In February, Canada released its Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS), a sweeping plan aimed at strengthening national sovereignty, security, and economic growth. With $180 billion in defence procurement, $290 billion in infrastructure investment, and ambitious targets for industry expansion, it is one of the most significant defence policy documents in decades.

But as defence expert Wendy Gilmour argues, the challenge is not the scale of the ambition, it is how it will be delivered. The strategy sets out clear goals, but offers less clarity on how trade-offs will be made, how quickly capabilities can be fielded, and how Canada balances urgency with long-term industrial development.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between CIC Executive Director Melanie Walker and defence expert Wendy Gilmour.

When you first read the Defence Industrial Strategy in depth, what was your reaction?

Getting the Strategy ‘out the door’ was itself a victory, given how much work goes into publishing a document like this. There was a tremendous amount of effort by the bureaucracy to get this over the finish line, and while it represents compromises, as every government policy document does, it is an achievement. But now comes the hard part. It is an ambitious document, but the real challenge will be in implementation. For instance, it contains a number of significant targets, but does not provide much direction on the fundamental question: how will trade-offs be determined?  These questions are especially relevant for the armaments, procurement and defence industry communities.

How will choices be made between “build, partner, and buy”? There are always choices to be made between the timeframes involved in recapitalizing the Canadian Forces, and in delivering new capabilities. We need most of these capabilities yesterday, not ten or twenty years from now. If we are going to “build”, this means research and development (R&D) and moving through the early stages of development and production. That is a long-term ambition when we might be at war tomorrow. Indeed, some would say we are probably already in a hybrid war. Certainly, if you are a NATO Ally living in Eastern Europe, you understand the threat posed by Russia, and that you may already be at war.

“We need them yesterday, not ten or twenty years from now.”

If the US is no longer the default customer, who are we selling to – and how do we reconcile those export ambitions with our values-based foreign policy?

I am firmly, personally, invested in Canada having a defence industry with sovereign capabilities that needs to be globally ambitious – the best in the world. We need to prioritize export markets that have the capacity to pay and where there is genuine buyer interest. If we are not prepared to sell to the Middle East to sell technologies we have developed and built at home, we are not going to meet the export targets contained in the Strategy.  

But the priority also has to be making sure that when we are exporting goods and technologies, they should not be available to prospective adversaries to use against us. This is a critical component of any export market development strategy.

At present, Canada is primarily an exporter of parts and components to our closest allies ‘primes’, who integrate our elements into larger systems. We need to be prepared to allow our allies to re-export those goods if we want to continue accessing their markets. That requires trusting that the allies we export to are making decisions consistent with the overall interests of Canada and the NATO alliance. This is difficult when we see certain allies’ policies diverge from our own. 

Ultimately, it is about risks and trade-offs and where those priorities are being set. Right at this moment, the priority has to be equipping the Canadian Forces and having a robust and sustainable defence industrial base.

Does our current F-35 situation (Canada is contractually obligated to 16 F-35s currently in production) illustrate precisely the dilemma this strategy is trying to solve?

I was involved in various pieces of the F-35 programme dating back to 2011. Had we stuck with the decisions taken by the then government in 2010, we would already have a flying F-35 fleet in service with operational capability. We delayed, and we delayed again; and we questioned our assumptions and then re-validated those assumptions. The money is now booked in the system. Let’s go ahead and get these aircraft into service. The criticisms being levelled at the F-35 programme [such as the potential for a US “kill switch”] I don’t believe are well-founded. It is already a global fleet, in use by some of our closest allies: Australia, Germany, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, etc. For the US to make any type of ill-informed decision to restrict access to software upgrades or future capability as part of that platform is very unlikely.

Ideally we should be able to ‘walk and chew gum’ at the same time. The F-35 is the needed capability today (if not a little bit of yesterday’s capability, irrespective of the fact that we call it a next-generation fighter.)  Canada should be thinking concurrently about our next generation air power, which is unlikely to be crewed platforms alone. 

In my view, “Build, partner, buy” are not discrete choices. They are collective decisions that chart a path moving forward. With the additional resources in the defence investment portfolio, we have the ability to do both.

Let’s stop revisiting extant defence acquisition decisions, and get on with delivering them – while planning what we need next. [There are welcome reports that Canada is considering joining the European 6th generation Global Combat Air Capability Program].   

In this rush to recapitalize, will we end up buying more than we build?

For some programs, yes. We don’t build submarines in Canada. It has taken us from the announcement of the National Shipbuilding Strategy in 2010 to the present just to get our shipyards geared up to get the Canadian Surface Combatant build underway. We can not afford to wait a couple of decades to create a submarine shipyard capability to produce them ourselves. 

The choice between competing offers (whether submarines or building or buying other complex systems) is a competition between schedule, cost, technical capability, program complexity, and downstream economic benefit – and there is no perfect answer. Whichever option we choose, it is absolutely critical that we think through the second, third, and fourth order effects. Whether we ‘build, partner or buy’ new capabilities, we need the critical supply chains in Canada, redundancy, and as the Defence Industrial Strategy rightly says, the intellectual property embedded in whatever capability we acquire in order that we are able to ensure support for the capability once in service.

The Defence Investment Agency was presented as a way of creating single points of accountability and streamlining procurement. Are you for it?

The Defence Investment Agency was presented as a way of creating single points of accountability and streamlining procurement. I do hope that it delivers. As presently envisaged, however, it doesn’t fundamentally change our procurement system, which is a tripartite partnership between National Defence, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED). Three players with, by definition, different interests. 

“It is a translation of political will.”

What I do believe is that the establishment of the Agency ultimately is a translation of political will. When the government wants to move quickly, it can. From about 2008 to 2012, when we had Canadian Forces members dying in Afghanistan and we needed heavy lift helicopters and Leopard tanks – the focus of effort was to deliver capability to the battlefield, and that is what happened. When the battlefield imperative wanes, Canada moves back to prioritizing ‘procurement integrity’ over the delivery of capability. Let’s hope the government’s recent statements have reset the priorities, and they are being absorbed into the Canadian bureaucracy.

We’ve just hit 2% of GDP in defence spending, and the new NATO target is 5% by 2035. Is that achievable alongside the DIS commitments — and how do we pay for all of this?

As we move from 2% of GDP to 3.5% for military capabilities, that’s real money,  approximately $110 billion annually into the defence portfolio. Canada hasn’t seen 3.5% of defence spending since the early-to-mid 1960s, and hasn’t seen anything close to that level since the Korean War, when spending reached just over seven per cent of GDP. 

The question is how we can maintain a domestic consensus for these investments, because they will come at the expense of doing other things. I do have great faith in the Canadian voting public, and that they will understand that sovereign capability is in our direct interest. It means we can project and defend our interests at home and globally: maintaining important market access, building partnerships with Europe and other parts of the world.

But as always, the proof will be in the pudding. In my view, the government has voiced its intent, and the system needs to stay focussed on trying to deliver on the government’s ambition.  

“What’s absolutely critical now is that we stop revisiting decisions, make the necessary trade-offs, and get capability to the Canadian Forces — now.”

This interview is condensed from a 1 April, 2026 members’ briefing as part of the Quarterly Series offered by the Canadian International Council.

Wendy Gilmour served for more than 34 years in Canada’s Foreign Affairs and National Defence departments. Her senior roles included Deputy National Armaments Director, Director General of Trade and Export Controls, and Director General of International and Industry Programs. She served on secondment to NATO as Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment, and as Canada’s High Commissioner and Ambassador to Pakistan. She currently serves as Senior Mentor to the National Security Programme at the Canadian Forces College.

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