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NATO says member states such as Canada need to spend more on their militaries to meet threats posed by Russia and others

NATO leaders are preparing to meet against an uneasy backdrop of conflict and commerce with Vladimir Putin musing he could "take Kiev in two weeks", ISIS using the beheading of another American journalist to taunt the U.S.and the outgoing NATO chief counting contributions and asking for more....
CBC Radio ·
NATO leaders are preparing to meet against an uneasy backdrop of conflict and commerce with Vladimir Putin musing he could "take Kiev in two weeks", ISIS using the beheading of another American journalist to taunt the U.S.and the outgoing NATO chief counting contributions and asking for more.

You can compare it with insurance. NATO is an insurance, a security insurance, and for an insurance you pay a premium. And now the premium has gone up because of this unstable security environment and that's why we need more defence investment in the coming years.NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says the price of admission to the defence organization is going up and points to threats n Ukraine and the rise of ISIS in the Middle East.

• Feature conversation with NATO's Anders Fogh Rasmussen -- CBC's The House

Representatives from NATO member nations -- including Canada -- meet in Wales for two days of talks starting tomorrow. They'll be asked to dig deep to help pay NATO's so-called insurance premiums.

According to projections prepared for the Minister of Defence, next year, Canada's defence spending will be nearly 3 billion dollars less than it was in 2011. That decline coincides with the end of the Afghanistan mission.

Currently, Canada spends just over 1 per-cent of its GDP on defence. NATO wants its members to increase that to 2-per-cent.

- James Bezan is the Conservative MP for Selkirk-Interlake and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Defence.

Canada's nearly twenty billion dollar defence budget may not be enough for NATO, but simply increasing it may not be the most effective way to tackle Canada's military risks.

To help us make sense of where Canada should commit our military dollars, we were joined by:

- Rob Huebert, an associate professor in Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary.

- Christian Leuprecht, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University in Kingston.


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This segment was produced by The Current's Gord Westmacott, Lara O'Brien and Ines Colabrese.

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