Anand defends hesitation to further invest in defence as NATO secretary general arrives in Canada

The cabinet minister in charge of the federal treasury says it doesn't make sense to pour vast amounts of money into the Department of National Defence until it has the capacity to spend what it's being given.

Federal Treasury Board President Anita Anand, a former defence minister, waded into the debate over Canada's apparent inability to meet the NATO benchmark of spending two per cent of the country's gross domestic product on the military.

Her remarks came Tuesday, a day ahead of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's visit to Ottawa, where he is expected to meet privately with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Canada has been under increasing pressure from allies — and from critics at home — to publicly chart a path toward meeting the western military alliance's spending goal for member states.

The Department of National Defence (DND) has for years been unable to spend its entire annual appropriation from the federal treasury — a fact Anand underlined as she defended the government's reluctance to come up with a plan to hit two per cent.

«I would like to stress to the media that it is fairly superficial to only speak about two per cent without examining how the funding is going to be spent in the short and the long term,» Anand told reporters before cabinet on Tuesday.

«If you can understand that procurements take time and they require expertise, then you would see the need to have more public servants who are able to work on those procurements, and multiple procurements at the same time, to get them out the door, to spend that money.

»And why would we continue to fill the — fill those — the books with additional money, if that money can't get out the door?"

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