It seems like everyone in defence and innovation circles is suddenly a dual-use company. Ask around and you'll find sensor makers, robotics firms, AI startups, even textile manufacturers, all reaching for the same label. It's understandable — the federal government is putting real money behind defence, and companies want in. 

But dual-use isn’t dual-use unless there is an actual defence need. It would help if there were a clearly defined list of defence procurement requirements. Then at least dual-use could become a technical designation rather than a marketing claim.

But these semantics mask a much more serious challenge for Canada’s Defence Investment Strategy. 

Technologies on their own cannot guarantee that we can produce the defence systems that Canada needs at the scale required to ensure effective deterrence, let alone a secure made-in Canada defence response. It’s the perennial problem of scale-up.

I've spent the better part of a decade at Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen) watching this pattern play out, not just in defence but across Canadian innovation generally. 

Canada is extraordinarily good at generating technology. We have strong startups, capable research institutions, and no shortage of entrepreneurship and promising ideas. What we consistently struggle with is turning those ideas into something that can be produced, scaled, and delivered reliably. Technology readiness gets all the attention. Manufacturing readiness (do you have the components, the supply chains, the processes to build competitively and at volume?) barely gets discussed at all.

The gap between technology readiness and manufacturing capability has consequences, and at NGen, we’ve seen exactly how serious they can be.

Early in the pandemic, Ottawa moved quickly to procure ventilators, funding several projects in parallel. One of them was a ventilator already on the market — one that had, in fact, been used by National Defence for battlefield conditions. On paper, it looked like the obvious choice: proven, Canadian, ready to repurpose for COVID. Then we discovered that most of its components  were being sourced from China. It was a Canadian product in name. It was not a Canadian product in any way that mattered for security or reliability.

We at NGen took a different route. An old sleep apnea device, developed years earlier in Winnipeg by a sleep doctor, became the basis for a new ventilator — redesigned, digitized, and rebuilt so that its critical components could actually be sourced and manufactured in Canada. That meant finding the companies that could produce each piece, and the company that could bring it all together. It wasn't glamorous work. But it produced something the original approach couldn't: a product with a domestic supply chain that created new opportunities for technology and manufacturing companies alike across the country. 

By the way, it only took five months to bring our Canadian product to market at a fraction of the cost of the other system.

That's the lesson defence procurement needs to absorb. It is not the technology alone that deters an adversary. It's the demonstrated ability to produce defence systems that integrate that technology, at scale, reliably, on Canadian soil or under Canadian control. A drone system built on impressive quantum sensing or advanced electronics is not a deterrent if it exists only as a prototype, or if half its components come from a country we'd rather not depend on in a crisis. 

Canadian technologies aren’t dual use unless they can be integrated in defence systems and reliably produced at scale in Canada.

This is where our current defence investment strategy needs to be enhanced. There's enormous emphasis, understandably, on identifying and funding promising dual-use technologies. There's much less emphasis on who is actually going to build the finished systems those technologies feed into — and at what volume, and how quickly, and with what degree of supply chain resilience. Departments like National Defence were never built to answer those questions, and it's unrealistic to expect them to. That work requires people who understand manufacturing integration, not just technology evaluation.

It also requires the government to have a precise grasp  of Canadian manufacturing capabilities. We work with  Canadian companies doing cutting-edge defence-relevant manufacturing — sealants for ship and submarine doors, 3D-printed components for the Army, critical components like motors, advanced materials, batteries, cameras, controllers for uncrewed vehicles, manufacturers producing drones that are being used in Ukraine, sold directly to Ukrainian buyers rather than through any Canadian procurement channel — which are not on the radar of the government. If Ottawa can't see the companies already doing this work, it has little chance of building the kind of integrated, vertically coordinated production network that the "Buy Canadian" ambition actually requires.

None of this is a knock on the intent behind the strategy. The opportunity in front of Canadian industry right now is exciting, and larger than most people appreciate. But opportunity and readiness are not the same thing. If we want the "Buy Canadian" instinct to mean something more than a preference, we need a process — a genuine integration function — that can identify Canadian companies with real capabilities and assemble them into the production networks capable of actually delivering the defence systems government says it needs.

NGen has spent the past several years building exactly this kind of integrator function for Canadian manufacturing, and we think the same model applies directly to defence. 

What we're proposing is a coordinated defence production acceleration program for the sector, built on three initiatives that work together, rather than in isolation: 

The first, Smart Manufacturing for Defence Suppliers, is about raising the floor — helping existing suppliers adopt the industrial AI and advanced manufacturing systems that let them produce faster and more adaptably. The second, Critical Production Networks, is about connecting them — building vertically integrated production systems in priority capability areas so that a critical component isn't sitting stranded next to nine other critical components that no one has linked together. The third, Micro-Factories, is about speed — modular, reconfigurable production capacity that can be deployed and scaled on demand rather than built from scratch every time operational requirements shift.

The Winnipeg ventilator wasn't a one-off. It's what this kind of integrator function produces when it's actually in place, and we've since run that same model at scale: NGen's collaborative project structure has mobilized over $700 million in industry investment against roughly $600 million in public funding, across more than 280 projects, generating over $10 billion in product sales and licensing revenue and creating thousands of net new jobs.

Demand has consistently outstripped available funding — our most recent AI project call was oversubscribed more than four times over. That track record is the reason we're confident this approach can do for defence production what it has already done for manufacturing more broadly: turn funding and intent into things that actually get built.

That work is, admittedly, less exciting than announcing a new technology partnership or a funding envelope for AI. But it is the component that determines whether any of the technology we're now so eager to call dual-use ever becomes something we can rely on when it matters. And that makes it vital.

Production capacity is not a footnote to defence strategy. It is the strategy.

Jayson Myers is CEO of Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen), the industry-led, not-for-profit organization that leads Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for Advanced Manufacturing.