Winnipeg’s aerospace industry — the third-largest among Canadian cities — is working to ensure Manitoba receives its fair share of defence spending.
The federal budget called for Ottawa to spend just over $48 billion on defence during the 2026-27 fiscal year and Prime Minister Mark Carney has called for defence spending increases in the coming years.
Manitoba’s NDP government has launched an effort to ensure more Winnipeg-area companies are able to bid for defence work, while incumbent Winnipeg mayoral candidate Scott Gillingham has made the expansion of the city’s aerospace and defence sectors a plank in his re-election campaign.
The parallel moves suggest the continued growth of Winnipeg’s aerospace sector is an economic development priority for both Gillingham’s office and Wab Kinew’s provincial government.
“We are third in Canada right now. We punch above our weight class already in aerospace,” Waverley MLA David Pankratz, the Military Envoy in the NDP government, said at an aerospace-industry gathering in Winnipeg on Wednesday.
While this has been the case for decades, Winnipeg’s aerospace industry has been wary of federal defence procurement priorities since 1986, when Brian Mulroney’s PC government awarded a fighter-jet contract to Montreal’s Bombardier over a superior and less expensive bid by what was then called Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg.
Winnipeg West MP Doug Eyolfson, whose riding includes CFB Winnipeg and Richardson International Airport, suggested the 40-year-old decision, which exacerbated the political alienation of Western Canada, is no longer contentious.
Over the past year, both Magellan and Standard Aero have expanded in Winnipeg with the help of federal funds and the Department of National Defence is planning a $500-million modernization of 17 Wing at CFB Winnipeg.
“We have made our way past what happened in the 1980s,” Eyolfson said after his government and the province announced $3 million in funding to help smaller companies bid for federal defence work.
“I think we’re in a different time,” said Paul Soubry, the former CEO for NFI, who was appointed by the province last week to lead the Manitoba-Canada Defence Alliance, a new organization tasked with promoting Winnipeg’s aerospace industry.
“The geographic dynamic of Manitoba relative to northern sovereignty and the relationship with the U.S. is a different time.”
Former NFI CEO Paul Soubry was recently appointed to lead the Manitoba-Canada Defence Alliance, which seeks to promote Winnipeg’s aerospace and defence industries. (Kevin Nepitabo/CBC)
The president of a Winnipeg-area drone-technology pioneer welcomed the new spotlight on Winnipeg’s aerospace and defence sectors.
“I think we’ve always taken it a little bit for granted that we’ve had these world leading companies — Magellan, Standard Aero and Boeing — here,” said Howard Loewen, president of Micropilot, which has been designing software and hardware for drones for 30 years.
“I think a lot of people don’t think about that.”
Micropilot, which is based in the RM of Rockwood, does not serve recreational customers. It sells orders in excess of $100,000 to government and industrial customers, some of whom supply foreign militaries.
Loewen, who describes his company’s higher-end drone tech as a “niche product,” said he welcomes the possibility of supplying the Canadian Armed Forces, which has identified drone technology as an area of need.
“Obviously a lot more attention is being paid to us,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to find a way to participate in the federal government and the Canadian Armed Forces supply chains. But it’s still very early days.”
Gillingham said he has similar hopes for other smaller players in the aerospace sector.
“We want to see all of our companies locally have the opportunity to bid on jobs and and procurement opportunities for this defence-industrial strategy,” said the mayoral candidate.
His re-election platform includes a promise to allow new industrial parks to defer paying development charges until they have customers, a move intended to speed the development of CentrePort lands west of Richardson International Airport.