Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Madam Mayor for coming. Thank you, Mélanie, the Minister of Industry. Thank you to everyone here at this Canadian flagship, this Quebec flagship. It is a great, great pleasure to be here, back in Montreal, at CAE, a leading Canadian defence company that is building what Canada needs now. And it must be said, for generations, skilled workers in Quebec have supported the industries that underpin Canada’s security and prosperity. Quebecers know what it means to build things that matter. The work you do here supports our families. It anchors communities. It defends our country. And we are here today to build on this tradition.

Canada's new government was elected with a clear mandate: to make Canada stronger, more resilient and more independent. We're pursuing that on every front, building affordable housing at rates not seen in generations, creating one Canadian economy, realizing Canada's full potential as an energy superpower, and striking new international agreements with reliable partners. None of these goals will come easily. All will require ambition, collaboration and on occasion, sacrifice. But Canadians are up for it. We know, as Mélanie just said, we know that the world has changed and that Canada must change with it.

The assumptions that shaped decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy have been upended. The threats we face are numerous and growing—ranging from incursions into our Arctic to attacks targeting our cyberspace. The very nature of warfare is changing rapidly, driven by the proliferation of drones, autonomous systems, and weapons in orbit. In a more fractured and darker world, Canadian leadership will be defined not just by the strength of our values—but by the value of our strength. That strength must be concentrated, reinforced, and, above all, Canadian. That is why, right after the election, the new Government of Canada set out on an ambitious mission to rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in our Armed Forces.

We're now on track to meet our 2% NATO target by this spring. A full decade ahead of the previous schedule. Thank you. Recruitment to the Canadian Armed Forces is up by 13% since June. We've signed a series of new defence and security partnerships with allies who share our interests, who share our values and our history. And that includes the landmark SAFE agreement with the EU that the Minister of National Defence (inaudible) that he signed with the European Union last week. Crucially, we have committed to double our defence expenditures by the end of this decade, and that amounts to an additional $80 billion over the next five years. In addition, as part of our NATO commitments, we will invest an additional $45 billion per year on domestic resilience, yielding both security and economic benefits. In total, over the next decade, Canada will invest $180 billion directly in defence procurement, $290 billion in defence and security related infrastructure, and create over $125 billion in additional downstate economic benefits.

The magnitude of these commitments underscores the seriousness of the emerging threats before us. They also create significant economic opportunities. The Canadian defence industry already provides more than 80,000 Canadians with direct employment, and many more indirectly. It is imperative to maximize the return on these investments—over $500 billion—to strengthen our security, increase our jobs and prosperity, and protect our sovereignty.

Defending Canada means more than just increasing the size of our military. It also means the strength of our industries, the resilience of our economy, and our capacity to act independently when it matters the most. Our national security and our economic security go hand in hand. To those ends, as the minister mentioned, we are announcing Canada's first ever defence industrial strategy. It's a bold plan to get our armed forces what they need when they need it. It's a bold plan to scale Canadian defence companies and to put hundreds of billions of dollars into strategic sectors of our economy while creating over 125,000 high-paying jobs across Canada. Its framework is simple: build, partner, buy. First, we will build in Canada and prioritize Canadian companies. As a matter of policy, military procurement in areas where we have sovereign capabilities will be directed to Canadian firms first. Where we can't build alone, we will partner with like-minded allies, helping to attract investment, transfer intellectual property and integrate supply chains so that public dollars flow back to Canada and Canadian jobs created right here.

And only after exhausting those first two options, will we buy from abroad. Even then, we will ensure the maximum benefits are returned to Canada throughout the value chain, including through a modernized, industrial and technological benefits regime. The centerpiece of our new approach is the Defence Investment Agency or DIA. The DIA will streamline and speed procurement, will cut red tape and it will expand domestic production. It has three fundamental objectives. First, to protect Canada's sovereignty, particularly in the Arctic, by ensuring our women and men in uniform have the tools they need to defend our country. Secondly, the DIA will work to build Canadian prosperity. And thirdly, work to strengthen Canada's strategic autonomy, which means our ability to act independently in a more dangerous world. We start by defending Canadians. The truth is, over the last few decades, Canada has neither spent enough on our defence nor invested enough in our defence industries. We've relied too heavily on our geography and others to protect us. This has created vulnerabilities that we can no longer afford and dependencies that we can no longer sustain.

Government procurement is too slow, too fragmented and too reactive. For many Canadian companies, it is easier to sell to foreign governments than to our own. The current process increases our reliance on foreign suppliers and undermines the firms that we should be building up. We have made important new commitments in defence, and we must do the same with our spending.

Our Canadian Armed Forces will be backed by a resilient Canadian defence industrial base. Every dollar will be spent to maximize jobs, careers and industries right here in Canada. So, I mentioned earlier, we'll start by concentrating on those sovereign capabilities that are critical to our ability to defend our country. These are areas where we're already strong or where we have the potential to lead. The obvious example, we're in the middle of it. Quebec and Canada have proven strengths in aircraft, aircraft engines, parts, simulation. With CAE, we are the world leader in training and simulation. You are the world leaders in training and simulation. Bravo. Bravo à vous. Across Canada, we have other strengths. We produce world class combat vehicles, munitions and naval vessels.

Furthermore, Canada is developing leadership in areas that will be increasingly central to defence, including space, artificial intelligence, cyber, quantum, medical countermeasures, robotics, and drones. Strengthening our sovereign capabilities, and the quality jobs that come with them, will require various tools, including our determination to buy Canadian whenever possible.

Our strategy rests on five pillars. First, renewing our relationship with industry by providing clear long-term demand signals. Secondly, procuring strategically with greater efficiency through that Build-Partner-Buy strategy. Third, investing in innovation and workforce development. Fourth, securing supply chains and finally, working with domestic partners, including in Canada's north. The details of these strategies are outlined in the strategy document we're releasing today. But I want to touch on one aspect that matters, particularly for our long-term competitiveness and is directly relevant to the activities of CAE. This company knows that our defence sector is research intensive. It's three times more R&D intensive than Canadian manufacturing overall. And history shows that defence spending catalyzes innovation far beyond the sector itself. Globally, there's examples, computing, GPS, powerful cameras in our phones, all emerge from defence investment. We are going to boost government investment in defence-related research and development by 85% to help develop the next generation of capabilities in AI, in quantum, in robotics and autonomous systems. I think we can see examples of that all around us. In part to do that, we're creating a new Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership, BOREALIS, to coordinate and accelerate defence research and innovation in frontier technologies like quantum and AI.

Overall, our main objectives are to increase Canadian defence sector revenues by over 220%, our exports in this sector by 50% and to create 125,000 new jobs directly related to the defence sector. And for SMEs, the strategy targets an annual increase of $2.8 billion to reach $4.5 billion. These direct benefits will have positive impacts across our entire economy. Each job created means one more Canadian who will enjoy greater security, a family that feels less anxious about the future, a local economy that is self sustaining and can provide opportunities to the next generation.

Ultimately, this strategy is about protecting Canada's sovereignty in its fullest sense. In other words, our ability to act independently in that more dangerous and divided world. And to be clear, this strategic autonomy doesn't mean isolation. It means being strong enough to be a partner of choice rather than a dependent. It means building a domestic defence industrial base so we are never hostage to the decisions of others when it comes to our security. It means diversifying our partnerships so that we're resilient against any single point of failure. And that's why the 'Build-Partner-Buy' framework at the heart of this strategy matters so much. When we build at home, we develop our sovereign capabilities in aerospace, digital systems, naval construction, space. Those capabilities ensure that Canada can defend itself under any circumstance. When we partner with trusted allies in Europe, the United Kingdom, the Indo-Pacific, we access capabilities and technologies that strengthen us both. By diversifying these partnerships, we reduce our exposure to any single alliance or any single decision that we don't control. And defence depends on complex supply chains, from critical minerals to specialized components. Accordingly, we're launching the Canadian Defence Industry Resilience Program to secure key supply chains for our armed forces.

We will expand the production, processing, and stockpiling of defence-critical minerals. And we will coordinate with allies through the G7 Critical Minerals Production Alliance and NATO stockpiling efforts because strategic autonomy is strengthened by smart partnerships. A sovereign country can defend itself and has local industries that support its defence and quality of life. A free country can act autonomously by doing what is best for its people, putting its interests, its jobs, and its aspirations above all else. This is the Canada we are building.

So, to conclude, Canada's new government came to office with a clear mandate, to build a stronger, more resilient, more independent country. And today's defence industrial strategy is central to that mission. With this strategy, we’ll strengthen Canadian security, ensuring our women and men in uniform have everything they need to defend our country. We will build Canadian prosperity by creating high-paying jobs, boosting research and development, growing world-leading Canadian firms, and ensuring that the benefits of defence investments are felt in communities across the country. In this century, the work of defending Canada is the work of building Canada. Security and prosperity aren't competing priorities. They're mutually reinforcing foundations of the true North, strong and free. They are the foundations of Canada strong. Thank you very much.