Canada will pitch plans for a new defence bank to G7 nations, urging ​them to join an initiative to provide critical financing for small and medium‑sized defence firms that struggle to access capital, ‌Foreign Minister Anita Anand [said].

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Foreign ministers from the world's leading Western democracies are meeting in France on March 26-27 against the backdrop of wars in Iran and Ukraine, economic uncertainty, and mounting unease over unpredictable U.S. foreign policy.

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"The capital available is going to depend on the number of countries that ⁠participate, and Canada is certainly advocating for more and more countries to come on board, and I will be presenting such an argument ​here at the G7 foreign ministers' (meeting)," Anand told Reuters at the meeting.

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Major European nations have yet to embrace the Canadian initiative. In December, Germany turned down the idea of a new multilateral defence bank.

And earlier this week, Britain announced it planned to team up with the ​Netherlands and Finland in a separate scheme to drum up more private finance for defence equipment.

Anand said many defence firms were small or ​medium-sized enterprises that do not currently have the necessary capital to meet the surge in demand for weapons and other military kit.

That was not something ‌necessarily taken ⁠into consideration in other initiatives such as the European Union's 150 billion euro ($173 billion) SAFE loans programme, she said.

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Anand said lessons had been learnt from the ​start of the war in Ukraine in 2022.

"We saw that there was a need for interoperability and there ​was a need ⁠for rapid scale-up in procurement and supply of military equipment. That's what the Defence Bank is going to address," she said.

Canada has provided C$25.5 billion ($18.5 billion) in aid to Ukraine.

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