Committee Testimony

House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research

Feat. David Perry

June 1, 2026

Chair, Members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation to speak to you today about Canada’s Defence and Dual Use Research Needs.   

In my remarks I want to concentrate on the need for clarity, priorities, and pathways to capability.

On clarity, it is welcome to see movement on BOREALIS, DISH’s, National Research Council initiatives, regional and other efforts.  Recognizing that this is still early days, it will be important to articulate clearly what the intent of these respective lines of effort are, which are intended to do what, and how they are supposed to connect and complement each other.

Similarly, with increased interest from Canada’s post secondary institutions and enhancements to the Industrial Technological Benefits policy and other measures, these efforts are spread across government research, industrial R&D and academic activity.  Who is doing what in Canada, what the intended relationships between these efforts are will also be important to sort through. 

Finally, Canada has signed multiple new agreements for enhanced defence and security cooperation in the last year, often with research agendas.  How these international collaborations connect to domestic initiatives will be important to clarify.  The key here will be aligning these new ventures with our long standing defence Research and Development partnerships with the United States of America which has given Canada unique access to much of the world’s cutting-edge innovation and helped foster a four generation old North American defence industrial and development ecosystem. 

Across the Canadian defence landscape a thousand flowers have been planted, and some are already blooming, but we need to know what we want the garden to look like.

Regarding priorities, in my view a weakness of our defence innovation ecosystem historically has been an overly broad focus relative to resource commitments.  In the past, we have both under invested and spread what we have committed too far.  We are planning consequential increased in defence R&D investment, which is welcome, but some of that is directed to the new initiatives you heard about from previous witnesses.   

Beyond that, the existing agenda was already expansive, with Defence Research and Development Canada itemizing 16 high level priority areas, including science and technology for NORAD modernization.   It is not yet clear how Canada’s new sovereign capabilities will change those priorities. But the ten high level sovereign capabilities and more than thirty subcategories give ample opportunity to lengthen an already long list. Lastly, as the committee’s current exploration itself indicates, the term dual use is very much in vogue, but there is little consensus around what that term does, or should mean, further complicating efforts to focus.  The contours of what counts as dual use need better clarity. 

Overall, greater prioritization to areas of real importance would maximize our potential return.

Finally, amidst all of these efforts we need to ensure there are credible pathways for turning research, development and innovation into actual Canadian Armed Forces, which has long been a deficiency of our system.  The draft legislation proposed for the new Defence Investment Agency proposes a means of procuring without competition defence supplies or services that received federal funding for research, development or innovation.  It has been a long-standing source of frustration from participants in initiatives such as IDEAS that they could be highly successful at solving a defence problem, yet unable to sell the Government of the solution.

This measure would go a long way to fixing this, if successfully implemented.   This pathway between innovation and capability would be further complemented by enhancing the minor capital portfolio at National Defence.  My colleague Alex Salt and I just  published a paper available on the Canadian Global Affairs Institute website arguing that increasing the funding available for smaller projects and making it easier for more of that money to flow quickly would help. It would get innovation into the hands of the military on one hand and provide more contracting pathways for Small and Medium enterprises on the other.  We think is a win-win proposition to get more of the smaller firms that can drive innovation into the Canadian Research and Development Ecosystem while quickly equipping the CAF.

Thank you.