The government announced the creation of a new agency yesterday morning—the Defence Investment Agency, which has a dual purpose of streamlining defence procurement contracts by putting them into a single office to avoid duplicating approvals, but to also encourage domestic defence industrial capacity in order to ensure there is more domestic production rather than just being able to buy new kit faster. Part of this will involve working more closely with allies in the UK, Australia and France, among others, in order to shift more procurement dollars away from the Americans.

Some of this may be easier said than done, because they are folding in the same risk-averse bureaucrats into this agency, which means that they will still need to encourage culture change around these processes, and that could be a problem because many of those existing bureaucrats will have scars from botched procurements in the past, where things went awry because of haste, sole-sourcing, or other political machinations that were intended to maximise Canadian industrial benefits and turned into boondoggles. The general instinct in Canadian bureaucracy is that after every scandal, they put in all kinds of new rules and reporting structures to prevent it from happening again, but those new rules and structures keep piling on without any proper rationalization, and soon you have your civil servants spending all of their time doing compliance checks rather than their jobs, but funnily enough, this never seems to get the attention it deserves when we talk about reforming the civil service or when finding places where cuts can be made. And I fully expect that there is going to be an early scandal or two in this procurement body that will shape the future of how it operates.

Meanwhile, Carney hand-picked its CEO, and wouldn’t you know it, he slotted in a banker friend from Goldman Sachs and RBC to head it up. I’m sure that there will be plenty of justification about how this is supposed to get past the culture of risk-aversion or something, but I find there is a whiff of cronyism that is likely to get worse the closer we get to the eventual byelections for all of those soon-to-be retiring former Cabinet ministers that Carney is finding new diplomatic posts for. Things are getting awfully clubby in Carney’s bro-culture PMO, and this looks like a signal that there’s more of this to come.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-10-02T14:05:15.840Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine has brought home 185 service personnel and twenty civilians in the latest prisoner swap. President Zelenskyy is currently in Copenhagen to meet with European leaders.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1973658861148979359

Good reads:

• Dominic LeBlanc told a Senate committee that the trade relationship with the US won’t magically return to where it was for the past 25 years.
• Health minister Marjorie Michel says that dental care will be spared from cuts.
• NSIRA says that CRA lacks rigour in how they audit charities for terrorism concerns, and that can lead to bias and discrimination.
• The PBO says that the housing affordability gap has narrowed in parts of the country, but there isn’t a single housing market.
• The federal Courts Administration Service says that spending cuts will worsen backlogs within federal courts, and curtail efforts to modernize operations.
• The SITE Task Force says that foreign interference attempts in the election were small-scale and difficult to attribute to any one actor from abroad.
• We got a bit more clarity about what happened in the election in Terrebonne, where the Bloc lost by a single vote, likely because of a postal code error.
• The Canadian Press fact-checks the claim that Carney held an announcement at a fake construction site. (Spoiler: It was indicated they were not permanent).
• The Senate is tightening the rules around language immersion training after a bout of pearl-clutching this past week.
• A Norwegian company is showing interest in a Quebec LNG project, but everything is still in the early stages.
• Doug Ford’s Skills Development Fund grants went to party donors. (I’m shocked!)
• Danielle Smith warns that if Carney doesn’t give her a pipeline she’ll sell more to the Americans. (Is this supposed to be a threat? How?)
• An election has been called in Yukon for November 3rd.
• Philippe Lagassé offers a few thoughts on the new Defence Investment Agency.
• Jen Gerson pans the absurd theatre of Danielle Smith’s Alberta Next panels.
• Susan Delacourt looks at the number of tests Carney will face in the next six weeks.

Odds and ends:

Want more Routine Proceedings? Become a patron and get exclusive new content.