At the Canada-EU summit in Brussels yesterday, Mark Carney signed a new security and defence partnership, and the joint communiqué was very, very long. A lot of stuff that might have been part of a G7 communiqué, but that wasn’t going to happen given how much time and energy was spent managing Trump and the Americans, and that included a lot of talk about upholding the rules-based international order, or combatting climate change, and that kind of thing, that would have caused Trump to throw another one of his public tantrums. But that’s the world we live in now.

This means that Canada is now on the road to participating in programmes like ReArm Europe, which seeks to drive down the cost of joint military procurement projects by increasing the scale of the buys, and helps to keep those industries in Europe rather than relying on the American defence-industrial complex, but the hope is that this agreement will open the Canadian market to those procurements as well (though I am curious to know how many Canadian firms are actually Canadian and not just American branch-plants).

Today will be the big NATO summit where increasing the expected defence spending target is the major focus, though there will likely be some sidebars around de-escalation with Israel and Iran. Ukraine will also be a focus, though president Zelenskyy is not expected to attend (though he was in the UK yesterday to sign new agreements on military production there, and to have lunch with the King at Windsor Castle). Nevertheless, that five percent target—to ostensibly be divided up as 3.5% operational spending and 1.5% in related spending that has some kind of a defence-adjacent component—is going to be incredibly difficult for the majority of countries to achieve, but especially to sustain. You already have some countries who met their two percent target by front-loading a bunch of procurement, but they have no idea how they’ll manage to stay at two percent, let alone 3.5%-plus going forward. (It’s also a dumb metric because it doesn’t deal with contributions to operations, and the disparity between the denominators among member countries is pretty vast, to say nothing about the fact that it’s easier to hit your targets if you crash your economy to drag your denominator down). One hopes there will be some cooler heads around the table, but it looks like the 5 percent is a done deal, which will create problems down the road.

https://bsky.app/profile/plagasse.bsky.social/post/3lsbzgrlhpk2u

Ukraine Dispatch

The attack on Kyiv early Monday wound up killing at least ten, including a child, as an apartment block was struck. Ukraine says that it attacked and set ablaze an oil depot in Russia’s Rostov region.

https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1937171580552966364?s=61

Good reads:

• In spite of Carney giving that 30-day deadline for a trade deal with the US, he’s already backpedalling and saying nothing is assured (because obviously).
• Carney has named ambassador to the US Kirsten Hillman as the lead negotiator of the new hoped-for trade and security pact with the US.
• The Canadian government is now offering to bus Canadian citizens out of Israel and the West Bank to secure locations where they can catch a flight.
• Evan Solomon doesn’t want to regulate AI very much, and is deferring to the courts on protecting copyright rather than doing something about it. Because of course.
• Fixing the Phoenix pay system has cost $5.1 billion to date, as they slowly start transitioning to a new system, because this is the cost of being cheap.
• General Jennie Carignan suggests we buy more than the 16 committed F-35s, but perhaps not the full 88 if we’re going to transition to more European partners.
• In the event you were wondering, nobody is convinced that the current review of the Access to Information system will actually fix anything.
• Ontario is thinking about weakening recycling rules because businesses complain that it will cost too much, which will just mean things wind up in landfills again.
• Wab Kinew has hired former TV journalist Richard Madden to be the province’s new trade representative in Washington.
• Manitoba has ended its state of emergency as the wildfires recede and evacuees are starting to return home.
• Kathryn May analyses the recent senior civil servant moves, and what they signal about Carney’s government.
• Susan Delacourt takes a look back over the past year, when things first started to unravel for Justin Trudeau and his government, and how things have changed.

Odds and ends:

New episodes released early for C$7+ subscribers. This week I explain what a Henry VIII clause it, and why it's a problem in Bill C-5. #cdnpoli

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-06-24T01:52:21.102Z

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