NATO countries, including Canada, have become complacent under a dangerous illusion of safety.
In recent months, drones have been violating the airspace of NATO allies.
This month, a drone of unconfirmed origins crashed into a Polish military base. In September, nearly two dozen Russian drones violated Polish airspace, while Russian fighter jets violated Estonian airspace.
Such incursions should be a wakeup call not only to Europe, but also to Canada.
In December, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that Russia could attack a NATO country within five years. He urged alliance members to adopt a “wartime mindset,” pushing beyond current defence budgets to increase production capabilities.
The Carney government has dramatically boosted Canada’s defence spending. But Canada has not yet begun operating with a wartime mindset. This must change.
For those living closer to the front lines of conflict, the urgency of the threat is plain to see.
“[Poland is] facing a growing threat from Russia,” Witold Dzielski, Poland’s ambassador to Canada, told the authors in an interview in late 2025. Dzielski noted the September drone incursion was merely “one of the most vivid examples in recent months” of Russian aggression.
“We’ve been a target of hybrid warfare for a number of years … we are facing other kinds of aggression, including kinetic aggression,” he said, referring to the November 2025 explosion of a railway line used to deliver aid to Ukraine.
Poland is already spending about 4.5 per cent of GDP on defence and plans to increase that to 4.8 per cent in 2026. Doing so will make it the alliance’s highest defence spender as a percentage of GDP.
Poland seems to be preparing for conflict, and other NATO allies should be too. Dzielski chided NATO allies over their past complacency. “NATO did not work on its preparedness in the way it should have,” he said.
Fortunately, NATO has the military technology; it is production that has been lacking.
Currently, NATO’s industrial base lags well behind Russian war production.
In the first three months of 2024, Russia produced what NATO allies produced in an entire year, Rutte said in a May 2025 address to NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly.
Russia further expanded its artillery production in 2025, giving it a five-to-one firing advantage over Ukraine. NATO members, meanwhile, have struggled to meet Ukraine’s monthly requirements of 356,000 rounds.
Canada has an opportunity to lead in niche areas where modern warfare is evolving most rapidly.
On the current battlefield, Russia and Ukraine are now fielding fibre-optic drones, which relay control and video through a physical cable, increasing immunity to conventional electronic jamming.
Canada’s defence sector, which spans about 600 companies, has deep expertise in platform systems, avionics and sensor subsystems.
To counter “unjammable” threats like fibre-optic drones, Canada could accelerate work on multi-sensor drone detection technology that does not rely on traditional jamming.
It could take a leadership role in developing drone detection technology by integrating more domestic innovators into international incubation networks like NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), a Halifax-headquartered organization that connects innovators with military end-users to maintain a technological edge for the alliance.
With 20 Canadian companies in DIANA’s 2026 incubation cohort, Ottawa should treat this as a strategic opening to scale-up investments in domestic firms, and to connect DIANA with Canadian innovation initiatives such as the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) program.
Robert Baines, president of the NATO Association of Canada, stresses that Canada will also need to change its approach to defence procurement if it wants to build up its domestic industrial capabilities.
“We need to expand our industrial capacity,” Baines said, and “we need to make sure that our collaboration is increased with non-U.S. countries.”
Specifically, local defence firms need long-term procurement certainty in order to confidently expand production output, including on technologies such as unjammable drone detectors.
Such a change could transform Canada from a security consumer into a security provider, Baines says.
Canada can no longer afford to be the ally that watches from the sidelines. We need to ensure that when the next wake-up call comes, Canada is already wide awake.
This is indeed a wake up call. The era of quasi-benign superpowers is over. The United States, Russia and China all have a tinge of evil in their DNA, some more than others. We cannot depend on our traditional superpower ally at this time, and as such, we need to strengthen ourselves in conjunction with other sane middle powers. Canadians cry that “we are a peacekeeping nation”. That is all well and good, even though that reputation is a bit tarnished due to lack of participation and a low level of military readiness due to lack of support from successive governments. The bottom line…. we cannot keep the peace if our military is not strong enough to maintain or make the peace in the first place. Time to buckle up, pull up our boot straps and rebuild the type of protective force that made us great in WW2, but with modern day technology added to it.
Well said sir. Though I will add that while Canadians were seen as Peacekeepers, we still maintained that we can get anything done that is needed. We are More of a Warrior Country. I don’t mean that we are a war mongering country as we are not, but we will always answer that call. Canada is a nice polite Country, just one that will remind you that Canada can and always punches above its weight Class. WW2 D-day We showed everyone how it is done.