Liberals revive campaign pitch for centralized military procurement agency

Murray Brewster · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 14, 2025 3:05 PM EDT | Last Updated: 5 minutes ago

In the look of annexation threats from the Trump medication and a Canadian nationalist progressively demanding the national authorities bargain little from the United States, the Liberals person resurrected a erstwhile run transportation to make a standalone defence procurement agency.

Liberal Leader Mark Carney highlighted the pledge during a run halt successful the Montreal country connected Monday astatine the office of Quebec-based aircraft-maker Bombardier.

He promised to modernize procurement rules and amend authorities and regulations arsenic required to "centralize expertise from crossed authorities and streamline the mode we bargain instrumentality for the military."

During the 2015 campaign, the Liberals pledged to modernize defence purchasing. 

Four years later, they promised to found Defence Procurement Canada to "ensure that Canada's biggest and astir analyzable defence procurement projects are delivered connected clip and with greater transparency to Parliament."

Risk of slowing down procurement

Carney didn't code wherefore erstwhile efforts astatine large reforms fell by the wayside, but acknowledged however "we request to separate betwixt announcements and what really happens and however you really get results."

The thought of a azygous constituent of accountability for subject instrumentality purchases — alternatively of a multi-department attack — has been astir since astatine slightest 2008 and mostly supported by immoderate defence observers and erstwhile officials arsenic a much businesslike mode of delivering connected projects, immoderate of which person taken decades to spot done to completion.

The caput of the country's defence manufacture relation sounded cautious. 

"This isn't the archetypal clip a centralized procurement bureau has been floated," said Christyn Cianfarani, president of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI).

"It's a tempting solution, due to the fact that it seems comparatively elemental connected its surface, but erstwhile governments person ne'er recovered a mode to marque it work."

She said specified an bureau would necessitate "huge" changes to the procurement process. 

"The increasing pains during that modulation could really dilatory down procurement astatine a clip erstwhile Canada needs to velocity it up," she said.

WATCH | Carney says Liberal authorities would boost defence spending: 

On Monday, Carney erstwhile again pushed the conception that Canada indispensable diversify wherever it buys its subject equipment. 

"The priorities of the United States, erstwhile intimately aligned with our own, person shifted," Carney said successful his speech. "For excessively long, our subject has been underfunded and overly reliant connected the United States."

Prior to the election, Carney ordered Defence Minister Bill Blair to reappraisal the ongoing acquisition of U.S.-made F-35 fighters.

The aerial unit requires 88 precocious warplanes to regenerate the four-decade-old CF-18s. 

The national authorities has committed and paid for the archetypal tranche of 16 and suggested it could possibly capable the remainder of the request by pivoting to different aircraft-maker and moving 2 fleets of combatant jets.

As portion of the Liberal plan, the enactment says if it forms authorities it would besides found probe and engineering to person made-in-Canada innovative solutions successful areas specified arsenic artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cybersecurity. 

Last summer, Canada's Defence Department and subject admitted successful a long-awaited reappraisal that their attack and implementation toward the usage of artificial quality is "fragmented" and unco-ordinated. The department's caller strategy was candid, saying neither the Department of National Defence (DND) nor the Canadian Armed Forces are "positioned to follow and instrumentality vantage of AI."