Prime Minister Mark Carney released Canada’s first national security strategy in more than 20 years on Oct. 29, naming space-based communications and navigation among the technologies the country needs in its sovereignty push.
The Plan for a Stronger Canada is built around eight “Strategic Capabilities” that Ottawa wants to develop at home or with allies. Emerging technologies top the list, a category that includes space-based communications and navigation, along with artificial intelligence (AI) computing, quantum computing, semiconductors and telecommunications. Critical minerals, defence and energy are among the other seven.
Elsewhere the plan says Canada must have access to “reliable intelligence, space-based communications, secure telecommunications, and data storage,” and wants the country to be “a major player in developing and commercializing advanced technologies, including AI, quantum computing, space-based technology, and energy.” The defence section promises military options to deter and defend “against hybrid warfare and threats in space and cyberspace.”
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly told Space Canada’s SpaceBound conference in Gatineau on Oct. 20 that the government is writing a national space strategy, with Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen advising her and Carney. Her department and National Defence released Canada’s first positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) resilience framework the same day.
Joly also put $15 million into a Xona Space Systems centre in Montreal that will build and operate satellites for its navigation constellation. The money came from the Strategic Response Fund, one of two industrial funds the security plan names, alongside the Canada Strong Diversification Fund.
The plan promises to “significantly deepen our connections and cooperate on Strategic Capabilities” with Europe. A day after it came out, Canada and the European Union said at their Montreal summit that they will open negotiations on Canadian access to Galileo, the EU’s satellite navigation system, and begin exploratory talks on IRIS², its planned secure-communications constellation.
Defence spending set to reach 5 per cent by 2035
Canada spent 2 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence in 2025–26, and the plan puts it on a path to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) target of 5 per cent by 2035. It gives the Canadian Armed Forces a single mission, defending Canada and Canadian interests, and tells the government to prepare “for all contingencies up to and including war.”
Protecting the country’s geography, “including in the Arctic,” is what the plan calls the forces’ defining task. It also commits Canada to meeting its obligations to NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
To equip the forces, Ottawa wants a stronger domestic industrial base and procurement aimed at “maximising strategic autonomy and resilience,” working with the Defence Investment Agency to deliver the Defence Industrial Strategy. Space company executives at SpaceBound urged the government to move faster on funding for sovereign space capabilities.
Budget 2025’s $10.9 billion over five years for digital infrastructure at National Defence, the Armed Forces and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s signals intelligence agency, is the only dollar figure in the Prime Minister’s Office release.
Intelligence, export controls and infrastructure
The government wants more “sovereign intelligence capabilities, collection and analysis,” a bigger contribution to the Five Eyes partnership with the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and new investment in AI and secure cloud computing for intelligence work. It plans a sharper set of sanctions and import and export controls, an “all-threats approach” to protecting critical infrastructure, and more security information-sharing with companies and research institutions.
Each priority needs its own plan
Under each of the five areas the plan rests on — economic security, foreign policy, defence, public safety and intelligence — the strategy says the government “will produce a plan,” so most of the specifics have yet to be written. The Prime Minister’s Office says the strategy gathers principles that have guided government policy for the past year and a half.
Carney will call a First Ministers’ Meeting on national security, and the topic will become a regular item at those meetings. Ottawa will also work more directly with industry, unions and universities through new and existing advisory bodies. Proposals to modernize national security law are due within a year, and a review of the whole security system will feed an updated plan within four years.
“In a rapidly changing, more dangerous, more divided world, Canada must have the capacity to defend our sovereignty, the resilience to withstand emerging threats, and the determination to shape our own future,” Carney said in the release announcing the plan.