Carney tells NYT Canada will 'diversify away' from Starlink
Prime Minister Mark Carney told the New York Times that Canada will reduce its reliance on Elon Musk's Starlink, framing it as part of a wider push to cut the country's strategic dependence on the United States.
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada will reduce its reliance on Starlink, Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet service, as part of a broader effort to cut the country’s economic and strategic dependence on the United States.
“Starlink, we will diversify away from, no question,” Carney told the New York Times in an interview published on Wednesday, according to reports from NDTV and TeslaNorth.
Carney framed the move in terms of sovereign risk, saying he had studied the “extreme tail risk” of US military action after President Donald Trump’s repeated rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state. “I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” he said. “That’s just risk management.” He stressed that an invasion was “not a base case,” but that it would be “irresponsible” not to prepare.
The prime minister added that other satellite networks do not yet match Starlink’s capabilities, and suggested Canada could work with partners in Europe and potentially South Korea to build the scale needed to cut dependence, particularly for defence communications. Ottawa has already committed a $2.14-billion loan to Telesat Lightspeed, a planned Canadian low Earth orbit network, and has secured capacity on it for rural and remote providers.
Carney also set limits on the decoupling push, saying it did not make sense to break up the deeply integrated autos sector and cautioning against using southbound energy and food exports as leverage. He said he speaks with Trump “frequently,” and the two have talked a number of times since trade talks collapsed in August.
The interview drew fresh attention to Ontario, where Premier Doug Ford’s government cancelled a $100-million Starlink contract in March 2025 — signed in November 2024 to connect roughly 15,000 rural and northern homes — over Trump’s tariffs. Ontario later reached a confidential settlement with SpaceX, saying only that the “kill fee” was significantly less than the contract value. Meanwhile, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan holds a roughly $8.7-billion SpaceX stake, bought for about $300 million in 2019.
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