The data ‘highlights a real and growing gap between the federal government’s legal needs and its in-house capacity,’ says Gregory Harlow, president of the Association of Justice Counsel.
Former Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick says awarding a bonus involves ‘a fairly sophisticated conversation’ that considers how they achieved key targets. ‘Did you leave a trail of bodies behind you … or did you strengthen your team?’
With its scope expanded to new categories of vessels that may be less familiar with polar hazards, it is time to strengthen awareness and increased enforcement in the Canadian Arctic.
Canada has a promising new approach to defence procurement that meets the moment. Together, Bill C-31 and Budget 2026 are an opportunity for the country to align the operating systems beneath that strategy to ensure the emerging industrial base is truly sovereign and homegrown.
The F-35 debate, the submarine competition, the Arctic sovereignty gap—they all share the same missing variable. And Canada already knows the answer, if it chooses to look.
Because in today’s geopolitical environment, Canada cannot afford to lose control over the mineral assets tied to our future security and industrial base.
‘It’s a shot across the bow. The U.S. administration has clearly been watching the PM’s moves on defence and has concludes that there’s too much talk and too little action,’ says defence expert Christian Leuprecht.
The countries that succeed in the coming decade will not necessarily be those with the largest budgets alone. They will be the ones capable of adapting fastest, integrating innovation most effectively, and translating industrial capacity into operational capability at speed.
‘This legislation would substantially expand the federal government’s ability to bypass competitive procurement processes and concentrate significant power in a single minister,’ says NDP defence critic Don Davies.
If Ottawa meaningfully partners with Alberta’s growing aerospace and defence sector, and Canada’s other defence innovation hubs, it will go a long way to making the new industrial strategy a success.
The implication is clear: Canada’s defence strategy must become, in part, an industrial strategy—one focused on building and retaining firms.
Its software replacement will fail again if the government doesn’t address the root causes: lack of flexibility and connectivity with existing systems.
‘The fact that careful and deliberate steps have not been taken to ensure that employment equity groups are not disproportionately harmed by these historic austerity measures tells us everything we need to know about our employer,’ says union leader Nathan Prier.
PSPC says it has identified so far a total of $5.5-million in improper billing and recovered $4.8-million to date.
Public Services and Procurement Canada says shaving three years off the timeline to bring Dayforce online won’t cut into time for testing and stabilizing the new system before it’s applied throughout the public service.
Procurement Ombud Alexander Jeglic told MPs on April 16 that revisiting the issue in the usual two-year timeline would make his office ‘part of that failure’ already plaguing the Procurement Strategy for Indigenous Business.
As Ottawa moves ahead with plans to spend $81.8-billion on defence, a Senate committee studying Canada’s defence procurement heard from industry representatives that firms are finding it challenging to sell to their own government due to issues with procurement policies.
Canada made a deal in 2023 for American defence contractor Lockheed Martin to supply 88 F-35 aircraft to replace its aging CF-18 fleet at a projected cost of $19-billion. That cost later increased to more than $27-billion. However, in March 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered a review of that deal amid deteriorating bilateral relations with the U.S.
Federal departments and agencies have a mandate to award at least five per cent of the total value of federal contracts to Indigenous-owned and led businesses, but departmental reporting overstated the actual benefit to Indigenous businesses, says the Office of the Procurement Ombud.
Auditor General Karen Hogan said the backlog of pay issues needs to be eliminated as soon as possible in order to prevent transferring these unprocessed transactions to a new pay system.
The German automaker ‘focuses on what makes sense for us,’ says a Volkswagen Group spokesperson, which Canadian industry leaders say is unsurprising given the ‘high stakes’ of the negotiations.
Senior government official Alex Benay says he’s ‘pretty comfortable’ the Phoenix pay system can handle the ‘volume’ of severance payouts as the public service faces a swell job cuts.
Marine sensing systems, Arctic surveillance infrastructure, autonomous vessels, AI-enabled maritime platforms, and shipbuilding capacity are foundational to Canada’s sovereignty and economic resilience.
The assumption appears to be that fewer experts can somehow do more with less—an impossibility in a system already stretched past its limits.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada says its members have had prolonged issues since the federal government transferred the Public Service Health Care Plan from Sun life to Canada Life in July 2023.
