In 2013, the Department of National Defence posted 63 tenders on the federal procurement portal. In 2025: 1,210. Over twelve years, DND went from 1% of all federal tenders to nearly 18%. That shift didn’t happen through speeches. It happened in the data.
Canada has been promising for years to hit NATO’s 2% of GDP spending target. The procurement data shows the machine was already running well before that promise became a campaign slogan. The bulk of the change happened under the Trudeau government, the same government that NATO allies were publicly pressuring to spend more.
In 2015, DND posted 148 tenders. In 2017: 758. In two years, the department quintupled its presence on the federal portal. The trigger is documented: in June 2017, the Trudeau government released Strong, Secure, Engaged (SSE), its defence policy. The defence budget was set to grow from $18.9B to $32.7B over twenty years. Procurement activity followed almost immediately.
This is the first visible inflection point in the data: a line that lifts in 2016, surges in 2017, and never comes back down to the levels of the previous decade.
In 2015, DND posted 148 tenders. The Strong, Secure, Engaged policy launched in June 2017. In two years, DND jumped to 758. The line never comes back down.
Finding: the 2017 SSE defence policy quintupled DND’s procurement tempo within two years. No other event produces as sharp a shock in the data.
From 2019 to 2021, volume stabilised between 696 and 764 tenders per year. A decade earlier, those numbers would have seemed extraordinary. Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The following year, DND crossed 930 tenders. The effect is measurable, clear, and dated.
DND’s share of all federal tenders climbed from 11.4% in 2021 to 13.2% in 2022. This isn’t a statistical blip: it’s an institutional response, visible in procurement data before it was confirmed by any budget year.
Nearly all of the growth, from 148 tenders in 2015 to 691 in 2024, happened under the Trudeau government. That’s the same prime minister NATO allies were publicly pressuring to increase military spending, and that several partners cast as the Alliance’s reluctant student. The procurement data tells a different story.
In 2025, as Mark Carney, who became prime minister in March, was pledging to reach 2% of GDP by 2030, DND hit its all-time record: 1,210 tenders, or 17.5% of all federal procurement notices. The groundwork was already laid. The election promise was describing a trajectory that was already well underway.
Finding: DND is the only major federal department to have seen sustained, large-scale growth in tender volume since 2017. PSPC, SSC, and the other big buyers have remained relatively flat.
A tender is not a tank. The F-35 contract was signed in 2023; the aircraft won’t arrive until the 2030s. Procurement activity is a leading indicator: it measures intent and the launch of processes, not deployed capability.
Canada has now reached NATO’s 2% GDP target. The procurement data had been signalling this direction since 2017, well before it became a political commitment. The question is whether the industrial supply chain can keep pace. Between a posted tender and a plane in a hangar, there is often a decade.
The machine is running at its highest tempo in decades. Canada has crossed the threshold. The harder question is whether delivery timelines can match the ambition.
ProcureData
department field in the ProcureData database. DND tenders are identified under the canonical value “National Defence”. Years refer to the calendar year of publication. Defence spending as a percentage of GDP is drawn from published NATO reports.
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