Carney Secretly Locked Canada Into a $1.1B American Weapons Deal — While Publicly Promising to Buy Canadian

A U.S. Pentagon contract notice, posted this week, reveals Canada quietly signed a deal for American-made HIMARS rocket systems months ago — with no public announcement. According to two confidential sources, a press statement was prepared and then deliberately pulled back. Mark Carney promised during the 2025 election to buy less American military equipment. The Pentagon didn't get the memo.

How the Pentagon Broke Canada's Secret

The Carney government didn't tell Canadians about the deal. The U.S. Department of War did.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon posted a contract notice for a $1.1-billion deal with Lockheed Martin to manufacture M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) for allied nations — listing Canada alongside Australia, Estonia, Sweden, and Taiwan. A total of 17 HIMARS systems will be manufactured, with delivery by April 2028.

The notice makes clear that formal paperwork has been signed. Defence analyst Dave Perry told CBC News: "When you see notifications like this, it means basically the formal paperwork has been signed. And if the money hasn't already been put into a bank account that the U.S. government manages … then the cheque is in the mail."

How many systems Canada ordered remains unclear — Canada originally expressed interest in 26 HIMARS units total. The Department of National Defence was asked by CBC News to confirm when the letter of acceptance was signed and what down payment was made. DND did not answer those questions.

The Press Release That Was Deliberately Buried

Two confidential government sources told CBC News that a public statement announcing the HIMARS deal was prepared last winter — around the time the deal was finalized — but was pulled back before release.

Why? The deal was signed just weeks before the Carney government released its new defence industrial strategy, which explicitly emphasized buying Canadian military equipment.

In other words: the Liberals knew that publicly announcing a billion-dollar American weapons contract at the same moment they were promising to buy Canadian would expose a contradiction they weren't prepared to defend. So they said nothing. They hoped no one would notice.

The Pentagon noticed.

The Election Promise Carney Has Already Broken

During the spring 2025 federal election campaign, Liberal leader Mark Carney explicitly promised to diversify where Canada buys its military equipment and to reduce dependence on American defence suppliers.

The HIMARS deal — signed in January 2026 before Carney had been elected, according to sources — is just the most visible example of a contradiction Perry describes bluntly: "There is a concrete contradiction between what the prime minister said about shifting the ratio of dollars spent in the United States to dollars being spent in Canada."

Perry acknowledges that some of these commitments predate Carney and can't be unwound overnight. But the HIMARS announcement was handled not through transparency — "here's the deal we inherited, here's why we're proceeding" — but through silence. The government prepared and then suppressed a public statement. That is a deliberate choice, not an inherited constraint.

HIMARS: What It Is and Why Canada Wanted It

The HIMARS is a wheeled, truck-launched multiple rocket system. It can strike targets at ranges of up to 300 km with precision-guided munitions. It was famously effective for Ukrainian forces against Russian logistics and command posts in the 2022–2024 phase of the war.

The Canadian Army has argued since at least 2023 that HIMARS is essential for defending Canadian troops stationed in Latvia as part of NATO's enhanced Forward Presence, and for the army's broader modernization. As Canadian Army commander Lt.-Gen. Mike Wright put it in December 2025: "The HIMARS system is the long-range precision strike system that we need for land operations. It's a capability that's been proven on the battlefield in Ukraine."

From a purely military standpoint, the acquisition is defensible. What is not defensible is doing it secretly while publicly promising the opposite.

A Pattern of Defence Secrecy

The HIMARS suppression follows a broader pattern in Carney's defence procurement conduct:

• The government ordered a "review" of Canada's F-35 fighter jet purchase — a $20B+ American contract — without saying what would happen if the review determined the contract should proceed. (It almost certainly will.) Defence Minister McGuinty confirmed this week the review still isn't finished, more than a year in.
• Canada's new Defence Investment Agency, announced in last week's spring economic update at a cost of $103.8 million, is explicitly tasked with faster procurement — which raises the question of why the existing Department of National Defence requires a parallel agency to get things done.
• A leaked military training report obtained by CBC News showed the basic training pass rate fell after the Armed Forces changed recruitment requirements — a problem the government has not publicly acknowledged.

The pattern is consistent: make bold public statements about Canadian sovereignty and defence independence while quietly proceeding with American hardware deals, suppressing announcements, and building bureaucratic workarounds rather than fixing the institutions that keep failing.

What Canadians Should Ask

Canadian taxpayers are owed answers to straightforward questions the government has refused to provide:

1. When exactly was the HIMARS letter of acceptance signed, and who authorized it?
2. How much has Canada already paid in down payments or deposits?
3. Why was the press statement prepared and then suppressed?
4. Who made the decision to not announce the deal publicly?
5. How does a $1.1B+ American weapons acquisition align with the Liberal defence industrial strategy that was released weeks later?

If the Carney government had nothing to hide, the press statement would have been released. It wasn't. The Pentagon's contract notice forced transparency the Liberal government was unwilling to provide voluntarily.

That is not sovereignty. That is not accountability. That is a government that thinks Canadians don't deserve to know what their military is buying, and for how much.

Sources: CBC News, May 1, 2026 — "Pentagon procurement post reveals Canada quietly locked into HIMARS deal" (Murray Brewster); U.S. Department of War contract notice, April 30, 2026 (Lockheed Martin HIMARS production contract); CBC News, December 2025 (Lt.-Gen. Mike Wright interview).