A Reportback on the “Fund Healthcare, Not Warfare” Bus Tour
Prime Minister Mark Carney made a surprise appearance at the CANSEC arms fair in Ottawa last week. Accompanied by blaring rock music as he stepped onto the stage, Carney received a rock star’s welcome from attendees.
“Wow,” Prime Minister Carney said once the applause died down. “It’s funny, I’m the first Canadian prime minister to speak at CANSEC. I don’t know why the other ones didn’t come, this is fantastic.”
It’s not hard to understand why the Prime Minister got such a warm welcome from the weapons makers, generals, and bureaucrats gathered at CANSEC, Canada’s largest weapons expo.
Over the next decade, the federal government plans to spend $180 billion directly in defense procurement, $290 billion in defense and security related infrastructure, and increase federal spending on military-related research and development by almost 85%.
“We’ve enacted the largest increase in defense investment in Canadian history,” Prime Minister Carney told his audience at CANSEC. “We’ve committed to doubling our defense expenditure by the end of this decade.”
But this unprecedented spending spree on military hardware is coming at a steep cost, as the federal government makes deep cuts to healthcare and other public services.
The costs and consequences of this radical shift to a military-first economic strategy were the focus of a recent Ottawa-area bus tour that the Council of Canadians organized with Peace Brigades International-Canada, timed to coincide with the “Shut Down CANSEC” protests against the arms fair.
Looking at the Local Costs of Militarism
Our tour began outside the offices of Canadian Association of Professional Employees, one of the three major unions representing federal workers. The Carney government announced over 40,000 layoffs over the next three years in its November 2025 budget.
Laura Shantz, Senior Advisor for Advocacy and Campaigns with the union, explained how these cuts are endangering public health, harming the federal government’s ability to regulate prescription drugs, monitor food safety, prevent deadly disease outbreaks, and more.
The cuts have gone far beyond layoffs. As Shantz explained, the Liberal government is cutting $60 billion over the next five years, in what economists have described as a “Harper-style” austerity drive that is shredding public services and social programs – including health care.
Pharmacare is on the chopping block, as are programs to deal with the toxic drug crisis, home and long term care, and mental health. Health Canada will lose over a quarter of its budget, with nearly 3,000 layoffs by 2028. The growth of health transfers to provinces will slow to crawl, as Carney has reintroduced a Harper-era funding formula. That means the federal government’s share of health spending will decline.
Just a few blocks away are the offices of the Business Council of Canada, the influential lobby group that speaks on behalf of Canadian CEOs. With the Carney government’s decision to go all in on a military-first economic strategy, the BCC’s corporate wish list is being realized.
Since 2024, the BCC has been calling for a massive, business-friendly bonanza of arms procurement and tax cuts, paid for through austerity for health care and other social programs that benefit ordinary people. The BCC’s fingerprints are all over the 2025 Budget and the defence industrial strategy that followed.
We drove a few more blocks to the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industry (CADSI) office, the main arms manufacturers lobby group and organizer of the CANSEC weapons fair. Brent Patterson of Peace Brigades International spoke about how many of the companies selling weapons at CANSEC are complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Iran. The weapons produced also fuel repressive regimes and conflicts, from the Philippines to Sudan.
While this spending splurge on military hardware is supposed to allow Canada to assert its independence vis-à-vis the U.S. empire, American companies continue to rake in the lion’s share of contracts from the Department of National Defence, albeit more quietly than before.
CADSI’s member companies, which include U.S.-based defence contractors Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and General Dynamics, have rejoiced over the “unprecedented increase in defence spending” the Carney government has announced. “The PM’s vision is the right one, and CADSI’s members are ready to help implement it,” the arms industry association said in an October 2025 statement.
CADSI’s member companies will soon be getting the chance to do just that. At the arms fair, Carney announced that his government is creating a Defence Advisory Forum, composed entirely of senior industry executives, “to ensure the partnership between government and defence industry remains in sync.”
Next, we stopped outside the Ottawa Hospital, where budget cuts are costing over 200 nurses their jobs. Amy Roberts, a registered nurse and president of the Ontario Nurses Association local 83, explained how funding cuts at the provincial and federal level are leading to worsening hallway medicine, more frequent incidents of violence against healthcare workers and greater burnout among nurses and other staff.
Roberts stressed that the restriction of the right to strike for nurses have contributed to the already dire staffing shortages at Ottawa Hospital. The Ford government’s Bill 124, which unconstitutionally limited pay increases to just 1% per year for frontline healthcare workers and other public sector workers, is typical of the lack of respect shown for healthcare’s largely female workforce, Roberts said.
When inflation is taken into account, wages for nurses and other healthcare and social services workers have fallen over the last decade, a 2024 Toronto Star analysis found. Nationally, pay for these essential workers actually shrank by 1.5% over the 2013-2023 period, driven by imposed contracts and anti-union legislation targeting public sector workers. Some nurses now rely on food banks to help make ends meet, the Star reported.
The push to privatize healthcare by Doug Ford and other provincial governments will only make this situation worse, as professional staff and resources are drained from public hospitals to private clinics.
We then made a long trip to Kanata, to visit the Lockheed Martin’s large, gleaming facility. Lockheed’s products, from fighter jets to missile systems, have been fuelling the genocide in Gaza. And while the Carney government hit pause on the purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets, the federal government continues to do billions in business with the U.S.-based defence contractor. The Kanata facility, for instance, manufactures computerized weapons control systems for naval vessels, including for Canada’s navy.
A partial tally by CBC News found at least $13.6 billion in upcoming DND contracts going to U.S. weapons manufacturers, as of September 2025 – everything from rocket launchers and surveillance planes to combat vehicles and weapons systems. The beneficiary of the $2.4 billion deal for U.S.-made mobile rocket system? Lockheed Martin. Historically, Lockheed Martin is the second-largest recipient of federal contracts – only Brookfield has gotten more.
Retired Canadian general Mark Norman told CBC that the U.S. has the “potential to punish Canada” by leveraging these programs against us. “Every one of those programs … has huge vulnerabilities with respect to our continued dependence on not just U.S. supply chains, but on U.S. access and U.S. technology,” Norman said.
Is Lockheed Martin a Canadian company?
One point of discussion on the bus that came up was: what even counts as a Canadian company? The Liberal government has pledged to shift 70% of all procurement to Canadian defence companies by 2035. But as many analysts have warned, Carney’s “Buy Canadian” policy has so many loopholes that you could drive an armoured personnel carrier through it.
Under the current content rules, Lockheed Martin Canada would likely count as a “Canadian Supplier” and receive preferential treatment within the procurement process. “All it takes to be a Canadian supplier is that you maintain an address with employees in Canada and pay taxes here,” writes policy analyst David Corbett of the Canadian Shield Institute. “It’s clear that the federal government’s idea of Canadian suppliers includes any branch plant subsidiary of a foreign multinational.”
This dubious definition of a “Canadian” company was illustrated by the Defence Minister, just as CANSEC got underway. Declassified documents obtained by the Toronto Star revealed that Canadian military and intelligence services have signed contracts with Palantir, a company founded by far-right tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel. The U.S. based company has become notorious for its executives’ militaristic views and its AI technology’s role in generating targets for the Israeli military in its destruction of Gaza.
Minister David McGuinty’s response? “Palantir Canada is a Canadian company, subsidiary to Palantir global,” McGuinty said.
Shut Down CANSEC
The day after our bus tour, hundreds of people opposed to war and Israel’s attack on Gaza rallied outside the CANSEC arms fair, greeted by a massive contingent of riot police. Independent journalists were barred from attending the convention by CADSI, though Israeli arms company representatives were welcomed in. The British government barred Israeli government officials from a London arms show in September 2025 over its military operation in Gaza, but not Canada.
Health care was supposed to be “at the core” of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to “Build Canada Strong,” but as weapons spending has soared, the federal government has abandoned one health care promise after another.
What has been sold as a necessary effort to protect ourselves from Trump’s bullying looks more like a stealth policy of corporate welfare-through-warfare. This shift risks integrating Canada even more deeply into the U.S. military industrial complex. And it is coming at the expense of Canadians’ most cherished social programs – including public healthcare.
The bus tour allowed participants to make connections between seemingly disparate issues of defence policy and healthcare.
We’ll need to do much more of this in the future, to build a broad front demanding generational investments in health care and other public services, and an international role that is centred on peace, diplomacy and true independence from the U.S.
