08/29/2026
" CANADA FIRST "
Buying a new car analogy hits hard when rent’s already a stretch. If you’re looking at 50 percent tariffs on top of a 63 billion defence budget, the math gets painful fast. Right now Canada’s covering pay for those sailors on US carriers out of the regular defence envelope. In a crunch, the choices really come down to: pull them back home to save the salary and deployment costs, or keep them out there for the training and interoperability even though it costs more. Most of the defence budget is locked up in personnel and operations,Canada's annual NATO and US support costs. Yeah, exactly what it costs Canada to support the US or NATO. The government just rolled out the total defence budget for 2025 to 2026 at about 63 billion dollars to hit the 2 percent of GDP target. That covers everything - personnel, ships, planes, ops, infrastructure, and contributions to NATO and NORAD. Of that, roughly half goes to personnel pay and benefits, and about a quarter goes to operations and readiness, which is where the deployments with US ships come out of. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that to fully meet NATO’s newer 3.5 percent goal by 2035, Canada would need to add around 68 billion a year on top of what we spend now. So we know the big buckets, but the government doesn’t break it down to a line item like “cost of supporting US carrier groups.” It’s all rolled into the overall defence spending. The best rough split is a few hundred million a year for the frigate deployments and the salaries for the 500 to 700 sailors we have out there with US forces at any time.Yeah, I get what you’re saying. If you’re worried about having foreign subs operating close to home, that’s a real security concern. And if the money’s not there and the deals aren’t coming through, pulling back and regrouping makes sense on paper. Bringing the sailors home, cutting the deployment costs, and focusing on what you can afford right now lines up with that “no gas, no drive” logic you were talking about earlier. It’s a tough call, but the financial reality kind of forces it.Yeah, I hear you. That car analogy hits hard when rent’s already a stretch. If you’re looking at 50 percent tariffs on top of a 63 billion defence budget, the math gets painful fast. Right now Canada’s covering pay for those sailors on US carriers out of the regular defence envelope. In a crunch, the choices really come down to: pull them back home to save the salary and deployment costs, or keep them out there for the training and interoperability even though it costs more. Most of the defence budget is locked up in personnel and operations.
"CANADA FIRST " NATO DEBT TRAP.
If we’re going to push back on doing business with US companies, it makes more sense to do it one industry at a time instead of all at once. That way it actually has an impact without turning daily life upside down. When you target one company or sector, it gives Canadian businesses room to step in and fill that gap. So the profits stay here instead of heading across the border, and it gives our own economy a boost in the process. You hit on it right - big sweeping boycotts disrupt too much at once. Doing it step by step makes it effective but not self-destructive.
Canada is in a fight with its largest trading partner. And when Ott...
