In February 2026, Prime Minister Carney stood before a parliamentary committee and confirmed what defence analysts had been quietly documenting for years: 75 cents of every dollar Canada spends on defence capital procurement leaves the country. The F-35 program returns 6.1 cents per dollar in domestic industrial benefit. Canada is, in a very literal sense, paying for its own strategic dependency.

The North Warning System—a network of radar stations stretching across Canada's Arctic—provides early warning of aerospace threats approaching North America. Built during the Cold War to detect Soviet bombers, the system is aging and increasingly inadequate for detecting modern threats, particularly cruise missiles and advanced aircraft.