framework this year.

Carney warned that Canada depends too much on an increasingly unreliable United States for its defence and is spending too much of its rearmament budget south of the border.

NATO’s GDP forecast puts Canada’s economy at $3.1 trillion for the year, making its two per cent NATO commitment worth about $62.5 billion, according to senior government officials.

The federal government is currently spending about 1.45 per cent of real GDP on defence and has not spent anything close to two per cent since 1990 — despite having promised its biggest allies for years that it would.

At a news conference closing the G7 summit Tuesday, Carney said allies’ attention will shift next week from addressing threats to economic security to addressing issues of global defence and security at the NATO and Canada-EU summits.

“We recognize that our leadership will be defined not just by the strength of our values but the values of our strength,” he told reporters.

With files from Kyle Duggan and Nick Murray