Thank you.
Madam Chair, honourable members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to appear before you.
Canada's sovereignty depends on our ability to measure, understand and protect what nature has given us.
My name is Karn Manhas. I'm the founder of Terramera, Miraterra and Catalera. That's three Canadian companies, 16 years and around 350 patents held here in Canada. My background is biology and law.
I want to start with a question: What is defence actually for?
We talk about defence as borders and fighter jets. Those matter, but they are the means, not the purpose. The purpose of defence is to make sure that Canada keeps operating as a nation, even under disruption from a hostile state, a pandemic, a supply chain collapse or a closed border. Defence is not just about being ready to fight back. It's being resilient enough to keep going. Once we accept that, energy, critical minerals and food all show up immediately.
There are three terms this committee should hold together.
Food sovereignty is our ability to produce our own food. Food security is reliable access to it. Food defence is whether our food system can withstand attack or disruption. The first two we talk about; the third we don't talk about enough.
If the U.S. border closed tomorrow, Canada would have roughly three to five days of fresh food. Lettuce, tomatoes and berries would be gone in 72 hours. We are the fifth-largest agricultural exporter in the world, running our own grocery system with a just-in-time model.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe. One of the first things Russia did was attack Ukrainian farmland. Clearing landmines spread chemicals across the soil. Ukraine went from feeding Europe to dropping exports by 90%. Thirty per cent of its total agricultural potential has been destroyed. That was not collateral damage; that was strategy. Farmland was the target.
Article 3 of the NATO Treaty names food and water systems as a central pillar of allied civilian resilience. We signed that treaty. We just have to build it into our strategy.
In February, Canada launched its first defence industrial strategy. The build-partner-buy framework is right, but it makes no mention of food. At Davos, the Prime Minister himself said, “A country that cannot feed itself...has few options.”
I'm here to help this committee close that gap.
Here is the opportunity. The Netherlands, a country roughly the size of Vancouver Island, is the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world. Canada is fifth. That gap is not geography. It's not weather. It's strategy and it's fixable.
Canada now has the ability to measure its natural world—soil, food, water—down to parts per million and parts per billion, and not weeks later but in and near the field in minutes. Miraterra has built instruments that can scan soil using advanced spectroscopy and AI connected to millions of scientific publications. That technology was built in Canada with Canadian research institutions. We can monitor soil health, carbon and pathogens, and detect chemical contaminations at parts per billion. We can detect nanoplastics field by field. We can monitor the state of Canadian farmland and Canadian lands.
I call this strategic natural intelligence. It's a defence capability. It exists in Canadian companies and research organizations right now. This is where AI changes the equation. The same instruments that advise a Saskatchewan farmer on fertility and production can detect a contamination event or disruption in Quebec. The same soil data that drives $30 billion of GDP for every per cent of agricultural productivity we can improve is the system that can tell our defence systems whether the land that feeds us is under attack. One system with two missions—that is what dual use is supposed to do.
Canada started building a national soil map in the 1980s. Budget cuts stopped it. We could build a living digital version now at a fraction of the original cost. It would tell us in real time if our farmland was under attack. The cost is less than one to three fighter jets, depending on how deep we want to go.
I have a few recommendations.
First, add strategic biology and food systems as critical investment areas within Canada's dual-use defence research framework. Food and soil intelligence belong inside the build-partner-buy and dual-use architecture.
Second, fund a living national digital soil map. The technology is built in Canada and is ready.
Third, create a sovereign IP retention mechanism with retention covenants that keep Canadian-funded science Canadian-owned long enough to matter. We do not have a research problem. We have a commercialization problem, an adoption problem and a retention problem.
Fourth, increase our growth and adoption of innovative Canadian research and science solutions. Not all will work—we need to be okay with placing bold and strategic bets.
Finally, with ITBs, build a clear policy that allows us to invest in and grow innovative Canadian solutions and critical Canadian infrastructure that put resilience first.
At Davos, the Prime Minister was right. A country that can't feed itself has few options. Let's make sure that's not us.
