Kevin Vuong: How Canada stacks up against its peers

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At the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, we built a new website called Benchmark Canada to be the resource that aggregates scattered data into one place. It is transparently sourced and comparable, with context and reference points to see how our country is doing relative to our peers using standardized, widely accepted methods for comparison.

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The site organizes more than 40 metrics under five pillars. Four measure capacity and whether we can finance, build, govern and secure the nation. The fifth is the test that the other four are put to: is all that capacity elevating the lives of the people that the country exists to serve?

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Every metric has its own page, with charts that visualize the data and outline the underlying figures, the full source citations and any caveats that may apply. Each page carries one of three verdicts — “Strong,” “Watch” or “Weak” — that describe where Canada sits within the metric’s peer set, usually the G7 or a wider group of comparable economies. Where an apples-to-apples comparisons are not possible, we use Canada’s own published service standards.

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I want to be clear about what Benchmark Canada is not. It is not a partisan endeavour: at its core, this project is about elevating public discourse by cutting through partisan rhetoric to surface objective facts about the state of the nation, and this is reflected in its findings. Some metrics reflect positively on the country, while others highlight where we could do better.

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It is also not a policy platform: establishing that Canada is last (or first) in the G7 on a measure is not the same as knowing what to do about it and, frankly, doing so would unnecessarily invite accusations that the project is advancing a special interest or policy agenda.

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Lastly, it is not a claim that everything is broken: Canada benchmarks well on a number of measures, and those pages say so as clearly as the weak ones do. A project that only ever concludes that everything is failing would not be an honest benchmarking exercise.

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At MLI, we are thrilled to be working with the National Post to launch Benchmark Canada and, over the next 10 weeks, we’ll do a deep dive into a set of metrics each week. Defence is where we are starting, and it is a good demonstration of the project’s various aspects at work.

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For the first time since the 2014 pledge at the NATO summit, Canada is meeting its commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence. NATO’s latest figures put Canada’s core defence spending at 2.03 per cent of GDP in 2025 and an estimated 2.13 per cent this year. Equipment spending, which is also measured by NATO, tells a similar story: 21.97 per cent of the defence budget in 2025, projected to rise to 25 per cent in 2026 crosses NATO’s modernization guideline for the first time.

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These are real improvements and the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney should be applauded for fulfilling a commitment and meeting the guideline that previous governments were unable, or unwilling, to do.

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To put these in context, spending at 2.13 per cent ranks Canada 20th of 31 allies, and 25.52 per cent lower than the alliance average of 2.86 per cent. The equipment share ranks 28th of 31, ahead of only Italy, Croatia and Norway, and less than half of Poland’s 55.9 per cent. If we also look at personnel, Canada fields 1.71 military personnel per 1,000 people, ranking us as 30th of 31 allies and last in the G7.