On the same day the federal government released a new national security strategy warning that Canada needed to “prepare for all contingencies up to and including war,” the Auditor General tabled a report showing the Canadian Armed Forces can’t reliably say how much ammunition it has, what it actually needs, or when the next shipment will show up.
That’s not a talking point from the opposition benches. It’s the finding of Auditor General Karen Hogan, in a report tabled in the House of Commons on October 29. And it lands squarely on a government that has spent the better part of two years telling Canadians it takes defence seriously.
The bottom line from the audit
The headline conclusion is blunt: National Defence “did not manage its ammunition to meet its regular-use and strategic stockpile needs.”
The strategic stockpile is the reserve the military would draw on in combat or a serious emergency. According to the audit, it “did not contain all the types and quantities of ammunition required,” and there were “significant gaps between what was needed and what was available in some inventory classes.”
Worse, the department’s own assessment of what the stockpile should hold had holes in it. The Auditor General found it did not fully account for all the ammunition needed to meet operational requirements, and didn’t even include ammunition for some equipment. You can’t fill a shelf you never measured.
NATO readiness “well below target”
This isn’t just bookkeeping. The audit quotes National Defence’s own analysis: as of March 2026, the Canadian Armed Forces’ readiness level to meet NATO commitments was “well below target, and ammunition was one of the contributing capability shortfalls, especially for the strategic stockpile,” as CBC News reported.
March 2026 is a full year into Mark Carney’s time as Prime Minister. Allies are not grading Canada on press releases. They are grading it on whether our forces can show up equipped.
$695 million committed, zero rounds delivered
Here’s the number that should embarrass Ottawa most. In 2024, the government dedicated $9.2 billion over 13 years to rebuild the strategic stockpile. In the 2025–26 fiscal year, on the Carney government’s watch, National Defence committed $695 million of that money. Yet as of March 31, 2026, no ammunition had been received from those commitments for the strategic stockpile.
Money announced is not ammunition in a bunker. The Auditor General says that at the current pace, it will take several years to close the gaps.
Nineteen months to deliver, and nobody wrote down why
When the audit looked at 15 regular-use ammunition contracts, it found it took an average of almost 19 months from contract signature to final delivery. Public Services and Procurement Canada also “did not consistently track and document why contracts were changed to extend delivery dates.”
Think about that. Deadlines kept slipping, and the department responsible for buying the ammunition often didn’t record the reason. That is exactly the kind of drift that a government promising faster, leaner procurement was supposed to end.
They don’t even know what’s in the warehouse
The audit also found persistent problems with basic inventory control. As of March 31, 2026, 31% of the locations where National Defence holds ammunition had not completed their required annual count, representing $656 million in ammunition overdue for counting. The department’s total ammunition inventory was valued at $2.6 billion.
Meanwhile, averaged over the last three fiscal years, the Army, Air Force and Navy used only 56% of the regular-use ammunition assigned to them, and National Defence never assessed why. CBC reported that the audit pointed to limited or cancelled training, and to equipment such as tanks and ships that was often out of service. So soldiers aren’t training with the ammunition they have, and the reserve they’d need in a crisis isn’t full. Both ends of the problem at once.
The warnings were already on the table
None of this should surprise anyone in government. CBC notes that retired general Wayne Eyre, the former chief of the defence staff, sounded the alarm about the military’s ammunition supply three years ago, warning a House committee that at the rate of consumption seen in Ukraine, Canada would exhaust much of its stock within days.
Hogan made the same point about repeated failures more broadly. In her opening statement to the Public Accounts committee, she said that for both ammunition and the public health emergency stockpile, “problems that had been identified through previous audits had not been fully addressed, raising concerns about preparedness for future needs.”
“We’re making it”
Defence Minister David McGuinty’s response was the familiar one. “The entire auditor general report on ammunition tells us that we have progress to make, and we’re making it,” he told reporters, according to CBC News. “We accept and embrace all of those recommendations. In fact, we’re acting on most of them already.”
Accepting recommendations costs nothing. Ministers accepted every recommendation in six of the reports tabled that day. What Canadians need is ammunition that arrives, inventories that get counted, and a stockpile that matches what our forces would actually need.
Conservative defence critic James Bezan put it plainly: “This is not an insurmountable problem. It is a question of political will.”
Talk is cheap. Ammunition isn’t.
The Carney government wants credit for big defence announcements and a new security strategy that talks about war. But readiness isn’t measured in strategies. It’s measured in what’s on the shelf when the call comes. On that test, the Auditor General’s verdict is clear: the shelves aren’t ready, the books aren’t reliable, and the fix is still years away.
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