Ukrainian soldiers prepare to launch an Avenger UAV drone in the country's Kharkiv region last week.Yevhen Titov/The Associated Press
Last year, the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development – previously known as Industry Canada, prior to a because-it’s-2015 rebranding – published a report on the state of the country’s defence industry.
It’s basically just a short deck, with 10 pages of charts, followed by an appendix of data and sources. It could form the basis for a quick briefing of a new minister, or the first 15 minutes of a department meeting with stakeholders.
The reader learns that in 2022, the Canadian defence sector generated revenues of $14.3-billion, almost half of which came from exports, and that the most valuable subsectors were military aircraft maintenance and repair, manufacturing of military ground vehicles, and naval vessel construction. Most of the information in the report is footnoted as having been pulled from Statistics Canada.
Yet it turns out that this little intro to Canada’s defence industrial sector took two years to produce. That surprising news appears on Page 4, which explains the “Report Development Process.”
The process started with “Stakeholder Engagement” from May to December of 2022. This was followed by a year of “Data Development.” Then came five months of “Research & Analysis,” and then publication in mid-2024.
This is not exactly doing “things previously thought impossible, at speeds not seen in generations.” I don’t mean to single out this one small item and the folks behind it; there are a million stories in the bureaucratic big city and this is just one of them. But this is the speed at which things often move in Canada, and not just in the public sector.
I was looking for info on Canada’s defence industrial base because Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged to rapidly ramp up military spending, and to spend a lot of the new dollars on made-in-Canada gear.
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I was wondering where the money could go. I was especially interested in Canada’s ability to ramp up the domestic design and manufacture of drones – novel weapons that since the start of the war in Ukraine have revolutionized battle in the air, on land and at sea.
Since 2022, Ukraine has been doing the previously impossible, at an impossibly high speed. Its speed has in fact been accelerating, because it has had no other choice. Necessity has been the mother of its inventions. The country, which is relatively poor and not otherwise a member of the high-tech vanguard, has nevertheless turned itself into the Silicon Valley of military drones.
Ukrainian industry, which is believed to have produced millions of drones since the start of the war, operates on a hyperdrive feedback loop running from battlefield to factory and back again, in a non-stop product development cycle.
Is the Canadian Armed Forces working like that? How about our legendarily slow military procurement? How about public procurement generally? The public service, whether federally, provincially or municipally?
Canada, unlike Ukraine, has lived for generations in security, stability and tranquillity. We’ve had the luxury of focusing on the self-indulgent pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Governments have had the liberty to be slow and often wasteful. Existential threats have been distant or imaginary.
But our long period of good fortune, far from strife or danger, in the lee a benign superpower, in a world where walls were always coming down rather than going up, has not prepared us for the more Hobbesian period we may be entering. Money, time and security – national and psychological – are all suddenly in much more limited supply.
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The existential certainty that Canada and the West enjoyed in the post-Second World War era, and which spread to Eastern Europe and much of the rest of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is crumbling. Even the idea that there is such a thing as “the West” is at death’s door.
Ukraine is being subjected to the worst-case scenario of what happens when a stable international order abruptly becomes unstable. People who previously lived lives much like our own, in a country with a geography and climate not dissimilar from ours, have suffered things unimaginable to Canadians: hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, a fifth of the land occupied, nightly air raids and national life reduced to battling for national survival.
We find ourselves in a world suddenly overpopulated with itchy trigger-fingered actors, who want to blow up the status quo. Some threaten from outside, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in recent weeks has sent planes and drones into Poland, Estonia and possibly Denmark, as a test to see if NATO is still alive.
Other threats come from within the tent, starting with a regime in Washington whose deepest impulses are authoritarian and anti-liberal, and extending to voters in many European countries, who are increasingly open to voting for leaders with similar DNA.
It’s a strange time. On one level, things have never been better. The world was mostly at peace for a very long time, accompanied by a steady rise in global prosperity, especially outside the developed world. But tectonic plates are coming unstuck, with each tremour triggering a bigger aftershock.
The summer of 1914, before the Great War started, was apparently lovely. Canada is still dressed for summer.