Palantir Has No Place in Canada

In February 2025, Palantir's CEO Alex Karp closed an earnings call with a smile on his face. "Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world. And, when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them." That company has had a place in Canada's military since 2020, which is already too much. As of today we know the contract could be worth up to $63 million, and that's about all we know.

National Defence flagged it internally as "not for public disclosure," and it still won't say what Palantir's software does for our military. An American company built alongside the CIA has a place inside our armed forces, and Canadians aren't allowed to know what it's doing there. I find that extremely concerning.

What Canada bought

On March 27, 2020, the Department of National Defence gave Palantir a contract for Gotham, for the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, the command over JTF2. It was sole-sourced on the grounds that Palantir was the "only supplier that could meet the key requirement." It started at $14.4 million. Over five years it was amended twelve times, and the twelfth amendment in March 2025 brought it to $44.4 million. DND told the Investigative Journalism Foundation it has spent $46.8 million so far, and the documents CBC reported today put the ceiling at $63 million.

There's a second deal too. In June 2025 DND signed a $3.7 million "data integration and analytics platform subscription" with Palantir, which the Toronto Star reported.

DND says Gotham runs on closed, classified networks in secure Canadian facilities, and that a security assessment found no government data, prompts, outputs or metadata could be stored, accessed or processed outside Canada. When CBC asked what information Gotham processes, DND declined to say, citing national security. I'm just not buying it. We're asked to take that assessment on trust from the same department that marked the contract "not for public disclosure," and it won't even say whether the system is air-gapped, which Jennifer Evans called on DND to disclose.

DND also told CBC that "The United States CLOUD Act does not have any authority over servers located in Canada," which is wrong. The CLOUD Act lets US authorities compel any company under US jurisdiction to hand over data it controls, wherever that data is stored, and DND's contract is with the Canadian branch of an American company. A Microsoft executive admitted the same thing under oath to the French Senate about data sitting in European data centres.

Built with the CIA

Gotham was built for the CIA. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, put $1.25 million into Palantir in its early days. Starting in 2005, two Palantir employees flew from Palo Alto to CIA headquarters in Langley every two weeks, roughly two hundred trips in all, and that deployment is what let Palantir build Gotham, its first product. Karp has said the most valuable part of In-Q-Tel's investment was the access to the CIA analysts who'd use the software. That's from Michael Steinberger's book on Karp, excerpted in Fast Company.

So the software on our special forces' networks was designed alongside American intelligence analysts, by a company whose CEO sells killing to his shareholders.

Why it matters

(Disclosure: I run Storm Developments, a Canadian cloud company, so I have a stake in Canada buying Canadian.)

What I can see is six years of our special forces building their work around an American product, renewed twelve times without going back to tender. Every amendment makes leaving harder, and that's the part that worries me most.

Every defence contractor profits from war, and Palantir sells something more on top of that, software that pulls together what a government holds on people so it can find them and act on them. In April 2025 ICE paid Palantir about $30 million to build a system for tracking immigrants for deportation. Our military is running their software out of public view, and it gets harder to remove every year. Techno-fascism is what you get when the state's power runs through private software the public can't inspect, vote on or get rid of, and that's the arrangement DND has been quietly extending since 2020.

Other countries are already backing out. France and Germany have ended Palantir intelligence contracts and pledged to rely less on foreign providers, and MPs in the UK are calling to end a £330 million NHS contract. As Vass Bednar told CBC, "These are not neutral technologies."

The usual answer is that nothing Canadian does what Gotham does. Jennifer Evans named two Canadian companies, Caseway in Vancouver and Anvil in Ottawa, while saying neither matches Palantir's breadth today. They never will if the contract keeps getting renewed without a tender.

What I'm asking

Write your MP and ask for three things.

Retender the contract competitively.
Disclose its full scope to Parliament.
Publish a plan to move to Canadian-controlled software.

The third one matters most. Retendering and disclosure get us a fair fight and an honest record, and the plan is what gets Palantir out. We should do everything in our power as a freedom-loving nation to kick Palantir out, or we won't be a freedom-loving nation for long.

Find your MP.

Palantir has no place in Canada.