Prime Minister Mark Carney will travel to Turkey for the upcoming NATO summit, as global tensions remain elevated due to conflicts in Ukraine and Iran.
Carney will then travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and discuss expanding trade and investment in energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, and tourism. It will mark the first visit to Saudi Arabia by a Canadian prime minister in 26 years.
The statement noted that Canada has significantly boosted defence spending over the past year to achieve NATO’s target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who will also be attending the summit, has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO if member countries do not increase their military spending. More recently, Trump has been critical of NATO for not providing military assistance to the United States when it launched a military operation in Iran in late February.
Carney has praised the United States for reaching a ceasefire and a memorandum of understanding with Iran, and has said Tehran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.
Carney has ruled out direct Canadian military involvement in the Middle Eastern conflict, but said Canada was open to helping implement a U.S.-Iran deal, and assist in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open once hostilities have ceased completely.
During a speech in Ankara on July 6, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Trump had been “extremely forceful” in encouraging members of the alliance to spend more on defence.
“You could argue that he’s the first president of the U.S. since Eisenhower who was able to come to this situation where the Europeans and the Canadians will spend the same as the Americans,” he said.
In 2023, Canada was spending around 1.33 percent of its GDP on its military, making it one of nine countries not meeting the benchmark. At the NATO meeting that year, then-Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg criticized Canada for not spending enough on defence.
During the 2025 NATO summit in the Hague, Netherlands, all NATO members agreed to raise their military spending targets to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. Ottawa has said Canada is on track to meet this target.
