By Pen Pendleton
The world is witnessing an era of frightening and sustained warfare by rogue regimes and contending superpowers. Europe and Asia are forming new alliances to rearm. Government funding and private investment is rapidly shifting capital to producers of advanced weaponry. A new global military industrial complex is emerging with profound political, cultural, and economic implications.
Indeed, thanks to the emergence of remote-controlled weaponry, we are already thinking and talking about warfare differently.
In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has made defense rearmament a rallying cry to national pride as well as a bid to strengthen Canada’s NATO partnership. But his mantra, “we will build Canada strong,” speaks as much to transformative economic growth as it does to Canadian sovereignty. The policy is paying off. Carney’s popularity is surging while some 600 defense companies—from Canadian shipbuilders to cybersecurity innovators like BlackBerry—have contributed CAD$9.6 billion to GDP, employing over 80,000 workers.
For business leaders in the industry, the opportunities are immense. This is true not just in Canada, where the government is allocating $180 billion in domestic defense procurement contracts, but internationally as well. Thus far, however, executive communication teams are simply following in Carney’s rhetorical footsteps.
Too many corporate marketing campaigns focus entirely on “Buy Canadian” patriotism, job creation in local ridings, and domestic supply chain resilience. While these localized narratives successfully win political favor in Ottawa, they carry zero weight when pitching to foreign ministries of defense or international venture capital funds.
To compete for contracts from London to Moldova, Canadian CEOs must turn Carney’s political rhetoric into commercial messages for an international marketplace.
Buyers facing immediate security threats do not care about Canadian regional employment; they care about mission-critical performance, rapid delivery timelines, and technological interoperability.
Shifting from a domestic-supplier mindset to a global-exporter posture requires Canadian defense executives to strip away political sentimentality from their external corporate messaging. Rather than pitching themselves as stable employers, they must broadcast their status as aggressive, tier-one innovators capable of solving asymmetric battlefield problems.
The global defense pie is expanding exponentially, but the largest slices will go to those who speak the universal language of best-in-class science, technology and battlefield dominance.