KPMG Summit: DIS Could Be the Answer to Canada’s Procurement Delays
By James Careless
Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) is an effective solution to Canada’s procurement delays. That message rang loud and clear during KPMG’s National Interest & Defence Summit. It was held on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre. The one-day event was hosted by KPMG to present the results of its National Interest & Defence Study to government and industry leaders, and to get further feedback from them to refine the study’s conclusions.
The Defence section of the National Interest & Defence Study findings were detailed by Dan Doran, Executive Director and National Lead for Defence and Security at KPMG Canada. These findings are based on KPMG’s conversations with industry and government leaders, in a bid to help Canada plan and manage future procurements based on facts.
“Right now, Canada’s defence system focuses mainly on reinforcing the integrity of the procurement process,” said Doran. “Ensuring layered stewardship over a model of governance and a focus on demonstrating “best value” have trumped moving with speed delivering at scale.”
This fact has long been a problem for the Canadian Armed Forces and this country’s defence industry, and the impetus for change. Thankfully, “the Defence Industrial Strategy has manifested this ambition for change, and this is important,” Doran said. “What the DIS is relaying to industry and telling the government is that we need to get better at executing faster, more consistently at scale and over time.”
According to Doran, the current procurement process isn’t broken. In fact, “It’s working exactly as it is designed to work because the current system is designed to be delivered with heavy governance structures that focus on accountability and best value for money, even at the expense of timely outcomes,” he said. “So the change that we’re seeing right now [through the DIS] is that that system is not appropriate for the situation that we’re collectively living in now.”
He pointed to the vulnerability of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) under the current drawn-out procurement system. “Many SMEs struggle to cross that ‘valley of death’,” said Doran. “It’s cliche, but it’s true. And this is where the current procurement system becomes deadly, because long procurement cycles, compliance burdens, and unclear pathways disproportionately affect all the firms—because capital is internal, and the runway does end.”
To speed up the procurement process, the DIS relies on a strict “build, partner, buy” framework. It forces the government to get “a better understanding of where it’s appropriate for us to develop capabilities at home, build domestically, where we want to partner with allies to build together through partnerships, and where we just simply want to buy off the shelf and that’s the appropriate decision,” Doran said. Making such decisions at the start of procurements can speed up the process.
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Doran also cited the DIS’ commitment to early government engagement with industry as an effective way to speed up procurement. “Limited early engagement makes it hard for firms to invest ahead of demand,” he explained. “Unclear sequencing raises risk and slows commitment. And when engagement comes late, innovation often stalls at the prototype stage instead of becoming deployable capability. Leaders told us that, in many allied systems, earlier engagement helps shape solutions before requirements get locked in, and this invariably reduces rework and delay later.”
In general, the DIS is designed to address the concerns laid out by Doran. In this document, “government is clearly signaling a desire to buy Canadian and strengthen the industrial base,” he said. Still, “it goes back to the challenge of converting that intent into procurement pathways that firms can actually plan around, because at the end of the day, one of the fundamental things that we need is predictability. This goes back to the importance of early engagement. When government and industry can meaningfully and in a trust-based environment engage at the onset, particularly when domestic partners are engaged sooner, risk is reduced and outcomes are improved, and that comes through trust.”
Given rising global volatility and growing security threats facing Canada, the DIS couldn’t have arrived at a better time. This is particularly true when it comes to strengthening Canada’s northern flank against hostile actors. “At its core, Arctic sovereignty is about execution,” said Doran. “In the north, sovereignty is exercised through the ability to deploy, sustain and reinforce capability, reliably over distance and in extreme conditions. So success in the Arctic really is going to be predicated on integrated solutions at pace and at scale, and taking into account collectively the logistics and coordination challenges associated with building in that space.”
Ultimately, making the DIS work will require government and defence companies to pull in the same direction. “When coordination works, friction drops and confidence increases,” Doran concluded. “But as we know, when it doesn’t, even well-designed strategies lose momentum.”
