It's not as easy as it looks to spend an extra $9 billion on military stuff in only a few months

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With the end of the fiscal year only three months away, the Liberal government is facing the unusual problem of potentially failing to spend money fast enough.

Specifically, its Department of Defence is now in the closing weeks of an all-out drive to spend $9 billion as quickly as possible in order to satisfy a Carney government pledge to finally meet Canada’s NATO spending targets.

Ever since 2014, NATO has maintained a guideline requiring its member states to spend at least two per cent of their GDP on defence.

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Canada has not once hit the threshold since it was set, despite repeated pledges by the government of then prime minister Justin Trudeau to do so.

Instead, Canada has consistently ranked as one the alliance’s worst freeloaders. According to NATO’s own accounting, Canada hasn’t even been able to maintain defence spending at anything higher than 1.5 per cent of GDP.

In June, one of the first major policy announcements of the newly elected Carney government was to boost defence spending just enough to hit the two per cent target by year’s end.

“Canada will achieve NATO’s 2% target this year – half a decade ahead of schedule – and further accelerate our investments in years to follow,” wrote the Prime Minister’s Office in a statement.

With the military budget already pegged at $53 billion at the time, it would take another $9 billion to hit the target.

Military hardware is extremely expensive, which typically means that buying $9 billion of it isn’t all that hard.

But the limitation for Canada was time.

Carney first made his spending pledge on June 9, and the fiscal year ends on March 31. This gave the Department of Defence just 10 months to spend $9 billion. Or, the equivalent of about $30 million per day.

The timeline is too short for Canada to simply stock up on big-ticket items like fighter jets or warships, as the military remains........

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