Canada is about to spend more on defence than any living Canadian has planned for. $180 billion in procurement over ten years. A new agency to run the buying. Ten named sovereign capabilities. A target of seventy percent of purchases aimed at Canadian firms

Almost every conversation I’ve been in since those numbers landed has been about the numbers. Is it enough? Can we afford it? Where should it go? Those are real questions and I’m not dismissing them.

But they all assume something that hasn’t been established: that when we decide what to buy, we will be able to take delivery of it.

That sounds like a strange thing to doubt. We’re talking about a country with money, allies, universities, critical minerals and a functioning capital market. The ingredients are not in question. What’s in question is the plumbing — the systems and structures that turn an announcement into a capability actually in someone’s hands, current enough to matter when it arrives.

I want to spend the next ten posts on that plumbing, because I think it decides more than the budget does.

Here’s the short version of where this is going. The most valuable technology available to Canada right now is dual-use — things with both a civilian and a military application. That’s not a new category; the term is decades old. What’s new is the direction it moves in. For fifty years, defence technology was invented by the state and released to the civilian economy afterwards. That has reversed. The frontier now sits inside ordinary commercial companies, funded by commercial investors, improving on commercial schedules — and the state’s job has quietly changed from inventing things to recognising, evaluating, buying and adopting them fast enough that they’re still current on arrival.

Those are completely different skills. We have spent seventy years building institutions for the first one.

What this means if you’re building something

If you run a company, the practical content of “taking delivery” is this: somebody has to be able to find you, understand what you’ve built in terms that mean something to them, get money to you on a timeline that doesn’t kill you, and put the thing in the hands of the people who’ll use it before it’s obsolete.

Each of those is a separate mechanism, and in Canada each of them is either missing or badly matched to how commercial technology actually develops. Over the next five weeks I’ll take them one at a time — where the failure sits, why the people involved are behaving rationally, and what you can do about it from where you’re standing.

Not all of it is fixable from your chair. Some of it is, and three moves are open to almost anyone reading this.

One — find the operator, not the buyer. The person who would use your thing can tell you within twenty minutes whether it is useful. The person who can purchase it cannot tell you that yet, and won’t for a long time. Take the first meeting.

Two — write one page in their language before you write a proposal. What effect does it produce, under what conditions, and what does it take to keep it running? That page is worth more than a deck, and almost nobody has one.

Three — go through a door with a name on it. A program run by a named partner beats an open call scored by a grid, because a named partner can be asked a question. Open procurement cannot.

None of that requires permission from anyone.

Next: fifty years of one-way traffic.

This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]