Canada has a technology deficit problem in high-stakes, hard-to-reach places.
Whether it’s a remote mine in northern Ontario, an oil field in Alberta, critical infrastructure across the Rockies, or defence operations in remote parts of the country, these environments still depend on systems that support complex operations—even when networks are unreliable and conditions are harsh.
“We can always engage with stakeholders in Ottawa when needed. But the innovation, talent, and scaling ecosystem that exists in Markham is much harder to replicate.”
Louis Lambert,
Emergent Solutions
The trouble is, in a country as large and geographically challenging as Canada, reliable connectivity—whether cellular, satellite, or fibre—is not always guaranteed. As industries adopt more AI and automation, the stakes are becoming harder to ignore. In some settings, disruptions can interrupt operations and put critical assets and lives at risk.
Louis Lambert, CEO of Emergent Solutions, calls this “the intelligent operational edge.” These are the places where “real-world and real-time decisions are made,” but where the infrastructure many organizations rely on is often “limited, unreliable, contested, or unavailable.”
The result is growing demand for technology that ensures critical data, voice, video, and AI-driven insights, alongside automation and autonomous systems, continue to perform even when one communications path drops.
Markham-based Emergent Solutions offers one example of how startups are approaching the problem. The company builds multi-bearer wired and wireless communications and intelligent edge compute systems that combine resilient connectivity, AI processing, and ruggedized hardware specifically to support industrial and defence operations in remote settings.
“Our goal is to provide operators with the resilience and operational continuity they need to maintain situational awareness and make informed and automated decisions when and where they matter most,” said Lambert.
Markham’s deep tech moment
Emergent may be a young company, but the team behind it isn’t starting from scratch. Many team members previously helped build Redline Communications, which was also headquartered in Markham, into a multinational wireless company with customers in more than 100 countries. That experience helped inform where Emergent would be best positioned to grow, ultimately leading the company to relocate from Ottawa to Markham. Redline was eventually acquired by the US company, Aviat Networks.
Home to more than 1,500 technology companies, employing more than 35,400 knowledge workers, Markham is one of Canada’s most concentrated hubs for advanced industrial and deep-tech development. The city has also been actively positioning local companies on national defence stages, including at CANSEC, Canada’s largest defence and security trade show. On June 25, ventureLAB, a tech hub and hardware accelerator in Markham, and co-hosted Defence Ready, an event designed for local SMEs and innovators looking to enter and scale within Canada’s expanding defence ecosystem.
That kind of energy is exactly what Lambert said drew Emergent to Markham: engineering skill, advanced manufacturing, established technology companies, and a network built to take companies from product development to global markets.
“We can always engage with stakeholders in Ottawa when needed,” he said. “But the innovation, talent, and scaling ecosystem that exists in Markham is much harder to replicate.”
For startups building technologies designed for complex industries, those relationships can matter. Defence, industrial automation, and critical infrastructure all depend on long sales cycles and trust that can take years to establish. The right introductions to customers, prime contractors, investors, and government stakeholders “can dramatically accelerate progress,” he said.
Building for the operational edge
The work Emergent is doing is arriving at a moment when Canada is paying close attention to defence, critical infrastructure, and homegrown technologies. Canada’s defence spending is rising, and a new Defence Industrial Strategy is expected to drive an estimated $180 billion in procurement investment, $290 billion in defence-related infrastructure spending, and another $125 billion in downstream economic activity over the next decade. At the same time, there’s a growing global appetite for Canadian energy and critical resources.
The changing priorities are also shaping the kinds of technologies companies are being asked to build.
Emergent’s systems, for example, support multiple connectivity options simultaneously, including UHF broadband, 4G and 5G, Wi-Fi, LoRa, Ethernet, and satellite. Lambert described the approach as “resilience through diversity,” keeping critical data, voice, video, and AI-enabled insights moving even when one communications path goes down.
Operators can start with communications capabilities and later add AI applications, sensor integration, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, or new networking technologies as requirements change, often without needing to send teams back into the field.
Emergent’s systems are also designed with “dual use” in mind—built to support both industrial and defence customers from the start rather than being adapted later.
“Reliable communications, intelligent edge computing, AI-enabled situational awareness, sensor fusion, and autonomous operations are valuable whether the customer is operating a mine, an electrical utility, a remote energy asset, or a defence mission,” he said.
For Lambert, the real potential reaches beyond any one startup.
“The opportunity in front of us is not simply to develop the next generation of technology,” he said. “It is to build it, scale it, manufacture it, and export it from Canada to the world.”
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Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by ThisisEngineering.