Last week in Istanbul, Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked how he felt about the limits placed on Ukraine’s access to Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. As CBC’s Murray Brewster reported, he struggled for a moment before answering. Then he talked about the “immense human suffering” caused by missile strikes on Kyiv and elsewhere, and said: “I search for the right adjective to describe whoever took this decision, or a group of people took this decision, against a country — and it’s against a country that is literally fighting for the lives of its citizens against naked aggression.”
After that he made it into a sales pitch, aimed at Canadians who have doubts about getting closer to authoritarian-leaning Turkey: “We as Canadians do not want to be caught in a situation where we are reliant on one provider that may change their view, or may be forced to change their views, by one nation state that puts Canadians at risk — or compromises our sovereignty, our ability to express our values and live our values.”
He didn’t name the United States or the Trump administration. He didn’t need to. Ukraine uses Starshield to track incoming missiles and jet-powered drones, and to guide interceptor and spy drones. It uses ordinary Starlink for critical internal communications. In mid-October Ukrainian officials said they had lost some of that access. Who did it was a messy question. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Starshield was “not, at this moment, available to Ukraine, and that’s under conversation.” Then on Saturday, the day after Carney spoke, Ukraine’s defence ministry said full access had been restored, with terminals working at “speeds exceeding 400 km/h.” Elon Musk then claimed Ukraine had violated its Starlink agreement.
So the service is back on. That doesn’t really answer Carney’s point, which was that somebody else controls it. Any corporate treasurer knows this risk. Imagine you run a factory and one supplier makes a part you can’t do without. That supplier can raise prices, slow deliveries or stop shipping because its government asked it to. You don’t fix that by trusting the supplier more. You fix it by finding a second one. Canadian officials have been open about wanting to depend less on Starlink and more on a future Telesat system. Turkey is the second supplier for a bigger part of the problem.
Diversification, with paperwork
Most of the coverage of the strategic partnership signed in Ankara on Thursday was about values: Turkey shuts down opposition TV stations, arrests journalists and attacks 2SLGBTQ+ advocates, and Carney’s answer was that engagement is not approval. The defence-industrial part got less scrutiny. It includes a memorandum between Global Affairs Canada and Turkey’s Defence Industry Secretariat that, according to Canadian Defence Review, opens the door to joint ventures and to co-developing drones and air defence systems.
Tolga Demiryol, an associate professor of political science at Altınbaş University in Istanbul, set out the logic in a paper published by the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in early October. “Canada-Turkey defence co-operation is an early test of whether the middle-power co-ordination the prime minister called for at Davos can produce anything more durable than a sequence of transactions,” he wrote, referring to Carney’s World Economic Forum speech in January. In his view both countries now treat their defence industries as tools of national sovereignty: “Canada is seeking to reduce the concentration of its defence procurement in the United States, while Turkey’s industry was built through repeated efforts to escape foreign control over critical components and export permissions.” And: “Turkey is courted today for two reasons: it has more to offer than it once did; and Canada has more reason than it once had to look beyond the United States.” Carney, he wrote, isn’t looking “for a replacement partner, but rather to reduce Canadian exposure to any single foreign supplier.”
The paper also describes a natural division of labour: “Canada’s strength lies in subsystems, sensors and components; Turkey’s lies in integrating them into platforms it can field and export.” That sounds tidy. It is also exactly how the last falling-out happened.
The camera problem
In 2020 Turkish authorities asked for an exemption to import target-acquisition gear made by the Canadian company Wescam for Turkey’s Bayraktar drones. Documents made public later showed that Turkey said the cameras would be used for reconnaissance tied to NATO operations in northern Syria. It was later discovered that they had been illegally diverted to Azerbaijan and used in the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Human rights groups accused Turkey of lying to the Canadian government. The result was a de facto arms embargo, which ended in early 2024 when Canada’s foreign affairs department stopped presumptively denying arms export permits to Turkey.
The awkward part is this. Five years ago Canada was the single foreign supplier that controlled a critical component and switched it off, which is exactly the kind of exposure Turkey’s industry was built to escape. Now each country is the other’s diversification plan. Carney says the new agreement doesn’t mean unfettered exports and that permits will still be reviewed case by case. “We have standards, we have rules and we will follow them, we will continue to follow them,” he said. Put plainly, the export permit is still the contract, and Ottawa still keeps the right to say no.
What Canada is shopping for
Mostly it wants to learn how Turkey did it. “An important point here, I believe that in Turkey, about 80 per cent of the defence needs of this country are produced here. This is not the case in Canada,” Carney said. “So there are a lot of lessons for us on how we can create an industry in our country.” In Istanbul he met Baykar, the private company that makes the TB2 drone. The TB2 stopped Russian armoured columns with precision strikes early in the war in Ukraine. Turkey now builds land and sea drones as well, and is developing its own next-generation fighter, the KAAN. Carney didn’t rule out buying equipment like the TB2, but he put more weight on expertise: “We’re in a position where we’re more in need of Turkish expertise in terms of reinforcing what we need to do to protect Canadians and to serve as a full NATO ally at this stage.”
Money may also flow the other way. Mike Ward, executive director of the Canada Turkey Business Council, said four major Turkish defence companies came to the Toronto Global Forum last year to pitch investment in Canadian aerospace, among other sectors. “They said, ‘Look, we want to do business with Canada. And sure ... Canadian companies can invest in Turkey if you’d like. But we really want to invest in Canada,’” Ward said. “And those companies have been back. So they’re looking to invest. They’re looking to invest in Ontario. They’re looking to invest to Quebec.” There is a European precedent. Baykar completed its purchase of the Italian aerospace company Piaggio in June 2025 and builds drones in a joint partnership with Leonardo, Italy’s leading aircraft maker.
Demiryol thinks shared production and joint rights could be the way forward, and that transparency is what will make it work this time. That’s sensible. Both sides already know from experience what happens when the other one controls the part.