Science and Research Committee on May 4th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

We have witnesses.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Okay. Do it at the end.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I will get you the information on that by tomorrow.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

It will be emailed.

We have witnesses and we should complete that first round of questioning. Please go ahead.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you.

I'm going to start with Mr. Shimooka.

The government's new defence strategy touches on improving our operational capabilities. I want to get your thoughts on this.

In the departmental results in 2024-25, Canada's maritime fleet serviceability was at 59.6%. Our land fleet was at 51%. Our aerospace fleet was at 42.4%. In relation to our other NATO allies, how does this stack up?

[Richard Shimooka]

It would depend on which fleet you're talking about. I think there's an overall challenge. I'll take aerospace as an example.

You are seeing the divestment of fleets of aircraft that were procured in the late Cold War in the United States, which would be considered the Carter-Reagan buildup aircraft, such as the F-16, the F-15 and whatnot into newer platforms like the F-22, the F-35 and the next generation. When you have older platforms, essentially, they're going to be a lot less serviceable and their availability is going to decline.

In Canada's case, with our CF-18s being procured around 1984, their serviceability is quite low. Because we are looking to transition towards the next-generation fleet, the F-35, the drawdown of that capability is predicated on having the capability to meet our NORAD commitments. Overall, our serviceability is generally low, just because we have had delayed modernization, and that goes towards—

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

To your point on NORAD capabilities, you mentioned in The Hub in March 2025, “At present, the RCAF has withdrawn from providing rotations for NATO air policing missions and keeps less than eight aircraft on NORAD alert—the bare minimum of availability required.”

Does that concern you?

[Richard Shimooka]

Absolutely, and I think it should concern all Canadians. That's been a significant pain point for many decades. If you think about our bilateral relations with the United States, even before the Trump administration, you had American officials identifying this as a major challenge.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

That brings me to the F-35. I'll get your thoughts on that.

As a country, we currently benefit from the Canada-U.S. defence production sharing agreement. Essentially, defence companies here are treated like domestic American companies. We have been part of the partnership for the F-35 since 2002. Currently, there are over 110 Canadian companies that have contributed to the F-35 supply chain. Right now, that's over $3 million in over 1,200 aircraft that have been produced so far.

I want to get your thoughts on the F-35. My personal opinion is we need to provide the best aircraft to our service personnel. I want to get your thoughts on that.

[Richard Shimooka]

I've written significantly about this, so I don't want to go too far.

The capability is clear. Every single major examination the Canadian government has done since 2010 has returned the same answer: The F-35 should be chosen.

If we can bring it back more broadly to the science and technology aspect of it, one of the aspects of that program was the multinational consortium that Canadian firms are quite interested in joining. From the start, the Canadian government was really positive about joining in order to give Canadian companies the ability to access a high-technology environment to work on these capabilities. That has been seen as a major windfall since 2001.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Quickly, I want to get your thoughts on this. In April 2025, the Prime Minister identified China as Canada's biggest security threat. In January this year, he travelled to China to forge a new strategic partnership with the People's Republic of China that's focused on energy, agri-food and trade. Just recently—I believe it was Thursday last week—The Globe and Mail ran a story entitled “Chinese envoy warns Canada against sending MPs to Taiwan or warships through Taiwan Strait”.

Is it a good thing for Canada to be forming a strategic partnership with the Chinese Communist government?

[Richard Shimooka]

I think there are serious concerns. If you think about some of these....

I just returned from Japan. If you look at their security situation, this is a major challenge that affects all of the entire region. Our partnership has the potential for serious issues. It has to be carefully defined. In the areas where there are technological linkages and all of that, we have to be on guard, so to speak, for the potential for infiltration in other activities.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

This committee recently heard compelling testimony from security experts Michael Kovrig and Charles Burton and human rights activist Margaret McCuaig-Johnston about the pursuit of an agreement to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into this country. Would you consider the EVs to be a national security risk?

[Richard Shimooka]

It depends on what that agreement looks like, but it certainly can be the case. I've seen espionage activities in other sectors that follow the same pattern that this can be used for. If you think about the level of data that can be harvested from these systems using modern AI or machine-learning techniques, it can be. There is a potential for that.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

We will now proceed to MP Noormohamed for six minutes.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses. It's great to see all of you here.

In particular, it's good to see Industrio, another Vancouver Granville company here. It's great to see you virtually. I might start with you, because you are at the nexus of a lot of things that are going on in our world right now and, in particular, some of the challenges and opportunities the space you're in is dealing with.

I might start by asking you to talk a bit about your competition and what it's like in your current space. The military landscape right now is increasingly dominated by a lot of the neoprimes, like Palantir and others, that are investing in their own R and D and their own market-finished projects. They work with military customers.

What does a company like Industrio need from the government to be competitive in that market without being absorbed or displaced by better capitalized American players at a time when sovereignty is super important?

[Edoardo De Martin]

What's important for a company like ours is customers. That's number one.

The second thing is, in a country of our size, where we do not have that robust of a corporate environment that invests in R and D, it's very challenging for my organization to grow, build and innovate quickly, because innovation needs continuous movement, building, creating and customers. The public sector plays into that and it's very important, because to make it in Canada, you have to work with the corporates and you have to work with the public sector.

When this dual-use strategy was revealed, I looked at it as a massive opportunity for us to leap-frog some of the technologies that are in place now. There's no reason why we have to buy Palantir when we have the technology here to do it in Canada.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

You pointed out the DIS. The strategy's explicit about how AI, secure cloud, integrated command and control and high assurance communications are sovereign capabilities that Canada has to own and control. You spent three years building Signal for exactly these environments.

In your view, what does it mean practically for Canada to own and control an AI platform? How does the current procurement framework reward sovereign-by-design builders like you? Where do you see the opportunity for you and for companies like yours in that strategy?

[Edoardo De Martin]

For sovereignty, we have to think about what areas of the stack we have to give up, what areas are safe to give up and if there is a good reason to give them up—and there are. The most important thing, hands-down is the storage and releasing of our data outside of our borders or our jurisdiction. There are multinationals and organizations that we can trust to be part of that stack and arrangement, but we have to legally bind them to it. What I've seen recently is that we've been unable to do that, apart from one.

In terms of the opportunity for our organization, when we're looking at sovereignty and what we need to be competitive, it's creating policy together, with Canada and SMEs like mine working together with the idea of growing that technology and that sovereignty. That's where we have to start, at the very beginning. If you look at the beginnings of Palantir, it started with the U.S. government—together. Tesla started with the U.S. government—together. That is the type of momentum we need at this time to capitalize.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

Let's dig into that in the time we have left.

Any analysis right now of Canada's defence industrial strategy would say digital sovereignty is no longer a policy debate, but a readiness imperative. If that's the case, the choices we're making today in procurement and likely architecture as well are going to have an impact. They're going to shape Canada's operational resilience for a very long time.

When you deploy Signal in a government environment, one of the questions that I think it is important for everyone to hear is, what concrete guarantees of data residency and model control can a Canadian SME like yours provide, which a hyperscaler that's perhaps U.S.-based could not?

[Edoardo De Martin]

We can provide everything apart from the model, everything we can guarantee in Canadian sovereignty. The model is the challenge all over the world. There are only four companies in the world that build these kinds of models, and one of them is in Canada. Working together with that company, we can pretty much guarantee data sovereignty.

On the procurement side of things, the challenge is that most procurement processes are not set up in a way to get to the best product or a Canadian company. They're usually centred around reducing risk and favouring multinationals. This is where we need to shift and break that procurement so that we are favouring Canadian companies and sovereignty in Canada.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

You have 17 seconds.

[Taleeb Noormohamed, Liberal, Vancouver Granville, BC]

What you're saying is we should be taking intelligent, managed risk and betting on Canadian companies.