It’s been interesting for us sitting around the edges of the new relationship between the federal government and the post-secondary community around security issues and watching two sides size each other up. Today, some thoughts on the matter and suggestions to speed up the process.
So, let’s start with the internal challenges the two sides have in forging a relationship. On the Government of Canada side, it’s very much the case that the various players in the game are not on the same page. Budget 2025 threw a bunch of money for research jointly to ISED, DND and Public Safety, and they have had difficulty arriving at a common position on how to approach this project. This is partly why the Defence Industrial Strategy was so delayed, and the problem of how to reconcile different perspectives remains to be resolved (at a very high level, it’s a split between the Armed Forces desire to get kit quickly and ISED’s desire to play industrial policy). So, it’s an interesting question: if you want to talk to the federal government about security, who do you call, exactly?
Of course, it’s more or less the same question on the post-secondary side. If the military (or the security ministries more broadly) wants to call an institution to see what services it can provide, who does it call? Very few institutions have arranged themselves internally so that there is a single “lead” or point of contact either with the military or with public security more broadly. My impression is that at U15 institutions there is a hope that VPs Research can end up handling everything, but I think that may be more an unconscious wish for military/security relationships to be focused exclusively on research (because it’s simpler) than anything else.
Now, we don’t want to give the impression that there are no relationships between the two sides, because that’s not true. At the level of individual institutions there are often quite productive relations with local bases and their commanders on questions of training and what one might call applied research. And at the national level, there has long been liaison done through things like the Canadian Military, Veteran and Family Connected Campus Consortium. Admittedly, the issues that tend to get raised through this forum are not the ones attracting the big public policy attention right now, but it shows that it is possible to develop deep relationships across the divide between security and post-secondary education.
What is true, though, is that there are some functional barriers to getting the two sides together. We noted a few of them up top, which is simply that the inability of the two sides to get their internal acts together. But there’s another issue too, which is the difference in cultures. It’s a problem that the players on both sides of the divide suffer from it as well. The military is hierarchical. Things need to go up the chain of command and come back down for anything to happen. Universities, on the other hand, are barely disguised anarchies. What this means is that neither side is particularly nimble/flexible, but the reasons for the inability to pivot quickly are quite different. And therein lies quite a bit of mutual incomprehension.
This situation, where two broad and disparate groups of organizations need to cooperate but don’t have a lot of connection with each other, is ripe for policy entrepreneurialism. So far, the main entrepreneur has been the U15 group of research institutions. Acting as a trusted, single interlocutor for high-reputation institutions, U15 was a partner the military could deal with. And as a result, we seem likely to get military research policy which has a significant bias towards big institutions with big research facilities.
This is not by any means a knock on the U15: this is exactly the kind of things its members are paying for, so fair play. And from a national interest perspective, thank God the U15 was there to get the ball rolling on this stuff as quickly as it did. But if anyone thinks that’s the sum total of security-PSE relationships that need to be developed, they are sorely mistaken. This new world of heightened security preparedness isn’t just a 4-year fad that will end when Trump leaves the White House. It is the new normal. We are playing this game for the next 40 years, at least. And what the U15 has negotiated is just Act One. Wider and deeper partnerships are the name of the game, and it’s worth everyone’s time to work on this.
In order to achieve this, it’s worth every institution taking the time to answer the question: “who is our lead on defence and civilian preparedness”? Not just with respect to research, but for everything. Who is the person that knows everything going on at the institution that might pertain to these areas and can act as a point of contact for government bodies? Just naming such a person would be a huge advance for most institutions.
But more importantly, it’s critical to build trust across the sectors. Right now, everyone and their dog is sending proposals to the Armed Forces, who aren’t entirely sure what to do with either the specific proposals or the more general attention they are receiving (other than roll their eyes and think…“oh look, people who smell money!”). Whereas what’s probably more important is to have a lot more meetings – not all of them formal – where the two sides can come to understand each others’ perspectives, strengths and weaknesses, and to have discussions around which challenges are most urgently in need of solutions and which are not.
HESA is doing its part in this respect. Next Monday, we’ll be convening key people from the CAF, Public Safety Canada, DND, ISED, and 40+ post-secondary institutions across Canada at Carleton University to discuss the shape of the sector’s engagement with the fast-evolving national defence and skills agenda. We’ll be bringing in key officials from Sweden’s Campus Total Defence initiative to talk about how post-secondary institutions in their country formed a consortium to deliver defence and civil preparedness related skills, and to help unpack how such a model of strategic coordination might work in Canada. A handful of tickets are still available, and registration closes today.
But there’s room for all sorts of people to host dozens of similar kinds of events over the coming months; gatherings, seminars, sessions of all kinds that involve the post-secondary community and folks from ISED/Public Safety/DND to talk about all kinds of security-related issues in low-stakes, Chatham House rules environments. It’s really the only way to bridge the divide.
