Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada can meet a steep expected increase in its North Atlantic Treaty Organization obligations spending partly by leaning on the country’s bounty of critical minerals.
The 32-member military alliance is meeting in The Hague and discussing a new total spending target of 5% of gross domestic product — 3.5% in core defense funding and 1.5% in related investments including infrastructure.
Leaders are “likely to all agree tomorrow” about the new headline figure, and they are “likely to agree” about the core defense aspect rising over 10 years, Carney said in an interview on CNN Tuesday.
For Canada that 5% comes out to about C$150 billion ($109 billion), he said, before clarifying “a little less than a third of that overall number is spending on things that quite frankly we’re already doing to build the resilience of our economy.”
Some of the spending on extracting, processing and exporting Canada’s critical minerals in partnerships with allies “counts towards that 5% — in fact, a lot of it will count towards that 5%, because it’s infrastructure spending,” he said, such as ports, railroads and “other ways to get these minerals out.”
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