Canada’s defense industrial strategy is, unfortunately, just a jobs program

Canada is about to spend more on defense than it has in a generation. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s drive to hit 2 percent of GDP — pushed along, in no small part, by years of American pressure — has earned real goodwill in Washington. But it shouldn’t have — not yet. 

Before the applause goes any further, somebody should actually read what Canada’s new Defense Industrial Strategy does. The document has little to say about what the Canadian Armed Forces need, or how fast they can get it. What it cares about is steering defense dollars toward Canadian firms, Canadian intellectual property and Canadian supply chains. That is a different project, and it produces a different result. 

A defense budget can go in one of two directions. It can buy military capability — the gear, the trained people, the staying power that makes a force usable when it is needed, bought quickly and built to work with allied systems. Or it can go toward economic development: domestic jobs, homegrown technology, industrial plants.

Canada needs some of the second kind for basic sovereignty reasons, and nobody seriously disputes that. The trouble starts when one contract is asked to deliver both at once. 

That is precisely what the new strategy asks. The Build-Partner-Buy framework, the new Defense Investment Agency, the domestic content rules, the Canadian-ownership conditions on intellectual property — these are economic development tools wired into a defense acquisition system. 

Some of it is deliberate. Some of it is just habit:. Industrial and regional considerations are so........

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