By Cam Scott
In October, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the creation of a new arm of the federal government, the Defence Investment Agency (DIA), intended to “rebuild, rearm and reinvest in the Canadian Armed Forces faster.” On December 9, the DIA announced its first procurement – the Enhanced Satellite Communications Project-Polar (ESCP-P).
With a total budget of over $5 billion, the ESCP-P looks like a windfall for big tech and aerospace firms. Alongside the Defence Enhanced Surveillance from Space Project (DESSP), a satellite array in support of NORAD missions, this is one of the larger single project budget lines under the banner of Carney’s “Canada Strong” budget which pledges a staggering $81.8 billion to the military over the next five years.
Harder still to fathom is the unprecedented spending authority that this war budget places in the hands of the DIA, focused on contracts worth over $100 million, and its head, former Royal Bank of Canada executive Doug Guzman. With Liberal MP and Secretary of Defence Procurement Stephen Fuhr, Guzman now wields greater contracting power than almost anyone in Canada’s government, and at the personal invitation of his longtime friend Mark Carney. So, what are his other qualifications?
Guzman’s time at RBC coincided with soaring investment in carbon intensive industries – in 2022 RBC was the biggest fossil fuel financier in the world – and ever greater penetration of global markets by Canadian capital. Notably, Guzman oversaw the acquisitions of London-based Brewin Dolphin, making RBC the third largest wealth management company in Britain, and Los Angeles-based City National Bank, of which he soon became chair. This level of integration is typical of Canadian imperialism, though RBC ended up having to inject billions of dollars into the US bank to boost liquidity amid shocks in the tech sector.
Before his tenure at RBC, Guzman was head of Global Metals & Mining and Canadian Investment Banking businesses at Goldman Sachs, where his experience overlapped that of Mark Carney, then-overseer of emerging market debt for the firm. This professional proximity tells us a great deal about the Carney agenda, and the role of career imperialists from the financial sector in Liberal designs on re-militarization and resource development.
Elbow gripping
Who then are the corporate beneficiaries of Guzman’s government debut, and Carney’s rapidly thawing Cold War over Arctic waters? The first contract under the ESCP-P was awarded to two Canadian companies, Telesat and MDA Space. Ottawa-based Telesat is one of the world’s largest satellite operators and tightly integrated into the Canadian Armed Forces, while Brampton-based MDA Space is best known for manufacturing the Canadarm. Both companies’ stocks rocketed after the announcement, but it’s here that one senses the true indifference of “Buy Canadian” sloganeering in the age of monopoly.
Telesat shares are principally owned by US billionaire Mario Gabelli, as well as New York-based Rubric Capital Management, distantly followed by a handful of Vancouver-based, transnational firms. Clearly Telesat’s performance is neither to the benefit of workers in Canada nor “Canadian communities,” but to politically meddlesome US billionaires. (Gabelli has praised Trump for bringing about “the end of creeping socialism” in the US, and Rubric Capital’s CEO David Rosen was a major donor to recent smear campaigns against Zohran Mamdani.)
Unsurprisingly, Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg remains a close personal friend of Mark Carney, dating back to Carney’s time at the Bank of England, and is already the recipient of many billions of dollars in government contracts. This obvious conflict of interest was seized upon by Conservative critics in 2024 when Telesat received a $2.14 billion loan from the government for satellite expansion.
Opposition scrutiny of Carney’s cronyism dates back to the first days of his advisory role to Trudeau, during which Brookfield Asset Management (with Carney as chair) solicited $10 billion in federal money in order to seed an asset fund. Conservative condemnation was swift, and not because of Carney’s attempts to benefit by Canada’s heavily financialized pensions. In a fit of colourful invective, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner portrayed Carney as a “fart-catching” flatterer, as well as an “uber-elitist and longtime carbon tax supporter.”
This last dig may seem like a non sequitur, but the ruling class fractions who want Carney’s head still tend to speak from the west, and with a vested interest in oil and gas. From Calgary, Garner has accused Carney of attempting to “destroy Canada’s energy sector” by a variety of means including opposition to an eastern Canadian pipeline. But as New Brunswick hopes for expedited approval of its Eastern Energy Partnership, pipeline included, under Bill C-5, Garner may have to change her tune. Not only has Carney made swift overtures to such critics – just look at the appointment of Trans Mountain CEO Dawn Farrell to the Major Projects Office – but his taste for capital intensive projects in defence has stayed a flight to the right by risk-seeking venture capitalists as well.
As recently as early 2025, one could observe a migration of tech CEOs from the Liberal camp to the Tories, as dozens of executives flocked to pricey, ticketed roundtables with Pierre Poilievre and began to parrot his campaign. At a distance, this alignment seemed to duplicate the recomposition of the MAGA movement in the US, gathering high-earning entrepreneurs around matters of deregulation and taxation.
By spring, however, the tech exodus from the Liberal camp had all but reversed. Carney’s overtures seemed to quiet Poilievre’s loudest proponents including Shopify president Harley Finkelstein and Maverix founder John Ruffolo, and his week-one cancellation of both consumer carbon pricing and an increased tax on capital gains quickly consoled a range of corporate discontents. Carney’s ability to thwart this sequence is impressive, but depends upon his own rightward ambitions – and these people are his rivals only insofar as they are also his peers.
Friends with benefits
As quickly as Carney has reconsolidated the Liberal base, even attracting numbers from its opposition, he has ushered in near total rapprochement with the US. In his April victory speech, Carney announced that Canada’s former relationship with our closest neighbour, “based on steadily increasing integration,” had come to an end. Today, reintegration seems assured – but supplemented by intense domestic competition, even repressing prices for the US bidder.
While Carney reshuffles Canadian industry to protect against Trump’s truculence, trade talks with the US and Mexico barrel ahead. However blustery the talk so far, no one expects Canada, nor any signatory, to exit USMCA anytime soon, and certainly not on terms that will benefit working people anywhere across North America.
In the lead-up to these high-stakes negotiations, it seems that Carney has dipped into his personal contacts once more, tagging Mark Wiseman as the new ambassador to the US. As former head of active equities at BlackRock and current chair of Lazard Canada, Wiseman is yet another controversial figure from the world of high finance, and another personal friend of Mark Carney.
From 2012 to 2016, Wiseman ran the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board with global ambition, using public wealth for imperialist plunder. In 2014 Wiseman opened the board’s São Paulo office, which was the driving force behind the fund’s extensive investment in Latin American energy infrastructure including fracking operations in the Peruvian Amazon. These violent patterns of investment continued continentally, where Wiseman oversaw the purchase of vast oil and gas assets in Colorado from Encana for $900 million US, and the acquisition of a significant stake in TORC Oil & Gas as they broke ground in southeast Saskatchewan.
The record of these years speaks for itself, and Wiseman’s contributions to upcoming negotiations will surely pander to the interests of a financial elite on both sides of the border. In fact, he already parrots many demands of the Trump administration, polemicizing against interprovincial trade regulation and Canada’s “sacred cow” of supply management. In an op-ed for the Globe and Mail from 2024, Wiseman tore into barriers to foreign investment, insisting that multinational capitals “should not have to explicitly demonstrate that a transaction is ‘of net benefit to Canada’ to move forward.”
Needless to say, this sounds at odds with Carney’s promises to “protect our workers and businesses” and “build Canada strong.” But misdirection is one of this government’s signature moves. Liberals are as changeable as the markets their values reflect, and Mark Wiseman goes to Washington for the same reason that Dawn Farrell gets to hand out cheques to her former industry, or that Doug Guzman can place new constellations over the Arctic.
Carney’s style of leadership keeps adversaries close, and beneficiaries closer still – and however transparent their offices, we ought to watch the money that he calls his friends.
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