PJ The Belt - May 23, 2026


Trump DITCHES NORAD？ — Canadian Army COLLAPSES!

Mentioned
Donald Trump Wayne Gretzky Franklin Roosevelt Mackenzie King William Lyon Mark Carney Ian Lee Omar
🔴LIVE： ALBERTA FINALLY CALLS REFERENDUM TO EXIT CANADA! Carney Just UNLEASHED Hell on Canada — This is Bad..

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

165.87

Word count

1,431

Sentence count

80

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

As the Trump administration announces a major rupture in military cooperation with Canada, reports are starting to come out about a very serious problem inside the Canadian military. And when you put these two stories together, it paints a very ugly picture - a picture Ottawa probably doesn t want people paying attention to right now.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 One of the longest standing military partnerships in the world is starting to break apart.
00:00:06.060 And honestly, the timing here is very strange because right as the Trump administration
00:00:10.960 announces a major rupture in military cooperation with Canada,
00:00:15.580 reports are starting to come out about a very serious problem inside the Canadian military.
00:00:21.420 And when you put these two stories together, it paints a very ugly picture.
00:00:25.660 A picture Ottawa probably doesn't want people paying attention to right now.
00:00:30.000 People are asking questions about Canada's military.
00:00:33.220 Questions we haven't heard in a long time.
00:00:35.980 But ultimately, what does it all mean for North American defense?
00:00:39.980 Let's find out.
00:00:40.840 We basically protect Canada.
00:00:43.220 But here's the problem with Canada.
00:00:45.120 We're spending hundreds of billions a year to protect it.
00:00:48.080 We're spending hundreds of billions a year to take care of Canada.
00:00:51.140 Canada's already met NATO's 2% of GDP.
00:00:54.500 We are on track to meet 5% of GDP by 2035.
00:01:00.000 canada's military is chronically short on gear and so much so that it's now asking personnel
00:01:08.160 in the ottawa region to return some of it items like tactical vests are being handed in by members
00:01:13.580 who are not part of a deployable unit ctv's annie bergeron oliver on what else is in short supply
00:01:19.480 thousands of troops in the ottawa area are being asked to hand in some of their field gear
00:01:24.920 to help compensate for what the defense department is calling critical equipment shortages it does
00:01:29.900 send a very positive message even though it might be normal it just indicates just how weak the
00:01:35.660 procurement system is how how low the stockpiles are and just how you know how much demand there
00:01:42.540 is on operations right now about 10 000 troops received an email last week requesting they return
00:01:48.220 rucksacks patrol packs tactical vests and fragmentation vests the defense department
00:01:53.100 says the equipment will be reissued to deployable units personnel in non-deployable units do not
00:01:58.780 require this equipment for their day-to-day duties. This in conjunction with several other
00:02:03.340 initiatives will also help address potential shortfalls of items particularly of highly
00:02:08.460 demanded sizes. The prime minister and government have very ambitious plans for this department
00:02:13.420 and so this is a bit of the canary in the coal mine. If we're having trouble on this micro level
00:02:19.660 it probably suggests that the department we might need some support. Ottawa has promised to scale up
00:02:26.300 military recruitment and add tens of billions to the defense budget but experts say changing
00:02:30.860 that scarcity mindset and modernizing procurement policies will take time. The department says
00:02:35.760 requests like this go out from time to time and that the gear could go to Latvia to new recruits
00:02:41.080 or Omar be used for training exercises. This is exactly what the Trump administration is talking
00:02:47.640 about when they accuse Canada of not taking defense seriously because while Ottawa keeps
00:02:53.340 telling Canadians that the military is stronger than ever, we're now hearing reports that troops
00:02:58.420 were being told to return their military gear because of equipment shortages. Think about how
00:03:04.100 insane that sounds for a G7 country. And this is why so many Americans increasingly see Canada
00:03:10.640 as a free rider on military defense, a country protected by the United States while constantly
00:03:17.500 under-investing in its own military capabilities. Because if Canada's military is supposedly doing
00:03:23.580 so well, why are soldiers dealing with equipment shortages in the first place? That's the
00:03:29.420 contradiction people are noticing right now. And honestly, it's starting to look like the Americans 0.99
00:03:34.780 are getting tired of carrying the load for North American defense while Ottawa pretends that
00:03:40.420 everything is fine. The Prime Minister doesn't appear overly concerned about a possible change
00:03:45.580 to the Canada-U.S. defense relationship.
00:03:48.880 On Monday, the United States announced its pausing participation
00:03:52.760 in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense,
00:03:55.980 saying Canada's military spending hasn't been enough.
00:03:59.380 I mean, it has a long heritage, but I wouldn't overplay the importance of this.
00:04:03.380 We have many aspects of very close defense cooperation with the United States,
00:04:09.440 as you know, our closest defense cooperation.
00:04:11.760 The board was established in 1940 by Prime Minister William Lyon, Mackenzie King and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt
00:04:18.540 and is meant to enable high-level dialogue on defense matters.
00:04:22.640 On Monday, Undersecretary of War Elbridge Colby posted on X that the U.S. would pause the board,
00:04:28.780 saying Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.
00:04:33.440 Prime Minister Mark Carney breaking ground on a graphite mine in Quebec as part of his major projects office
00:04:38.920 notes Canada is already meeting the NATO 2% spending target
00:04:42.720 and will reach the NATO 5% spending target on schedule, but not recklessly.
00:04:47.820 We know we need to spend more. That's clear.
00:04:49.940 It's a more dangerous world, but we're going to do it in a right way.
00:04:52.520 And that's the reason why we don't just draw a simple line,
00:04:55.340 take a list that was prepared five years ago and say, yeah, we'll have all that.
00:04:58.840 I'm not denying that there's spillover to the Kuzma negotiations.
00:05:03.540 I think they are linked and they're linked because defense spending is going to be huge.
00:05:08.460 it has an economic component. Ian Lee from Carleton University says this wasn't unexpected
00:05:13.660 but says he doesn't believe the Americans are talking about hard defense spending figures.
00:05:18.980 Lee says Americans appeared to be bothered by Canadian reluctance to join joint continental
00:05:23.800 defense projects like Donald Trump's Golden Dome and Canada's reluctance to commit to the F-35.
00:05:30.780 We could do a lot better by producing a lot more clarity and saying a new defense paper for example
00:05:36.960 where we say here is what we're willing to entertain and support we're willing to be
00:05:41.560 interoperable with you on your planes with you the americans on your planes but we're not willing
00:05:46.620 to do a defense shield or wherever we decide the line in the sand is canada's already paid for 30
00:05:52.020 f-35 jets and a defense review is underway to look at the remaining jets in the order
00:05:56.960 that review was scheduled to be completed last september but there's been no update since then
00:06:02.440 Here's the bigger story nobody in the media wants to talk about. This is not just about military spending. This is about Canada's entire direction as a country. Because under this liberal government, Canada stopped acting like a confident Western ally.
00:06:17.480 Instead, everything became about global conferences, carbon targets, virtue signaling, and international approval.
00:06:25.780 While our economy weakens, our military is weaker than ever, and our relationship with the United States starts breaking apart.
00:06:33.920 And the Trump administration is done pretending otherwise.
00:06:37.640 We're not going to bend. We've been ripped off as a country for many, many years.
00:06:41.220 We've been subjected to costs that we shouldn't be subjected to.
00:06:46.460 In the case of Canada, we're spending $200 billion a year to subsidize Canada.
00:06:51.460 I love Canada. I love the people of Canada.
00:06:53.460 I have many friends in Canada.
00:06:55.460 The great one, Wayne Gretzky, the great.
00:06:58.460 How good is Wayne Gretzky? He's the great one.
00:07:00.460 But we have, I know many people from Canada that are good friends of mine.
00:07:05.460 But, you know, the United States can't subsidize a country for $200 billion a year.
00:07:11.460 It comes a point when you just can't do that.
00:07:14.460 run your own country and to be honest with you canada only works as a state it doesn't we don't
00:07:19.700 need anything they have as a state it would be one of the great states anyway this would be the
00:07:25.020 most incredible country visually if you look at a map they drew an artificial line right through it
00:07:30.500 between canada and the u.s just a straight artificial line somebody did it a long time ago
00:07:36.540 many, many decades ago. And it makes no sense. It's so perfect as a great and cherished state.
00:07:46.160 That's why this move matters so much. Because once America starts treating Canada like an
00:07:51.980 unreliable partner, everything can spiral very quickly. Trade agreements, intelligence sharing,
00:07:59.260 defense cooperation, border security, you name it. All of that suddenly becomes negotiable.
00:08:05.640 And I honestly think a lot of Canadians still don't understand how serious this is, because for the first time in a very long time, America is starting to publicly act like Canada is no longer a real ally.
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00:08:35.640 You