Canada, long a reliable but underperforming member of NATO, is now facing a profound reckoning. For decades, successive governments in Ottawa have underfunded and under-prioritised the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), confident that geography, American protection and peacekeeping prestige would suffice in a post-Cold War world. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, coupled with rising tensions in the Arctic and Indo-Pacific, has upended that complacency.In response, NATO has begun a dramatic