CAF Procurement

[Kirkhill]

a culture “of painfully slow decision-making, extreme risk aversion [...] and an implicit acceptance that all defence spending is ultimately discretionary.”

One of the things that is a source of frustration for the [Canadian Armed Forces], for DND, for the Government of Canada and certainly for the minister of defence, is that our procurement processes have many, many layers, which does not always enable us to achieve the result as rapidly as we need to achieve the result.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/01/31/is_upgrading_the_canadian_army_a_mission_impossible_1088453.html

Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with DefensePriorities, a think tank in Washington, DC.

 

[Halifax Tar]

Even at the minor level like what we do in day to day contracting on ships, the process is ridiculously slow.

And as much as it's the system it's also the PS buyers we have that seem to spend more time pushing back on buys than it would take to just buy the fucking items.

There is an attitude at the lower levels that needs to change.

We avoid, at all costs, going to our second line support, because it's not support anymore. It's slow and difficult.

 

[MJP]

Even at the minor level like what we day to day contract on ships, the process is ridiculously slow.

And as much as it's the system it's also the PS buyers we have that seem to spend more time pushing back on buys than it would take to just buy the fucking items.

There is an attitude at the lower levels that needs to change.

I haven't pulled a RCN purchasing groups in a long while but the CA absolutely does not get any bang for its buck with their local purchasing groups.

One of the largest issues with the way we do business at the base/unit level is there is no real coherent oversight looking at streamlining the process and if you let it the system/policy will drag everyone down. We are great at looking at purchasing files to find a mistake but no one is going in and saying "Hey, how can we fix this" unless someone keen comes along and makes it work. Even then it only gets fixed locally and usually only until they leave.

I am aware of one initiative in a CA base that has cleaned up many of the roadblocks that are within their control and the numbers have dramatically increased so it can be done. The problem is each L1-L4 approaches it differently and there is no one working to fix it in an overarching way.

This is a bit of a swerve as local purchasing has pretty low limits compared to large scale defence spending but it does highlight that it is a pervasive issue