Ottawa’s own contract with SpaceX, the company behind Starlink, has grown to nearly $29 million, even as Prime Minister Mark Carney tells Canadians the country will “diversify away” from Elon Musk’s satellite service.
Federal disclosure records show a Shared Services Canada deal with SpaceX Canada Corp. started at $2.26 million in 2023 and has been amended at least eight times since (via Tesla North).
According to the Government of Canada’s proactive disclosure record, the contract covers communications and network services and began on October 24, 2023. The record doesn’t name Starlink or spell out the services, but SpaceX Canada Corp. is the Canadian subsidiary of the company whose main telecom business is the satellite network. The deal was originally set to end on October 24, 2025, with a total value of $2,260,000.
Since then, the end date has moved three times, first to March 31, 2026, then to February 28, 2027, and now to March 31, 2027. The latest disclosed total, filed for the first quarter of the 2026-2027 fiscal year (April to June 2026), sits at $28,941,731.17, or roughly 12.8 times the original value.
An amendment of $8,797,711.89, reported for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024-2025, pushed the deal past $11 million. Smaller changes followed in 2025-2026, including additions of $791,000 and $226,000.
The largest jump came in the January to March 2026 reporting period, when an amendment worth $17,221,200 lifted the total to $29,385,976.56. That same quarter also includes a $339,000 reduction plus additions of $282,500 and $150,290, while a later $444,245.39 reduction brought the figure to where it stands today.
Shared Services Canada awarded the contract through an advance contract award notice and received a single bid. The record says the limited tendering reason was “no response to bid solicitation,” and cites the exception that “only one person is capable of performing the contract.” No intellectual property terms are included, and the vendor is listed with a Halifax postal code.
Carney has spent the fall arguing Canada can’t rely on a single foreign-controlled network. After the Canada-EU summit, he warned that leaning on a system “a billionaire, almost trillionaire, decides to turn off” is “not a good idea,” though he also conceded Canada can’t drop Starlink overnight.
Telesat sits at the centre of the government’s answer. Ottawa has lined up more than $5 billion in federal loans and contracts for Telesat’s Lightspeed network, which is aimed at government, military and enterprise customers, including a $2.7 billion Arctic military deal whose satellites are set to ride SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to orbit.
Lightspeed still has no satellites in orbit, and the company is working through a US$1.71 billion debt payment due December 6. Lenders have floated a rescue plan that would give them first claim on Telesat’s Lightspeed stake if it can’t pay.
Ontario took a harder line in March 2025, cancelling its $100 million Starlink deal over U.S. tariffs. Federally, the opposite has happened: Ottawa’s SpaceX bill kept climbing well into Carney’s time in office, and the disclosure record doesn’t say what the added spending covers.
Should Ottawa keep expanding its SpaceX spending until a Canadian option is ready, or start cutting it back now?
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