Matt Gurney: Mark Carney’s new Ukraine partnership lets Canada kill 2 birds with 1 drone deal - Toronto Star

Building military drones in Canada will be a huge help to Ukraine — and Canada will get two huge assets in return.

Prime Minister Mark Carney, right, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shake hands after signing an arms agreement, in Calgary, on Sept. 10, 2026.

Matt Gurney is a Toronto-based journalist, broadcaster and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Reach him via email: matt@readtheline.ca

Canada and Ukraine are partnering to build the weapons that will be needed in future wars. It’s a fantastic idea, and something I’ve long called for. It allows both countries to play to their strengths. Canada brings relative safety from Russian attack. Ukraine brings a degree of procurement efficiency to which we can only aspire.

The deal, some details of which the federal government released last Thursday, is intended to produce millions of drones in only a few short years. These drones will be built in Canada by Canadian companies using Ukrainian designs. Canada will provide a third of the production runs to Ukraine for use in defending itself against the ongoing Russian invasion. The rest, we get to keep for our military. This is how Canada plans to go from a few thousand combat drones to a few million, fast.

Of course, the devil is in the details, and a deal is not an implemented plan. Still, the shape of this plan is ideal. Canada is far from the Ukrainian front lines, and we can build munitions here in relative safety. I say “relatively” very deliberately, given a series of military production sites in Europe were recently hit by attacks and acts of sabotage almost certainly perpetrated by Russia. (The Europeans have been downplaying this to avoid triggering a direct confrontation with Moscow; we’ll see how long that remains viable, particularly as Germany gets more blunt in its accusations.) Canadians cannot assume we’re immune to these “hybrid warfare” attacks. But our facilities would certainly be less exposed than Ukraine’s, which Russia can attack directly.

Making the drones here is, therefore, a huge help to Ukraine. We can go back to being what we’ve been in prior major conflicts — “an arsenal of democracy,” to borrow a phrase from American history — and give Ukraine a steady supply.

In exchange, we get two huge assets. First, we get the industry itself. A major challenge for the entire Western alliance is a lack of munitions production. Our defence industries were massively downsized after the Cold War, and it’s been hard to rebuild them. There’s reluctance to invest in such infrastructure when the long-term demand for it is unclear. A deal like the one we’ve just made offers some degree of certainty. Building millions of drones makes big investments worthwhile.

Second, we get Ukrainian experience. Canada has an appalling record on military procurement, largely because procuring stuff for our military isn’t really what our so-called procurement system actually does. In truth, it’s simply a way of spreading federal money around to key ridings and powerful companies. Any stuff it actually ends up equipping the military with is mostly a bonus.

Ukraine, for all its problems with corruption and accountability, doesn’t have this luxury: it innovates or dies. Canada procures new equipment on decades-long timelines; Ukraine can design and start building new drones in a matter of weeks. Working from Ukrainian designs, Canadian companies will be able to bypass one of the stupidest, most dysfunctional aspects of Canadian public policy — namely, an inability and/or refusal to move quickly on selecting military equipment.

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There is a dark truth revealed by this new deal and by our prior military support for Ukraine: Canada has been able not only to rapidly procure weapons and equipment but also to deliver them quickly and cost effectively when Ukraine has needed them. Meanwhile, more than one person inside the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence has confessed to me — sometimes with a weary laugh, but more often evincing something like despair — that if Canada tried to procure that exact same thing for itself in the exact same quantities, it would cost 10 times as much and take 10 times as long. Maybe more.

We should obviously try to fix this. In the meantime, though, simply outsourcing the problematic part of the process to Ukraine could be a very effective, albeit slightly embarrassing, way to move on. I wish it weren’t the best option on the table, but as someone who’s been covering Canadian military procurement for almost 20 years, I can assure you it is. By far.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Matt Gurney is a Toronto-based journalist, broadcaster and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Reach him via email: matt@readtheline.ca