Earlier this year, AVSS Co-Founder and CEO Josh Ogden warned that Canada was at risk of becoming a country of drone subsidiaries, rather than drone builders.
He has observed the country’s drone industry becoming ever more dependent on foreign technology, with too few Canadian companies retaining control over the intellectual property and production behind the systems they sell. He believes domestic drone companies need support at multiple levels of the sector’s supply chain, and was clear about the risks Canada faces if things don’t change.
“Capital flows toward certainty.”
Sean Greenwood, Canadian UAVs
“A foreign manufacturer can turn off your technology,” Ogden told BetaKit in February. “And if there’s a conflict and you’re reliant on a US manufacturer, there’s going to be so much demand in their home country that we’re not going to get service.”
These concerns are becoming harder to ignore as drones take on a growing role in defence and security, and as the nation works to strengthen its defence supply chains through the Defence Industrial Strategy.
AVSS has taken a meaningful role in advocating for Canada’s homegrown drone sector in recent years. It is one of 14 Canadian companies that recently formed the Canadian Alliance for National Uncrewed Capability (CANUC), which is calling on Ottawa to prioritize procuring Canadian-made systems.
BetaKit spoke with other leaders in Canada’s drone sector, whose companies are also founding signatories of CANUC, about how they’re building sovereignty into their companies, and what Canada needs to do to strengthen domestic control of the industry.
Canada needs more airtime
Canadian UAVs has spent more than a decade focused on one of the drone industry’s core constraints: giving drone operators repeatable, lawful access to civilian airspace. Its Sparrowhawk Detect and Avoid Radar System is designed to help operators, researchers, and manufacturers fly farther and for longer periods while remaining integrated with Canada’s national airspace.
According to Canadian UAVs’ President Sean Greenwood, this capability has implications for Canada’s domestic drone industry. He explained that Canadian manufacturers compete with companies in the United States, Israel, and China that have accumulated extensive flight experience.
“Flight time is the currency of this industry,” Greenwood said.
The company has made three deliberate choices about where control resides. Since its inception, Canadian UAVs has avoided Chinese goods, remained a Canadian-controlled private corporation, and built its own software engineering capability, so its airspace data can stay in Canada.
Some of those decisions cost the company in the short term, but have supported security clearances, controlled goods registration, and continued work with customers in the long term.
Greenwood believes sovereignty means retaining Canadian control over the parts of a drone system needed to maintain, modify, and support it. For his company, that includes design authority, software and data, certification pathways, and final integrations.
“For components, it means a deliberately layered supply chain where you know exactly what comes from allied partners, what has a second source, and what’s a single point of failure,” he said, adding that allied partnerships are “genuinely a strength” for drone companies “when structured properly.”
He wants to see Ottawa designate national strategic partners for uncrewed, autonomous systems under the Defence Industrial Strategy, and back that designation with procurement.
“The signal we need to send to every Canadian OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deciding whether to build intellectual property here or license it from abroad is that domestic capability will be recognized and contracted,” Greenwood said. “Capital flows toward certainty.”
The weak links in Canada’s supply chain
ARA Robotics is approaching drone sovereignty from the manufacturing floor up. The Montréal-based company develops unmanned aircraft systems for defence, security, mining, and wildfire management applications.
The firm is currently focused on increasing the amount of Canadian technology inside the aircraft itself. Over the past year, the company has established new relationships with domestic suppliers and invested in projects intended to bring new production capabilities into the country. Its near-term target is to reach 70 to 80 percent Canadian content across its products.
But the company’s work toward that goal has revealed the limits of what Canadian companies can currently produce on home soil.
“Like other Western nations, Canada continues to face supply chain gaps in critical components such as microelectronics, battery cells, and permanent magnets used in electric motors,” said ARA Robotics CEO Pascal Chiva-Bernard.
Another gap is in the firmware embedded in these systems. Chiva-Bernard believes Canada needs to give greater weight to ensuring these programs are domestically controlled, and therefore adequately protected against cybersecurity threats.
“Simply assembling products in Canada will not create a domestic supplier base that controls the design, manufacturing, and intellectual property behind critical technologies,” Chiva-Bernard said. He argued that Canada eventually needs domestic capability across the value chain, including components, software, manufacturing, and intellectual property.
But building capacity requires manufacturers to know there will be demand for what they produce. Like Greenwood, Chiva-Bernard sees procurement certainty as one of the federal government’s strongest levers. He wants Ottawa to establish multi-year, high-volume procurement programs with Canadian drone manufacturers.
He said it would give local firms enough visibility to invest in production capacity, deepen relationships with Canadian suppliers, and reduce their reliance on offshore designs.
“Drone technology has fundamentally transformed modern warfare, and Canada’s demand for these capabilities is growing rapidly,” Chiva-Bernard said. “ARA Robotics is ready to meet this need with best-in-class, sovereign UAS designed and manufactured in Canada.”
PRESENTED BY
Learn more about how AVSS supports the Canadian drone industry.
Feature image provided by AVSS.