Ontario ministers grilled over secret SpaceX payout as MPP's kill-fee questions shut down

Ontario’s opposition parties have seized on the Ford government’s refusal to disclose what it paid Elon Musk’s SpaceX to cancel a $100-million Starlink deal, after an NDP MPP’s questions about the secret “kill fee” were shut down at a legislature committee hearing on Tuesday.

NDP MPP Jessica Bell raised the issue at an estimates committee hearing into spending in the premier’s office and cabinet office, asking whether either office had given Premier Doug Ford information about the cost of cancelling the contract. Red Tape Reduction Minister Andrea Khanjin, representing both offices, refused to answer, saying the focus should be on “how those three offices co-ordinate to fight this global tariff war that we’re in”. Bell told the committee the premier had made a decision “possibly without considering the consequences and the costs of that decision, and now here we are a year later and we’re wondering how much was the kill fee” — before Progressive Conservative backbencher Dave Smith shut the line of questioning down with a point of order.

Liberal finance critic Stephanie Bowman said she found it odd the SpaceX payout appeared nowhere in the public accounts. “Where is that money? How much was it? And why is the government hiding it in the public accounts?” she said, adding the Liberals would keep pressing when the legislature returns.

Noah Jarvis, Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said: “They cancelled the contract for non-business reasons… Taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent, if they’re getting value for money for this and just how much the government is paying SpaceX to not do work.”

The contract, announced in late 2024 by then-infrastructure minister Kinga Surma, was to connect 15,000 rural and remote customers — largely in remote First Nations — to Starlink, and was due to go live in June 2025. Ford cancelled it in March 2025 after US President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada. The province says the confidential settlement with SpaceX was “significantly less than the contract value”; SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The audited public accounts for April 2025 to March 2026 contain no mention of SpaceX or Starlink.

Surma, now President of the Treasury Board, said last Thursday that “the taxpayers were clear in the election that they didn’t want us to pursue that option”, but repeatedly refused to confirm the cost. The next day she added: “When we deal with large procurements… Government does not disclose those parts… if we were to advertise to the world and to the market how much we’re willing to pay, we would lose our competitive advantage.” Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce, who has since taken over the broadband file, also refused, citing the “commercially sensitive nature of that negotiation”, and said the province now wants “a domestic, sovereign, low-orbiting satellite technology that ideally is Canadian, certainly not owned by Mr. Musk”.

Sources

• CTV News (The Canadian Press, Liam Casey), “Ontario ministers defend secret payout to Elon Musk’s SpaceX over nixed Starlink deal”, 30 September 2026: https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/politics/queens-park/article/ontario-ministers-defend-secret-payout-to-elon-musks-spacex-over-nixed-starlink-deal/