John Ivison: Let Starmer’s defence-spending implosion be a warning to Carney

Britain's former Armed Forces Minister Al Carns departs from BBC Broadcasting House after being interviewed on the morning after he resigned from his position, on June 12, 2026 in London, England. Photo by Leon Neal /Getty Images

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Al Carns, the 24-year Royal Marine veteran turned British politician, posted a Facebook video over the weekend, two days after he resigned as the U.K.’s armed forces minister.

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Carns followed his boss, defence minister John Healey, out of the door, with both claiming that the Labour government’s defence funding plan was inadequate.

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Carns said it had become clear to him that the change he pushed for in defence spending was not going to come. “We are still purchasing capability suitable for the last war, while our adversaries arm for the next one,” he said.

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The resignations (which also included two MPs resigning as defence parliamentary secretaries) are over the not-yet-released U.K. government’s Defence Investment Plan, which will fall short of the goal of three per cent of GDP defence spending by 2030. The plan is not transformative enough, or sufficiently funded, Carns and Healey said — particularly in light of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s own comments that intelligence assessments point to an attack on NATO by Russia as soon as the end of the decade.

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But it was the broader points that Carns made in his video that has lessons for Canadian policy makers: that the welfare-versus-warfare argument is an irrelevancy and that western societies need to become more resilient in an age of rising threats.

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Carns referred to three, apparently unrelated news stories: the interception by the Royal Marines of a Russian tanker in the English Channel, “carrying the oil that pays for Russia’s war”; the announcement by Starmer of legislation intended to protect children on social media; and the U.S. government’s move to block its allies from accessing the world’s most powerful AI model (Anthropic’s Fable).

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“You might think these stories are unrelated — defence, safety, tech — but it’s actually one string,” Carns said.

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“Is this country resilient enough to look after its own people?”

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Questions about resiliency and a redefinition of what constitutes “defence” are highly relevant for the Canadian federal government.

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The federal Liberals have announced ambitious defence plans — the equivalent of a tripling in spending in under a decade — but have yet to provide details on what it really means for the country.

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The goal is to project an image of a more self-sufficient, sovereign power that wields influence and has leverage.

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There is a tacit recognition that a strong country needs not just capable armed forces but economic security, and robust energy and communications protections.

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But the dots have not been connected and citizens are still in the dark about what it is likely to mean for them.

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The government’s plan will see Ottawa spending more on defence than on all other direct programs by 2033/34 and close to what it spends on transfers to other levels of government.

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As a research paper by the C.D. Howe Institute points out, such a sea change puts at risk the government’s fiscal plan to reduce deficits and the debt-to-GDP ratio over time.