TORONTO — When Katheron Intson was trying to drum up cash for her Canadian drone manufacturing company last year, only investors from south of the border expressed interest.

“I would have thought that we were on a fast track to becoming an American company,” the chief executive of Sentinel R&D admitted at a Toronto Tech Week event Monday.

But now that the ongoing tariff dispute has made sovereignty Canada’s hottest topic, she said the country has “woken up” to Sentinel’s potential.

The trouble? Domestic funding still needs to catch up.

Canada and its investors don’t support burgeoning defence companies enough and when they do, that support is slow to come by and often pales in comparison to what they can get elsewhere, entrepreneurs at the event said Monday.

“The biggest risk to us, of course, is becoming a non-Canadian company,” Intson said.

“We haven’t seen Canadian investors have the same level of bravery as some of our allies in investing in the space.”

Intson’s point of view is not new. Canadian entrepreneurs have long lamented having to look to international markets because homegrown investors are less likely to give them the cash they need to scale their businesses.

But her experience is taking on a new urgency amid dramatically shifting geopolitical winds. Global trade tensions are flaring, the U.S. president has teased wanting to make Canada the 51st state and two wars are threatening to shape a new world order.

Canadian companies say they are ready to meet the moment, if only they could find the support.

Part of the trouble, Intson said, is that few investors — other than the government-owned Business Development Bank of Canada or security-focused fund One9 — even want to back defence companies.

“We haven’t yet seen the rest of the funds catch up in terms of this new reality for Canadian defence,” she said.

“Should they choose to follow suit, that would be great, but so far the idea that BDC and a couple of other select funds like One9 being the only funds with the guts to invest in this space, I think that is concerning.”

The federal government has a role to play, too.

Intson has seen signals that it is improving, but Eliot Pence, chief executive of defence contractor Dominion Dynamics, still finds government procurement moves too slow.

He said it took the country 16 years to buy F-35s and 20 to consider what drones to buy.

Meanwhile, Ukraine, which is locked in a war with Russia, is “buying things, honestly, like overnight from a sort of Amazon-esque marketplace.”

“We’re now at an inflection point where we can’t consider what to buy for a decade. We have to buy it now,” Pence said.

He thinks a better procurement process would see decisions made in less than a year and would prioritize Canadian firms.

“What ‘good’ looks like to me is privileging explicitly Canadian companies because they’re Canadian — Canadian-owned, Canadian-controlled — and doing it very quickly,” he said.

“I’m talking like week cycles, day cycles, hour cycles. We shouldn’t be considering these things for more than a year.”

Pence recently founded the Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies in hopes of generating the kind of support he wants to see the country’s defence industry receive.

An online survey the group had Pollara conduct from March 27 to April 8 suggested most of the 3,032 Canadians polled feel much better about Canadian-owned and Canadian-controlled companies building defence equipment and technology for the government of Canada.

Online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error but Pollara says a probability sample of this size carries a margin of error of +/- 1.8 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Pence and Intson were speaking from the TIFF Lightbox, where tech publication BetaKit was hosting one of 600 events slated for Toronto Tech Week.

Canada’s artificial intelligence minister, Evan Solomon, took to the stage after them, urging attendees to support one another.

“Guys, you got to invest in each other, reward your risk takers,” he said.

Solomon is in the midst of putting together a national AI strategy for the country and working out how stringent it will be in its pursuit of sovereignty.

Tech companies are waiting on tenterhooks for the strategy because it will indicate whether Canada is adopting a staunch version of sovereignty that shuts out neighbouring tech giants or a less rigid form that allows domestic firms to play to their strengths and foreign companies to fill in the gaps homegrown companies can’t.

Solomon doubled down on his previous signals Monday, indicating he’s looking at the latter.

“Nobody here is trying to build a digital moat. No country in the world, the United States, nobody can do this all alone,” he said, noting Canada has to look for where it is best to build itself and where it should partner.

“When you’re buying because you don’t have options, just make sure it’s safe.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 25, 2026.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press