OSLO, March 15 (Reuters) – Canada and the five Nordic countries on Sunday said they have agreed to deepen cooperation on military industrial production and other topics, in the latest push by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to build new global alliances.
Carney has sought closer ties with China and Middle Eastern countries as well as India and Europe, as he tries to reduce his country’s dependence on the United States and forge a trading order led by what he calls middle-power countries.
The prime ministers of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Canada, meeting in Oslo, said they aimed to boost their collective defence, security and resilience by working more closely together on defence procurement.
“We all agree that if we individually spend that money or we spend it in an uncoordinated way, it’s not going to be value for taxpayers. It also will not protect our people as much as we should,” Carney told reporters after the six-nation meeting.
“We will still do a lot of procurement with the United States… but in all cases looking to procure much more in partnership. And it’s a much broader range of countries with whom we can partner,” Carney said.
The prime ministers also vowed to continue to provide economic, civilian, military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, they said.
“The old world order is gone and will probably not come back,” Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters.
“So we have to build something new and it has to be a world order that is built on the values that we represent,” she said.
The deeper cooperation will help safeguard security and create new opportunities for economic growth, said Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, who hosted the meeting.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche in Oslo and Louise Rasmussen in Copenhagen, editing by Terje Solsvik)
