National Security & Defence Dialogues: Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Resilience

In partnership with IN CYBER Forum Canada | May 21, 2026 | Explorer Hotel, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories

Key Takeaways

Southern solutions do not transfer North

• The most salient theme of the conference, raised across sessions by local authorities and invited guests alike: solutions applied in the Arctic must be unique to the North, and approaches designed in the South fail when transplanted without adaptation.
• Training and hiring models built for the Southern labour market do not work in a region with a limited talent pool: unconventional problem-solving outperforms credentialed expertise in the North, and hiring should focus on curiosity over educational and/or training pedigree.
• AI-literacy programming successful in the South, such as Vancouver-style coding camps, does not map onto Northern and Indigenous contexts; participants instead suggested that what works is small-cohort program design, hands-on and in-person training, and retention tools such as cultural days.
• Top-down training approaches do not appeal to Indigenous stakeholders, and English-as-default-language delivery creates additional friction.

The Arctic is a contested strategic space, and infrastructure is a sovereignty question

• Climate change is an accessibility multiplier: as the Arctic becomes more accessible, adversarial interest and potential reach increases.
• Adversaries: China’s cyber capacity dangerously outnumbers Canada’s, with the PRC pursuing dual-track targeting through espionage and critical infrastructure prepositioning, while Russia and non-state actors target Canadian military and research institutions.
• Northern infrastructure is aging or absent, with no redundancies. Harsh weather-related erosion degrades the limited infrastructure that does exist and creates associated stockpiling risks.
• Reliance on US cloud providers is a dangerous dependency for sovereignty-essential systems.
• Infrastructure development in the Arctic is a conversation indivisible from that of Canadian sovereignty, and cyber security functions as a strategic enabler across all of it.

Talent, trust, and the public-private gap

• Brain drain and the export of local expertise to Southern Canada deplete the North of capabilities and the ability to scale. This problem is rooted in economic hardship and the lack of educational and training opportunities.
• The federal funding process is onerous enough to be economically unviable for local businesses: the lengthiness of applying and awaiting government funding (128-page CanNor application being the example raised) has elevated private industry into the preferred investment partner over government, with government described as “not a good customer”.
• US companies are relatively less risk-averse investors than Canadian ones, resulting in US investment and stake in sovereignty-essential capabilities in Canada’s North.
• Northern communities want partners willing to prove long-term commitment: trust is built through repeated interactions, sustained presence, and face-to-face contact, and past experience with actors who engaged on a one-off basis has damaged community trust in external partnership.

Implications for Ottawa

• The current federal funding structure is perceived by Northern businesses as so burdensome that it elevates private industry into the preferred investment partner position over the government. The government’s funding structure should be adapted to enable it to build meaningful partnerships and ideally, to become preferred partner.
• In the private sphere, Canadian investors must be incentivized to become more accepting of risk in order to contribute to the national sovereignty effort.

Together, these two measures would disincentivize the current willingness of Northern communities to lean into foreign investment, which may become a threat to the development of Canadian sovereign capabilities.