r/canadaguns Big Bore Specialist Mar 22 '26

News / Politics / Activism Canada fast-tracks army rifle upgrade with $307M initial order | CBC News

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/army-rifles-defence-procurement-canada-9.7134518

Was this Colt’s reward for participating in the gun confiscation program?

$307,000,000 rifle contract.

126 Upvotes

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53

u/NTNDoc Mar 22 '26

Not everything is about the buyback. We massively increased defence spending this year, so the CAF needs to sink the funds into something or risk having to return the money.

CMAR has been on the books for a while and is one of the easier programs to fast track given that its already been field trialed and is an incremental update to the C8A3.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

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3

u/Lurch_902 Mar 22 '26

You don’t think new gear will help motivation?

10

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

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3

u/LongjumpingChipmunk Mar 22 '26

Bet you're fun at parties! On the bright side, there have been some public expenditure announcements that are promising, and sounds like recruitment is up. I'm hoping our civil defense posture evolves as well.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

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2

u/Spydude84 Mar 22 '26

New equipment could help in certain areas, if we have modern jets we might get more air force signups, but I think the reality is that a lot of young people don't feel like their country is worth fighting and dying for right now.

Liberal policies seem to universally crush military recruitment. Biden had issues, but now Trump's military is seeing great numbers.

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u/thisghy Mar 22 '26

You also need real operations to get involved in and keep looking forward to, or else troops leave after a little while. We dont have those, we have Latvia.

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u/Spydude84 Mar 23 '26

This is a good point. Very interesting to see how the public hates to see action because of the risk of troops dying, but that is what people signed up to do. I mean, they didn't sign up to die, but they signed up to do the job and take some level of risk, which should absolutely be mitigated.

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u/thisghy Mar 23 '26

Yeah, im telling you as a ex regf guy, this is what troops want the most often. It doesnt have to be that kinetic and risky even, but we need real operations to deploy on and we dont have many of those, and the ones that we have had over the past decade were small. (Also, not counting latvia or Poland again, those are effectively just long maple resolves).

2

u/PteSoupSandwich The 10/22 Dude Mar 22 '26

👆 True.

Most of the guys I served with got out after Afghanistan was done. Nothing to do and nowhere to go wasn't appealing to a lot of us.