This week in Gatineau, I joined the SpaceBound 2026 panel "From Spending to Strength: Building Canada's Defence Capability", organized by Space Canada at the Canadian Museum of History. I shared the stage with Maria Lily Shaw (Novaspace), Chris Pogue (Calian Group), Dr. Ahmad Khorchid (Defence Research and Development Canada), David Musson (Lunar Medical) and Frédéric Grandmont (ABB). Thank you to Space Canada for putting industry and government in the same room for this conversation.
The question behind the session was direct. Canada is about to spend significantly more on defence, so what will that money actually turn into? I answered from where Connektica sits every day, on the production floors where satellites and defence systems are assembled, integrated and tested.
Space has always mattered to defence. What changed over the last five to ten years is scale and speed. The sector moved from building small volumes of satellites for science and telecom to producing them in series, because building that capacity is now how a country protects its interests.
That shift made space dual-use by default. The same off-the-shelf components, the same suppliers and often the same engineers serve commercial and defence programs. The war in Ukraine added a lesson I think every allied country has now absorbed: you cannot depend on space capacity you don't control.
People come first. A large share of our know-how lives in the heads of a few experts, many of them close to retirement, and when they leave the procedures and the judgement leave with them.
The supply chain is the next weak point. Primes have little visibility below their first-tier suppliers, and information still moves by email, spreadsheets and paper. Bottlenecks and quality issues surface late, at integration or final test, when they cost the most to fix.
Infrastructure has a coordination problem. Test facilities, clean rooms and production lines are fragmented and often under-used, and nobody holds a national picture of who can produce what, when, and at what capacity.
The vulnerability that gets the least attention is digital. We already know that critical components, launch and subsystems often come from US suppliers, subject to US export controls and US priorities. Much of our design, production, quality and mission data also sits on US cloud platforms and US software. Under the US CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel a US-based provider to hand over data it controls, even when that data is stored in a Canadian data centre. Hosting in Canada does not guarantee Canadian control.
If I were helping the federal government decide, these are the investments I would prioritize:
Underneath that list is a change in how programs are funded. Today, funding mostly targets Technology Readiness Levels (TRL). Manufacturing Readiness Levels (MRL) deserve the same attention, and industry needs to adopt DFMAIT practices (Design For Manufacturing, Assembly, Integration and Test) so that a prototype can become a product built at rate and competitive price.
This is the problem we built Connektica around. The platform was first designed for production ramp-up, where AIT procedures have to be standardized to run at volume. Defence and space are high-mix, high-complexity, so we extended it for engineers working at low TRL who need room to iterate. The same digital work instructions and test sequences now follow a product from prototype and flight model to small series and production, and because operator feedback and lessons learned are captured at each step, the know-how stays in the process when an expert retires.
On supply chain visibility, suppliers can run approved work instructions and test sequences remotely and upload their test data, which is checked for conformance before parts are accepted. A prime catches a deviation at the supplier's bench, long before final integration.
See how space manufacturers share work instructions and collect test data from their suppliers.
The results are measurable. At Anywaves, antenna testing became 32 times faster. Atem saves more than 2,500 hours a year, and Skynopy was fully operational two months after first access.
We also apply the sovereignty argument to ourselves. Connektica is ITAR-free, and we are migrating all our infrastructure from US hyperscale cloud to sovereign infrastructure that is not subject to the CLOUD Act.
Success is when Canada can build, operate and replace its own defence satellites, through a Canadian supply chain, with all our data under Canadian control.
Getting there will depend less on headline budgets than on whether hundreds of Canadian SMEs can move from prototype to series production without losing quality or traceability on the way.
If you are a Canadian manufacturer preparing to ramp up for defence programs, book a demo and we will walk you through how your AIT would run on Connektica.