Hi everyone. The blog is off this week, but given the release of the Defence Industrial Strategy, it seems worth flagging a few early observations – and providing an update on how this is shaping the agenda for our upcoming session of the National Defence Research Roundtable, which is focused on the role of post-secondary institutions in developing skills as part of a new approach to sovereignty and national security.
So, the Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS) is finally out. I say “finally” because this was originally supposed to come out around the time of the budget in November; the delay comes from the fact that the document was the subject of some serious tug-of-war between the Department of National Defence, which wants gear yesterday, and the Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED), which wants to use the DIS as a way to support the domestic defence industry. The three-month delay does not bode especially well for future government policy in this area.
You should read Phil Lagassé’s review of the document here, because it’s very good. I am not going to deal with the research implications here: I do, however, want to tease out a little bit what Phil has to say about the skills/training implications of the Strategy for post-secondary institutions, because I think this is still an area where the government’s thinking is stuck in 2024. As Phil says: no matter how much we spend on defence and industry, the success of our efforts is going to depend on people. From a skills development point of view, that means three separate sets of plans.
First, Canada is going to increase the size of the regular forces by about 8,500 people and the size of the reserves by the same amount. That will take an expanded training effort, not all of which are likely to be handled by the various wings of the Canadian Defence Academy (CDA). The implications of the Armed Forces’ “Inflection Point” document released last year are also significant as they imply major upgrades to capabilities, and therefore training, which probably stretches the capacity of the CDA and the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) beyond what they can handle, meaning there will be roles for external trainers. Public institutions need to be very quick and nimble to help because it is certain that private career colleges will be very eager and able to scoop contracts in this area.
Second, Canada needs to increase its skills pool in what might be called “defence-adjacent” areas: that is, the people who can power defence industries. The DIS strategy does cover this – sort of. There’s no new thinking or funding here (literally – all the funding was in Budget 2025). All it says is there’s a lot of training to be done and it’ll all get covered through i) the $450 million pot the feds put aside for retraining workers affected by tariffs and ii) the $383 million pot set aside for the creation of new “Workforce Alliances”, the latter of which strikes me as a bit optimistic since those are supposed to cover six very specific economic sectors, none of which are defence. But in theory at least, the government is thinking about this area, and there is fairly clearly a role for post-secondary institutes to play, at least if the description of Workforce Alliances are anything to go by.
But then there is a whole third set of skills that quite simply haven’t even been looked at yet. Beyond skills for the front-line military, beyond skills for the defence industry, there are the skills that are going to be required for civil protection and preparedness. It’s hard to know what Ottawa thinks about this yet. The Department of National Defence is counting on creating a new “secondary reserve” of about 300,000 people to act as a kind of home guard to deal with everything from “low-intensity natural disaster response to high-intensity large-scale combat operations.” I’m skeptical about this: we’ve used the army to do natural disaster response a lot in the past, but it’s not what a military unit is actually for and in any event such an expanded reserve would have mission overlaps with existing provincial civil protection initiatives like the Ontario Volunteer Corps and the Nova Scotia Guard. In most NATO countries, civil protection is handled by some kind of Public Security ministry, not by the military directly. Public Safety Canada doesn’t at the moment seem to be preparing to create anything of the sort, but that’s not a good reason to leave the job entirely to the CAF, especially when it has so many other big tasks ahead of it.
But if you look at countries where civil protection is taken more seriously – the Nordic countries, say – there is a serious focus on making sure that skills for civil preparedness are widely distributed across the population. Above all, this means having a lot more people with education in things like paramedics, logistics, and cybersecurity, mixed with the analytical thinking and communications and planning skills– the kinds of things you need to prepare for real mass casualty events and disaster recovery.
Because Ottawa hasn’t really figured out who is going to run these things and how federal and provincial efforts are meant to interact, it hasn’t even started to think about how to build up these skills in the general population. But that doesn’t mean that Canadian post-secondary institutions can’t get started on their own. In Sweden, after Russia’s (second) invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was the country’s universities themselves that created “Campus Total Defence”, a consortium to deliver exactly these kinds of civil preparedness skills to the population.
It’s clear that Canada, after decades of neglect of both military and civil preparedness, has a long way to go to have the tools required to maintain sovereignty in the terrible new world order in which we have suddenly found ourselves. But there’s no reason Canadian post-secondary institutions can’t play a role in the development of security-related skills in the way their counterparts in Sweden. Institutions that engage early have the opportunity to shape the architecture rather than simply adapt to it.
That’s why HESA is convening a meeting at Carleton University on March 23, specifically on the notion of Campus Total Defence and bringing key Swedish officials to the event to help understand how such a model might work in Canada. We’re looking forward to hosting a wide and diverse audience, including universities and colleges, the Government of Canada and some key players from industry to discuss the shape of the sector’s engagement with the fast-evolving skills for sovereignty and national security agenda.
Tickets are still available here. We hope you’ll join us next month to start working out how.
