The Icebreaker co-founder argues that Canada must resist knee-jerk historical responses to our neighbor to the south.
Matthew Lombardi – co-founder IcebreakerCanadian Defense Innovation Network.
Last week, the United States released its new National Security Strategy, a document that makes something clear: the era of Canada living as a wealthy nation and renting its security from Uncle Sam at a huge discount is over.
The reflexive historical response to any problem with our southern neighbor would be familiar: get a shopping catalog of European defense premiers and buy more foreign equipment. But now this instinct must be resisted. The world is moving into a phase of geopolitical and technological fragmentation, and outsourcing national security is no longer an option. Our defense posture must reflect this reality.
The world is moving into a phase of geopolitical and technological fragmentation, and outsourcing national security is no longer an option.
Canada needs sovereign capacity. Not in the jingoistic sense, but in the practical, modern sense that a G7 country should have: the ability to create, maintain, improve and scale technologies fundamental to its own defense. This means supply chain depth, Canadian-owned intellectual property, and procurement systems that encourage domestic innovation rather than reinforcing our historical habit of buying foreign goods and hoping for crumbs of industrial offsets.
Canada submarine program offers a wonderful illustration. Canada has the right to turn to Germany or South Korea to acquire new submarines; these are complex platforms where allies have advantages that can last decades. However, the time between supplier selection and actual delivery—about ten years—should not be wasted.
In the same window, Canadian firms can design, build and deploy a made-in-Canada network of low-cost, mass-produced unmanned underwater vehicles capable of monitoring the Arctic on a scale that no legacy submarine fleet can match. Thousands of autonomous underwater vehicles patrolling our northern approaches will provide a surveillance backbone long lost to our fleet. This technology exists today in Canadian startups, research labs and dual-use innovators. What is missing is a procurement path.
This is the real test of what lies ahead Canadian Defense Industrial Strategy. Will we create real, repeatable and scalable mechanisms for purchasing Canadian technology? This is what it should look like.
First, procurement must extend beyond the museum. Our current model is slow, risk averse, and averse to iteration. It was built for an era when the tide of war changed every 30 years, not every three months. Startups can't wait ten years to get their first contract. They want small, fast, repeatable buys that will allow them to prove, deploy, fail, improve, and scale. This should include demoting minor procurement authorities to the level of the Commander of the Canadian Forces.
Secondly, Canada must support Canadian IP. Not as a protectionist reflex, but as a strategic necessity. Countries shaping the future of defense, from the United States to Australia and South Korea, are basing their strategies on domestic technologies. When Canada buys only foreign systems, we outsource not only manufacturing, but also the creation of expertise, patents, supply chains and export industries. We become consumers of other countries' security ideas, rather than creators of our own.
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Third, the Arctic must become our crucible of innovation. Canada controls nearly 75 percent of the Arctic coastline. This is the geography where our national interests are most evident and where the stakes of inaction are highest. If we can't innovate there, we can't innovate anywhere. A distributed network of unmanned underwater vehicles is exactly the kind of sovereign capability that strengthens the nation, revitalizes domestic industry, and signals to allies and adversaries that we intend to take over our strategic backyard.
None of this requires fancy budgets. Canada already spends billions on defense procurement, but too little of it goes to the companies that can make Canada stronger, smarter and safer. The defense strategy currently being developed in Ottawa must view Canadian technology firms as core partners, rather than as peripheral providers of “nice-to-have” add-ons to American or European platforms.
A country that cannot build anything to defend itself will ultimately be unable to determine its own destiny. The world has changed. Our assumptions must change along with this.
The views and analysis expressed in the article above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of BetaKit or its editorial team. It has been edited for clarity, length and style.
