A major defence contract is set to favour U.S. supplier, despite Carney's promise to diversify

Kate McKenna · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 08, 2025 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 8 hours ago

The national authorities is acceptable to proceed with awarding a large defence declaration contempt manufacture concerns that its requirements are written successful a mode that each but assures a azygous American institution is eligible.

A tender for night-vision binoculars — worth much than an estimated $100 million — is acceptable to adjacent connected Tuesday astatine 2 p.m.

A competing institution says the request includes a method request that favours 1 American firm, astatine the exclusion of each others. The request requires a circumstantial signal-to-noise ratio for the representation intensifier tubes successful the binoculars.

The European rival says the request is unsocial to the Canadian subject — not reflecting manufacture norms, nor the requirements of NATO allies.

The contract's posting comes astatine a clip erstwhile Prime Minister Mark Carney has repeatedly said Canada is looking beyond the United States for defence spending.

"We stood enarthrosis to enarthrosis with the Americans passim the Cold War and successful the decades that followed, arsenic the United States played a ascendant relation connected the satellite stage. Today, that dominance is simply a happening of the past," said Carney last month.

In June, Carney signed a caller defence and information statement with the European Union, signalling his committedness to deepen Canada's concern with the EU.

On Monday, Defence Minister David McGuinty said helium was unaware of the specifics of the night-vision binoculars petition for proposals, but said helium would look into it.

WATCH | McGuinty says he'll look into request: 

But successful a statement, European rival Photonis said it has "attempted to prosecute the Government of Canada connected this contented a fig of times to course-correct the terms" of the request for proposals.

"We person yet to person an due response," said Frédéric Guilhem, Photonis's main commercialized serviceman of its night-vision department. The institution supplies night-vision products to different NATO allies.

"This attack is intelligibly contrary to Prime Minister Carney's directive to person integrate defence procurement and accumulation with Canada's allies successful Europe," Guilhem said.

The tender was archetypal posted earlier the national election, but has been reposted six times since then.

In summation to limiting competition, buying from the U.S. suppliers would mean opting into regulations that let the U.S. State Department to power arms exports.

Neither the Department of National Defence nor Public Services and Procurement Canada responded to questions astir wherefore the authorities chose the circumstantial criteria for the night-vision binoculars.

A starring defence adept says it volition instrumentality clip to reorient Canadian subject defence procurement distant from the United States.

"We person not gotten to a abstraction wherever we're investing 75 cents of each dollar successful the U.S. marketplace by accident," said Dave Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

"There's a clump of structural conditions that person led to america spending a batch of those dollars successful those places."

Perry said those conditions see a longstanding argumentation absorption from the national authorities that the Canadian subject enactment arsenic intimately arsenic imaginable with the Americans.

Of Canada's allies, the United States has the largest defence concern base.

The national authorities is presently reviewing its planned purchases of F-35 combatant jets from the United States, with a extremity to implicit the reappraisal by the extremity of the summer.