Poilievre says he wants to restore the military while cutting spending — how would that work?

Listen to Pierre Poilievre list his top priorities — cutting taxes, building homes, reducing the federal budget and fighting crime — and you won't hear a specific mention of Canada's military.

The Conservative leader has pledged to change the culture of the Canadian Armed Forces from what he calls a "woke" culture to a "warrior" one. He has suggested he's prepared to increase the military's resources. But what exactly would defence policy under a Poilievre government look like?

The current federal government is facing growing pressure to spend billions of dollars more to meet NATO's military spending target for member nations — two per cent of GDP. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is confronting that pressure as he meets with leaders of other NATO countries in Washington this week.

The Conservative leader faces a different kind of pressure. He has to square his vows to "bring home control of our country and our defence" and "work towards" NATO's spending target with his core pledge to cut government spending with an eye to balancing the budget.

"That's pretty tricky math to accomplish in a short time frame," said Dave Perry, president and CEO of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

A Conservative government would have to increase the defence budget by somewhere between $10 and $15 billion five years from now — above and beyond the commitments already made by the Liberals — in order to meet the NATO target, Perry said.

In the meantime, the Conservatives also would look to slash deficit spending — pegged at nearly $40 billion in the most recent Liberal budget.

Poilievre also has called for a cultural shift within the Armed Forces. "We're going to end the woke culture and we're going to bring back a warrior culture," he told a reporter earlier this year.

It's a shift that some members of the Armed Forces are eager to see, said Peter MacKay, who served as defence minister from 2007 to 2013 under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

"There has been a feeling that there was a bit of an overcorrection, I think, in the last number of years," MacKay said when asked how he interprets Poilievre's comments.

Poilievre's "woke" versus "warrior" language is not meant to signal a rejection of the military's high-profile efforts to stamp out sexual misconduct, he said.

"I think there's a blazing red line between anything that would be deemed abuse or sexual harassment and what is more in the area of overemphasis on appearances, overemphasis on changes to uniforms, to the relaxation of certain what used to be called the Queen's orders and regulations within the military," MacKay said. "And I think that that's where members are bristling, particularly long-serving members."

The Canadian military recently backtracked on a move to loosen personal grooming standards. In 2022, the Forces removed most restrictions on hair length, hair colour, nail length and facial tattoos. The changes were introduced along with new gender-neutral uniforms.

Retired lieutenant general Michel Maisonneuve delivered a speech to the Conservative Party policy convention last fall. In it, he railed against a "woke movement" he accused of working to destroy Canadian values and accused the Trudeau government of "apologizing for who we are and how we came to be."