Canada's Minister of National Defence David McGuinty joins Althia to discuss increases to the country's defense budget and what the relationship looks like with the U.S. going forward. Their conversation follows Prime Minister Mark Carney's announcement this week that Canada will greatly increase military spending to 2 per cent of GDP just as NATO allies get together later this month to discuss raising the bar to 5 per cent.

We also speak to industry experts about just how integrated the Canadian and American militaries are, and what it would mean to become less reliant on the U.S.

In this episode: Minister of National Defence David McGuinty; Centre for International Governance Innovation's visiting executive and former National Defence director general Raquel Garbers, University of Ottawa associate professor and former bureaucrat Peter Jones; Canadian Global Affairs Institute President and CEO David Perry. Hosted by Althia Raj.

This episode of "It's Political" was produced by Kevin Sexton and Althia Raj. Matt Hearn is our sound engineer. Our theme music is by Isaac Joel.

Some of the audio clips this week were sourced from CPAC, CBC, Canadian Press Gallery, C-SPAN, CNN, CTV, CBS, BBC and NATO News.