National Defence Research Roundtable
Overview
In 2025, the Government of Canada committed to significant long-term investments in national defence and security, including new investments in research in Budget 2025 and a broader commitment to education and training as part of the Defence Industrial Strategy. It is clear that post-secondary institutions will have a crucial role to play in advancing defence and security research and strengthening Canada’s talent pipelines in the coming years – but how the sector will do this is less clear.
Across Canada, post-secondary institutions and their partners are already engaged in defence and security related work, but these efforts often unfold in isolation. HESA believes there is a clear opportunity and need to connect, share, and coordinate these efforts. That is why we convened the National Defence Research Roundtable (NDRR).
The NDRR brings together post-secondary leaders, advocacy organisations, leading research centers, funding bodies, and other key stakeholders from government and industry to tackle the big question: how do we build and fund a coordinated, nationally aligned defence research and education ecosystem?
Contact us:
Questions about the National Defence Research Roundtable? Interested in participating in future roundtables? Get in touch with us at defenceroundtable@higheredstrategy.com.
HESA launched the National Defence Research Roundtable initiative in late 2025. You can read more about our past and upcoming meetings below.
Upcoming Meetings
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Previous Meetings
March 23, 2026 – Carleton University
Building on our December 2025 meeting, this meeting of the NDRR focused on integrating whole-of-society models of defence (“Total Defence” or “civil defence”) into the post-secondary ecosystem, and challenged participants to consider how the sector can coordinate its defence-related efforts. Over the course of the day, participants heard from key leaders of Campus Total Defence, a strategic collaboration between post-secondary institutions in Sweden, engaged with Canadian experts around the realities of adopting a whole-of-society model, and discussed the barriers to and possibilities for sector-wide coordination in Canada.
December 15, 2025 – Ottawa
The 2025 National Defence Research Roundtable convened representatives from Canadian post-secondary institutions, leading research centers, national organizations, and granting bodies to discuss how to coordinate and advance defence research in this country and to develop sector-wide advice on how Canada should structure future defence and security research investments.
Through thematic discussions and collaborative policy design sessions, roundtable participants outlined the structures, investments, and enabling conditions needed to build a coordinated and nationally aligned national defence and security research ecosystem.
