Canada’s space companies make national-security pitch for chunk of defence dollars

SVP for the office of the CEO at Royal Bank of Canada, John Stackhouse, left, and former NASA chief economist, Alexander MacDonald, at the SpaceBound 2025 conference held at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, on Wednesday.

Canada’s space industry is jockeying for a chunk of the federal government’s defence dollars, selling itself as a sector that’s critical to national security and, quite possibly, the first frontier for Canada in any impending conflict.

And its sales pitch appears to be working. At a two-day conference held in Ottawa, two federal ministers, several high-ranking military officials, a handful of senior executives from major defence contractors and a mayor filled a conference room on the third floor of the city’s nature museum.

There, they listened to the industry’s