Eliot Pence wants to undermine US dependence and create a “defense premium” for Canada.
I'm back and recovering from a busy week in Ottawa where I participated as Budget 2025 and SAAS NORTH.
There is an interesting coincidence between these two events. In Budget 2025, the federal government marked the beginning of the development of the national defense technology sector. While we still don't know the strategy, we do know how much the feds are willing to spend: Nearly $7 billion will go to the defense industrial strategy as part of a broader $82 billion defense commitment.
“This is an opportunity for generations of entrepreneurs. You have a chance to change the country.”
Two days after budget cuts at the BetaKit main stage at SAAS NORTH, I had the chance to speak with Dominion. Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence. Dominion Dynamics is currently building a sensor network platform to monitor the Arctic, but Pence's ultimate goal is to build Canada's first “defense station.”
“Too many American submarines dominate this market,” he told me. “Eighty percent of what we buy, we buy from American companies. We want to change that. We want to get 80 percent of what we buy from Canadian companies. So we frankly don't care what we do as long as we're a Canadian defense company.”
Pence believes Canadian entrepreneurs will have an opportunity to change the course of the country's development by using defense as an economic multiplier and repatriation tool. There is also the issue of maintaining sovereignty, which seems important.
In this episode of the BetaKit Podcast, recorded live on SAAS NORTH, Pence talks in detail about this opportunity, his thoughts on various budget commitments and why “buying Canadian” is not a good thing.
Will Canadian entrepreneurs answer this call? Let's dig in.
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Image courtesy of SAAS NORTH.
