Matthew Lombardi is the co-founder of The Icebreaker, Canada’s defence innovation network.
The United States released its new National Security Strategy last week, a document that makes something brutally clear: the era of Canada living as a wealthy nation, renting its security from Uncle Sam at a steep discount, is over.
A reflexive historical response to any spot of trouble with our southern neighbour would be familiar: reach for the shopping catalogue of European defence primes and buy more foreign hardware. But that instinct must now be resisted. The world is moving into a phase of geopolitical and technological fragmentation, and outsourcing national security is no longer feasible. Our defence posture must reflect that reality.
The world is moving into a phase of geopolitical and technological fragmentation, and outsourcing national security is no longer feasible.
Canada needs sovereign capability. Not in a jingoistic sense, but in the practical, modern sense that a G7 nation should possess: the ability to build, maintain, iterate on, and scale technologies fundamental to its own defence. That means supply-chain depth, Canadian-owned intellectual property, and procurement frameworks that reward domestic innovation rather than reinforcing our historical habit of buying foreign and hoping for crumbs of industrial offsets.
Canada’s submarine program offers a perfect illustration. Canada is right to look to Germany or South Korea for the acquisition of new submarines; these are complex platforms where allies have decades-long advantages. But the timeline between vendor selection and actual delivery—easily a decade—should not be wasted.
In that same window, Canadian firms can design, build, and deploy a made-in-Canada network of inexpensive, mass-produced, unmanned submersibles capable of monitoring the Arctic at a scale no legacy submarine fleet could match. Thousands of autonomous undersea vehicles patrolling our northern approaches would provide the surveillance backbone our navy long ago lost. The technology exists today across Canadian startups, research labs, and dual-use innovators. What’s missing is the procurement pathway.
This is the real test of the forthcoming Canadian Defence Industrial Strategy. Will we create real, repeated, scalable procurement mechanisms for Canadian technology? Here is what that must look like.
First, procurement needs to get out of the museum. Our current model is slow, risk-averse, and allergic to iteration. It was built for an era when warfare changed every 30 years, not every three months. Startups cannot wait a decade for a first contract. They need small, rapid, recurring buys that let them prove, deploy, fail, improve, and scale. This should include pushing smaller procurement authorities down to the Canadian Armed Forces commander level.
Second, Canada must back Canadian IP. Not as a protectionist reflex, but as a strategic necessity. The countries shaping the future of defence, from the US to Australia to South Korea, anchor their strategies in domestic technology foundations. When Canada buys only foreign systems, we outsource not just production but the generation of expertise, patents, supply chains, and export industries. We become consumers of other nations’ security thinking instead of creators of our own.
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Third, the Arctic must become our innovation crucible. Canada controls nearly 75 percent of the Arctic coastline. It is the geography where our national interest is clearest and where the stakes of inaction are highest. If we cannot innovate there, we cannot innovate anywhere. A distributed network of unmanned underwater vehicles is exactly the kind of sovereign capability that strengthens the country, invigorates domestic industry, and signals to allies and adversaries that we intend to own our strategic backyard.
None of this requires fantasy budgets. Canada already spends billions on defence procurement, but too little of it flows to the companies capable of making Canada stronger, smarter, and safer. The defence strategy now being drafted in Ottawa must treat Canadian technology firms as core partners, not as peripheral suppliers of “nice-to-have” add-ons to US or European platforms.
A country that cannot build anything for its own defence will eventually be unable to shape its own destiny. The world has changed. Our assumptions must change with it.
The opinions and analysis expressed in the above article are those of its author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of BetaKit or its editorial staff. It has been edited for clarity, length, and style.