June 8, 2017

Canada to Increase Defense Spending 17%

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Canada has caved in to President Trump’s pressure and will increase its defense spending 70 percent!

That means Canada would spend about 1.4 percent of gross domestic product on defense by 2026-27, up from about 1.2 percent now.

Oh. So that 70 percent figure doesn’t account for inflation. It’s nice to see Canada promising to spend more, but going from 1.2 percent of GDP to 1.4 percent is a little less impressive than the spin from Ottawa. That’s 17 percent in real terms.

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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