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Canada’s $180 Billion Defence Buildup Is Already Out of Date

Warfare is changing faster than Ottawa’s procurement system can keep up

Canada is about to spend more on defence than any living Canadian has planned for. We have $180 billion in procurement over ten years, a new agency to run the buying, ten named sovereign capabilities, and a target of 70 percent of purchases aimed at Canadian firms. The emerging debate is about numbers: is it enough? Can we afford all of it? Where should it go?

But there’s another question that needs asking, and I don’t have an answer yet: if the most valuable thing available to us is dual-use technology—and I think it is—are we in Canada structurally capable of taking delivery?

Answering that question concerns the plumbing (i.e., the systems and structures through which investment produces tangible returns) rather than the politics (the funding announcements, rhetoric, and optics). It is worth concentrating on the state and functionality of that plumbing since it is what will actually determine what our money buys and unlocks in terms of long-term value.

Dual-use is different now, in 2026, in a way it wasn’t before. The concept is old but the situation is new, and seeing whether the former can meet the challenges posed by the latter is the whole story.

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There are two technical terms worth knowing. The first is “spin-off,” which refers to technology developed for military purposes that later finds civilian use. For fifty years, this was the normal direction of travel for dual use, and many of its examples now serve as the furniture of modern life.

ARPANET—the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network—built by the US’s defence research agency to keep computers talking to one another through disruption, provided the foundations of the internet. The Global Positioning System, or GPS, began life as a US Air Force navigation constellation before it turned into the mechanism we rely on to find a hotel or restaurant. Radar came out of air defence and now sits in every airliner and most cars. Jet propulsion, nuclear power, microwave ovens, the integrated circuit: all of it emerged as something a government wanted or needed for military reasons.

Canada has its own lineage in this field, and it is more impressive than most Canadians realize, even if it’s less well known. In 1949, the Royal Canadian Navy and Ferranti Canada built DATAR—short for Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving—a digital system that fused radar and sonar from several ships into one shared picture of the battle. It worked on Lake Ontario in 1953, a decade before anyone else managed the same trick.

Canada could not afford to fit the fleet, and the Americans built their own instead. But the computing went on to power one of the world’s first computerized airline reservation systems, for Trans-Canada Air Lines, and became the model for a mainframe sold to Britain that became the basis of a major British computer line. Twenty years later, Spar Aerospace built the Canadarm, and the robotics expertise flowed outward into MDA, surgical robotics, and industrial automation.

That is the pattern for how spin-offs become game-changing applications in everyday life: the state pays for the hard part, and the civilian economy inherits the benefit. In short, a country’s technological standing was a function of what its government was willing to fund and support.

Then there is “spin-in,” which is the reverse: technology developed for the commercial market and adopted for military use. And this is now the dominant direction, replacing rather than merely supplementing the spin-off model.

Consider where the leading edge of computing sits: machine learning, sensing, autonomy, batteries, space launch, and manufacturing are effectively the domains of commercial companies, funded by commercial investors, improving on commercial schedules. No defence department on earth is out in front of it. The most consequential battlefield innovations of the past three years—now proving their worth in engagements across Ukraine and the Middle East—largely came from small workshops assembling uncrewed aircraft out of parts anyone can order, from commercial satellite imagery, from off-the-shelf communications terminals, from software shipped in weeks.

Canada’s clearest current example runs both ways at once. The RADARSAT satellites watch ice, floods, crops, and shorelines for civilian agencies. They also watche ships and the waters off our coasts for military ones. There is a seamless, frictionless interoperability between defence and non-defence—a feature that sums up what dual-use means in 2026.

It no........

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