Ottawa awards first $50M Defence Drone Initiative contracts

CALGARY — Ottawa has awarded up to $50 million in first contracts through its Defence Drone Initiative marketplace, picking six Canadian suppliers from nearly 400 qualified vendors as Prime Minister Mark Carney pushes a national goal of producing two million drones a year.

The initial batch covers low-cost tactical ISR drones and complex-terrain uncrewed ground vehicles. Suppliers named after Foreign Ownership, Control and Influence checks include AVSS, Volatus Aerospace, Draganfly, Objexis AI, Twenty20 Insight and Beonyx. Early orders call for 100 drones at $5,000 or less per unit — or two complete ground-vehicle systems — by March 1, with options that can swell buys toward thousands of airframes and more ground platforms. The PMO says the wave will introduce multiple new platforms and lift Canadian Armed Forces drone inventory roughly tenfold.

“I have to confess that our armed forces currently have about 2,000 drones in our infantry,” Carney told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Calgary. “In the years to come, we will need millions.” The marketplace, modelled on Ukraine’s Brave1, launched July 23 and is meant to compress procurement from years into days — even as some winning bids lean on allied designs assembled or sustained in Canada.

For the industrial build-out, speed is the point: rapid RFPs, quarterly supplier intakes and more competitions (including maritime mine-countermeasure vehicles) already queued. That same sprint bids up components, skilled labour and dual-use electronics — costs that flow through a defence supply chain Ottawa is racing to grow at home.