The Conference of Defence Associations Institute (CDAI) has held a Conference on Security and Defence annually with the 94th year being held at the Chateau Laurier this past March 4th/5th, 2026. Topics were wide ranging within the defence sphere and included military and civilian experts in all aspects of global defence and security along with keynote speakers from the military and government. The second day of this year’s conference opened with a discussion between the Honourable Stephen Fuhr, newly appointed Secretary of State for Defence Procurement (appointed May 25th, 2026), with former Vice-Chief of Defence Staff, LGen. (ret’d), Guy Thibeault, to discuss the mission and the new organization.
The new Defence Procurement organization will be “focused on accelerating military acquisitions” (ed. not a trivial task given Canada’s historical record). He works alongside the newly established Defence Investment Agency (DIA) to streamline equipment delivery for the Canadian Armed Forces and Coast Guard, while driving domestic industrial growth in sectors like shipbuilding and aerospace”. That is not a new goal as all capital procurement seems interested in faster delivery and “driving domestic industrial growth”, more often than not, to the detriment of the delivery of the capital equipment being procured.
From the Government of Canada website, “The Defence Investment Agency is modernizing Canada’s defence procurement by centralizing expertise, cutting red tape and streamlining decisions. This means faster delivery of critical equipment to the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Coast Guard, protecting Canada’s sovereignty and strengthening our armed forces”.
So, how will the new man achieve this. Well, the first question from LGen. Thibeault was multi-faceted as Mr. Fuhr was asked “what do you do? What’s your role” … who do you work for? … What makes you really exited? And what causes you to lose sleep at night?”. Rather a lot for an opening salvo.
Mr. Fuhr dove in noting that military procurement has always had a mantra of “open, fair, and transparent” but acknowledged that no-one had thought to add “timely”. In his mind, he wants to refine it down to “transparent and timely” as taking ten years or more to deliver a capability to the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) can actually negate the value of the procurement. Over a long delivery time, prices go up, technologies change, requirements change, and then the system shows up for the operators. “It’s late, expensive, and irrelevant”.
Also, because the responsibility and decision matrix for procurement rests in so many places (DND, PSPC, ISAT, Treasury Board) with none of them having a single focus on the specific procurement or it not being their number one priority, things don’t get done quickly. Things get put aside, one department can’t move forward without a decision from another department, etc. The old process may have worked at one time but no longer moves fast enough. The old process had too many authority gates to reduce risk and people started being too concerned about risk avoidance rather than risk management.
The Defence Investment Agency (DIA), in conjunction with the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS), should aggregate all those concerns under “a single point of accountability that brings in all those elements from those departments into one place with oversight all the time”. That’s the dream.
LGen. Thibeault acknowledged the fact that similar efforts have been attempted in the past, without success, and that there were probably a few naysayers in the audience. So he asked, ”What have we learned about our past efforts to make things better that’s helping inform where you want to take things in the future?”.
Mr. Fuhr was candid when he responded that they’ve always known what the problem was: too slow, too expensive, too many fingers in the pie, and that, “we just never got it sorted”. With the new system with the DIA/DIS – “we’ve got it sorted!”. Brave words indeed.
He does understand, however, that removing all these authority gates from the differing departments will take time and may meet resistance. There will have to be changes to the Defence Production Act, government contracting rules, and authority matrix changes. Speaking about the speed that some of these changes have already occurred, he made reference to,”… the new world order, … [as] the motivating factor that got everybody to get up and go.”, which, if I’m reading this correctly, is a veiled reference to the shitshow that is the current U.S. Administration. But they realized that, although talked about in the past, they really had to do it this time, not just for all the past reasons, but thinking about how to capitalize on stimulating Canada’s economic position, not at the expense of military requirements, but in conjunction with them. “And we can do that”.
The DIA currently operates as its own special operating agency under PSPC aiming to become a standalone agency in months (more than two). But what DIA does have right now is AUTHORITY as DIA is the contracting authority for any military procurement over $100 million. As put forth by Mr. Fuhr “we have resources. We have authority. And we’re ready to go.”
And it’s not that DND hasn’t had money before (DND spending doubled in the past four years) but a lot of it never got spent as projects languished in bureaucracy. But now, DIA has the money, there is a massive will to get this done, and Canada has an external economic enemy, all motivating factors and DIA is ready to roll. Mr. Fuhr further stated that it’s already happening and provided examples.
• The Challenger replacement (Global 6500) was in options analysis in the fall of 2025 and went to contract in December.
• A strategic partnership with Telesat MDA to bring industry in earlier to help avoid self-inflicted problems.
• The submarine project that is moving forward into the competitive process notwithstanding that money is not yet even approved for submarines.
The current threshold of $100 million is an arbitrary number to help filter out projects at the moment. All the smaller ones will currently continue in the older system. However, as DIA gets up and running, grows its personnel, and normalizes its processes, then the floor will be lowered to encompass smaller dollar value projects.
LGen. Thibeault allowed that this all sounded pretty good going forward but asked, “What are we doing in defence procurement to deal with those really urgent capability gaps that we have today?”
Mr. Fuhr responded that this was more a serviceability issue rather than a procurement issue noting that Canada has not invested in maintaining existing systems. With the influx to DND of an extra $82 billion over the next five years, it will be up to service chiefs to identify gaps, get existing CAF members up to training and deployment standards, “get tires, fix engines, do what needs to be done.”
LGen. Thibeault next wanted to know, “[within the federal bureaucracy and the CAF] … about our risk acceptance and risk tolerance?”
Without hesitation, Mr. Fuhr stated, “I would couch our risk tolerance as to have migrated into the paralysis by analysis bucket, where no one wanted to take the risk. And by the time I got to someone who owned the risk, the problem had grown so big that either the timeline or the cost was out of control. … I think the system was just paralyzed by making a mistake and in the process of being so paralyzed that they probably made more mistakes than they would have had they just owned the problem up front and got on with their lives.” Expanding on that thought, Mr. Fuhr said that he would take risks and manage risk where he had to as he has to deliver to the CAF and get the job done quickly.
LGen. Thibeault next moved into the concept of Build-Partner-Buy, which is a strategic decision-making model used to determine the fastest and most cost-effective way to acquire new capabilities, products, or technologies. It balances internal development (Build), acquisitions (Buy), and strategic alliances (Partner) based on urgency, resource availability, and competitive advantage. His question to Mr. Fuhr was, “How do you triage all of that demand that we’ve got on the requirements side into this build, partner, buy?”
Mr. Fuhr answered that they’re building out a process which isn’t quite ready. But, the bottom line is that DND needs to start pushing projects now as they know where the needs reside. The environmental chiefs know what they require under Strong & Free and need to just push them forward. Don’t wait for another defence policy or update. There may not be a bucket of money for any one specific project but there is a big bucket of money that hasn’t been parsed into smaller buckets yet. One example is, again, submarines. There is no money identified for submarines yet but DND and DIA are well into the process.
There is a commitment, a budget, a policy document, and there’s a massive will. There is risk involved with which not everyone is comfortable but DND should advance projects with internal resources as far down the road as can be got and then let DIS run with it.
Mr. Fuhr then took, what can only be regarded as a swing, at Treasury Board (TB). Before advancing his thoughts, he did acknowledge that TB is filled with good people who care about doing their jobs properly, albeit in an imperfect system. Currently, TB doesn’t provide entire funding up front but rather doles it out in chunks, chunks which require the project going back to TB every milestone for approval for payment or for the next stage. It takes forever as the Treasury Board needs to be constituted , the project needs get on an agenda, it gets bumped, starts over, etc., all while the project stands still. Also known as the “hamster wheel of unhappiness”.
Under the new model DIA will use a PSPC risk-based approach to contracting, currently used for medium-risk or under projects. Projects will get spending authority and as long as everything is hunky-dory then projects don’t have to go back to TB every time money needs to be spent. There is a risk, of course, but it’s managed risk. The thing that’s never happened before is that DIA has an unlimited cap. This should shorten the timeline for medium-risk projects from a decade to a couple/few years.
LGen. Thibeault noted all the new changes moving forward and posited that there must also be new ways for how to work with industry with the DIA/DIS framework.
Mr. Fuhr first wanted to deal with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as in the defence and security space in Canada, there are about 600 companies, 93% of them SMEs making up 40% of the workforce. The process is so complex, however, that many of them never compete for DND RFPs. DND is making massive investments in the economic well-being of Canada, and so for Canadians to see themselves as benefiting, these SMEs need to be brought into the investment. Regular Canadians must support this investment and the way to do is to give them a piece.
It’s also important to buy from Canadian companies to spur Canadian economic development . Sometimes that means investing in a foreign company who creates jobs in Canada. Bell Helicopter builds four lines of helicopters in Canada employing hundreds of people. Airbus and L3 are just a couple more. [ed. maybe SAAB in the future].
Canada wants those companies to grow and to continue to invest in Canada. However, Canada doesn’t want to be vendor locked which does bring forward industrial and technical benefits (ITB) value propositions (VP). Canada wants the ability to manage whatever we buy on our own terms in the long run. Let the OEM bring it into service and train CAF personnel as they know the systems best. But let the OEM create a footprint that creates Canadian jobs, whether for repair and maintenance, training facilities, or whatever. However it’s done, Canada should insist that it retains the intellectual property in perpetuity in case the OEM decides to pack up and leave or maybe not do business with Canada anymore.
LGen. Thibeault then addressed the elephant in the room by mentioning that a big part of the CAF’s mission is continental security, including air and missile defence, in conjunction with the United States. Canada is currently trying to diversify its procurement so that it is not as reliant on the U.S. and looking at NATO partners for future equipment purchases. Mr. Fuhr was asked, “What does that relationship look like?”
Mr. Fuhr reiterated Canada’s priorities are sovereignty, NORAD, NATO, operations other than war, etc. and, although the U.S. relationship is still very important, Canada does need to be more resilient and less reliant. That doesn’t mean Canada can’t do both. We will integrate with the U.S. where necessary but not always. For example, Canada just bought the Australian over-the-horizon radar and the French A330 tanker rather than the U.S. KC-46.
When asked how the audience could help, Mr. Fuhr put forward a list of ideas:
• For the military, he suggested to start pushing projects forward;
• For industry, continue to dialogue, participate in the defence advisory forum, and work more closely with DIA; and,
• Build out a resilient supply chain, more autonomous than it’s been in the past. Look at what has been declared a “sovereign capability” and go there, engage Canadian SMEs. South Korea, France, and Turkey are all leading in this.
With that, Mr. Fuhr was thanked for the candid discussion and wished good luck on this new endeavour.
