New military spending triggers anticipation among N.B. defence community

One month after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced what he called "generational" military spending, New Brunswick’s defence ecosystem is on high alert.

Carney pledged $81.8 billion over five years to rearm and rebuild the Canadian military, which includes an extra $8.7 billion to reach NATO’s defence spending target of two per cent of gross domestic product this fiscal year.

With less than four months for Ottawa to get that funding out the door, everyone in the defence sector is eager to flaunt what’s for sale.

A number of Canadian companies gathered at the Thales National Digital Excellence Centre in Fredericton last week to demonstrate their latest technology and capabilities.

Cara Salci is vice-president of growth, industry and corporate affairs at Thales Canada, a large prime contractor with the Canadian Armed Forces and leader in cybersecurity. She said industry players are getting prepared for what’s to come.

“We're seeing our stakeholders and our customers ask questions about how we can scale up faster, what type of people or talent we might need to deliver on a program or a capability and by when can we do that,” she said.

Those questions come on the heels of what Ottawa is calling the largest defence spending in decades. And there’s even more to come, with the Liberal government pledging to meet NATO’s defence spending target of five per cent over the next decade.

With everyone getting in line for a piece of the investment, Salci said it’s also important to recognize the seriousness and rationale behind the spending, along with the “changing geopolitical climate.

“We know that meeting our minimum two per cent NATO commitments is important for Canada,” she said. “It's important for our allies to be able to trust that Canada will do what it says it will do on the world stage.

“So as important as these investments are, it's really about delivering value, capability and resilience to Canadians to both secure and ensure our own sovereignty and also be able to support those who serve our forces around the world.”

Sundeep Kharey is co-founder of Tacteris, a Calgary company that develops planning software for military operations. He calls it a small company, but said they punch above their weight with “world class” technology.

In June, that technology was used during the Group of Seven, or G7, summit in Kananaskis to ensure security during high-level meetings with some of the world's most powerful leaders.

“We’re very lucky with the feedback we got from the boots on the ground, right from the commanders that were using it, from headquarters right down to the snipers that took our technology into the mountains, that they wanted to see more of this," Kharey said.

The company had trouble breaking into the Canadian market when it started out in 2012, he said, but recently there’s been more traction at home.