SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — Canada’s Air Effects Team
October 8, 2026
Honourable senators, I’m honoured to recognize the achievements of Canada’s Air Effects Team, many of whom are with us in the gallery today.
Colleagues, creating sovereign supply chains requires enormous effort and focus. Consider our military, where an estimated 75 cents of every procurement dollar lands in the United States. The creation of sovereign capabilities depends on Canada developing a strategic capacity that meets an evolving need among allies and has uses beyond the military. It requires global competitiveness in select sectors where we have the ability to lead and partnerships between deployed personnel and private sector innovators.
This last point is vital if we’re to innovate and iterate fast enough to compete, and Canada just proved we can. At a recent Five Eyes military modernization exercise involving roughly 14,000 personnel, Canada’s Air Effects Team achieved two firsts: its first autonomous, optionally piloted aircraft flying with a military call sign and, together with the United Kingdom, its first strike on a vehicle using a one-way drone.
Allies noticed immediately and were effusive. The U.K. officer leading the multinational brigade responsible for intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance said that without Canada’s sensor-equipped autonomous aircraft, the brigade “would have been blind for the majority of the execution.”
It was a true team effort involving the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian Armed Forces, National Research Council Canada, Defence Research and Development Canada and a private sector innovator called Ribbit. About 15 deployed personnel were backed by more than 20 behind the scenes. Government, the military and industry broke down silos and built an agile partnership, a model for future innovation. What they did cuts against our established procurement practices.
The lesson? Embrace mission command. Give leaders maximum freedom to deliver with real authority and clear priorities. Build if we can, partner if we can’t and buy only as a last resort. Let innovation be organic, even chaotic, rather than institutionalized and siloed. Give public servants the autonomy and risk tolerance to make decisions and then assess their impact independently. Procurement is now an operational capability. We must learn how to quickly move from prototype to impact.
The opportunity for Canada is massive. We could become a global leader in autonomous systems that team with helicopters and other crewed aircraft. This is an area few allies are pursuing, with applications in search and rescue, forest fires, border patrol and defence. Canada’s Air Effects Team demonstrated it can be done, so let’s celebrate and scale this up.
Colleagues, if you can, please join me upstairs in the Senators’ Lounge to meet and congratulate this impressive team. They deserve our hearty congratulations. Thank you.
