Mark Carney ran in 2025 on a simple promise: get equipment to Canada’s soldiers faster. Eighteen months into his government, the agency he built to do it is on its second rulebook in six months, its first bill still hasn’t passed, and the new plan moves billions in military purchasing further away from the people Canadians elect to watch it.
That’s not speed. That’s a government that can’t decide what it’s building, while asking taxpayers to trust it with one of the biggest spending ramps in Canadian history.
Two Bills, One Agency, Zero Laws
The Defence Investment Agency was set up just over a year ago as a special unit inside Public Services and Procurement Canada. In early May, the Liberals tucked the legislation to formally create it into their omnibus spring economic statement bill, C-31. As CBC News reported, that bill “was put before the House of Commons in the spring and has yet to pass.”
Then, on October 6, the government tabled a completely different bill. Bill C-40 would turn the agency into a Crown corporation, renamed the Canadian Corporation for Defence Investment, with its own board and CEO, reporting to a brand-new associate minister of national defence for procurement.
Ask why the plan changed in a matter of months and you get this, from Secretary of State for Defence Procurement Stephen Fuhr, speaking to iPolitics: “C-31 was tabled in early May, which is about six months into the DIA being established. Now we’re a year into it. We just continued to learn.”
Learning on the job is fine for a summer student. It’s a strange admission from a government that has spent a year telling Canadians the procurement problem was urgent.
The Boss Who Was Quitting, Then Wasn’t
The rewrite came after the Globe and Mail reported that the agency’s CEO, Doug Guzman, was planning to resign over frustration with government bureaucracy. The paper later reported he had changed course and was staying.
Guzman told the House finance committee the stories shouldn’t be trusted: “The first story said I was quitting, and the best evidence I can provide that I didn’t, is I’m in front of you right now.” Fair enough. But when the head of the flagship “go faster” agency is publicly rumoured to be walking out over red tape, and the government responds by rewriting the agency from scratch, Canadians are entitled to wonder who is actually steering.
Less Oversight, More Finger-Pointing
Here’s what should worry every taxpayer. Under the current system, Treasury Board must sign off on defence purchases at several stages. That’s slow, and everyone agrees it’s slow. But it’s also how Parliament follows the money.
A Crown corporation sits at arm’s length from government. Carleton University procurement expert Philippe Lagassé, who sees real upside in the idea, still warned CBC that “a Crown corporation model comes with big risks.” When something goes wrong, he said, the minister can say the board made the call, and the CEO can tell a committee they were following direction. “I do worry that when you set it up that way it allows for obfuscation of where responsibility was.”
Conservative defence critic James Bezan put it bluntly, saying the changes “could remove much-needed parliamentary oversight from the DIA, creating potential opportunities for waste and mismanagement.” Conservative MP Greg McLean asked at committee why C-40 needs a separate cabinet post just to oversee the agency. Fuhr insists the auditor general, the budget officer and Parliament’s committees will still have access. We’ll see.
And the scale is enormous. The Parliamentary Budget Officer says federal defence spending is on track to exceed $163 billion a year by 2035. That is precisely the moment you tighten the leash, not loosen it.
The GlobalEye Preview
We already have a preview of how “faster” works under Carney. In May, he surprised a defence trade show by announcing Canada would buy Saab’s GlobalEye surveillance plane, with no open competition. According to CBC’s reporting, the air force had not yet told potential bidders what it actually needed, and military officials only met Saab to go over required features more than three weeks after the announcement.
Sources told CBC the latest assessment found the plane meets only a portion of the military’s requirements and needs modifications. Fuhr’s answer was that sometimes you take the “85 per cent solution.” Former senior defence procurement official Alan Williams said the approach “makes us look, I think, very, very amateurish.”
Ottawa has since signed only a preliminary agreement with no timeline or final cost made public. The government itself says the choice was based on geopolitical and economic criteria.
Meanwhile, the spring bill proposed expanding the exceptions that let government skip normal competitive procurement from four to as many as 14, including purchases deemed of “national interest.” How those powers carry over into the new Crown corporation is, per CBC, still unclear.
What Canadians Should Demand
Nobody defends the old procurement mess. Canada’s military has waited decades for ships, jets and trucks. But Carney’s answer so far is a pattern: announce first, check requirements later, rewrite the rules when the first plan stalls, and move the decisions further from Parliament each time.
Before C-40 goes anywhere, MPs should insist on three things: the full contracting rules made public, Treasury Board and parliamentary review kept intact for major purchases, and a clear answer on who takes the blame when a multi-billion-dollar buy goes sideways. If the Liberals won’t agree to that, Canadians should ask what exactly they’re trying to speed past.
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