Beyond the $5,000 Drone: Scaling Canada's Defence Drone Initiative
This month in Calgary, I had the honour of watching Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stand up in front of Canada’s defence industry and send a message of urgency, scale, and partnerships.
This message tied the new Defence Drone Initiative (DDI) directly to our ongoing support for Ukraine, and that has fundamentally strengthened both efforts. Ukraine gets access to innovative Canadian technology to defend its sovereignty, and the Canadian defence industry gets the boost it needs to become relevant in that conflict and those to follow.
Ultimately, the DDI is a grand experiment designed to try to break Canada out of its shocking inability to procure uncrewed systems on any relevant time scale. On the larger end of the scale, the RCAF’s first MQ-9 drones are scheduled for delivery in 2028, a full 19 years after the first request for proposals was supposed to be released by the JUSTAS program in 2009. On the smaller end, the Canadian Army now has fewer drones than Ukraine loses in a week.
As it stands, the wide net cast by the DDI carries a significant risk. If we’re not careful, we will end up creating an ecosystem where 400 different companies are selling 100 drones each to the Canadian Armed Forces. That is a recipe for breadth, not depth, and creates the illusion of a thriving sector without actually giving any single company the concentrated capital required to scale production, build robust supply chains, and compete internationally.
If we try to build a domestic industry by churning out $5,000 hardware-focused drones a hundred at a time, we will lose. Canada does not have the manufacturing base to compete in a race to the bottom.
Instead, Canada needs to aggressively lean into what we are already good at.
We are experts in NATO and common standards. Canadian companies have an edge in interoperable systems that routinely surpass our European and American counterparts. We know how to build systems that talk to everything and integrate into multinational coalition environments. In the modern battlespace, a drone that can’t securely share data across the allied network is a waste of batteries, no matter how cheap it is.
Second, we have a deep, sophisticated talent pool in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. At TerraSense, we have proven that Canadian software and sensor fusion can compete on the global stage.
The future of uncrewed systems isn’t the chassis but the intelligence inside it. Autonomous systems that can operate in GNSS-denied environments, distributed edge computing that can identify threats in real-time, and architectures that can scale and play with global allies.
The DDI is a massive opportunity backed by tremendous political will. To convert this experiment into a sustainable, competitive defence tech industry we need to resist the urge to sprinkle capital evenly across hundreds of suppliers. We need to concentrate our bets on scale, interoperability, and the advanced autonomy that Canada can deliver at a global scale.
At TerraSense, we stand ready to lead that charge.
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