Disruptors

Defending the Deep: How Newfoundland Is Securing Canada’s Underwater Sovereignty

John Stackhouse: Hi, it’s John here. It seems like lately when it comes to our national priorities, Canada has been doing some pretty serious soul searching. Who are we? What do we stand for, and what do we need to do to move forward as a nation today, we’ve got some pretty special stuff to start off with because when you really wanna get the big picture.

John Stackhouse: Sometimes you gotta go right to the top.

Rick Hillier: Ladies and gentlemen, I’m General Rick Hillier. I spent my entire life as a soldier and retired after 35 years, three months, two days, and 14 hours. I was never so proud as when I put my uniform on with that beautiful Canadian flag on my left shoulder.

John Stackhouse: General Hillier, of course, was the chief of the defense staff of the Canadian Armed Forces from 2005 to 2008. He also helped organize Ontario’s vaccine rollout during COVID, and he spent years pushing for reforms to make the Canadian forces more effective and respected at home and abroad.

Rick Hillier: Security is the guiding principle, the pillar on which every single one of our friends and allies now operate on three sides of our great nation. We have the longest coastlines in the world. It’s a vast ocean. It’s deep. That landscape is now changing. It’s faster, it’s murkier, and we’re seeing much more traffic. And the threats that come in are more connected than in any times in our lives. We have to invest in defense and security. I think in a more serious way than we have ever done in the history of our nation.

John Stackhouse: Now, I know there are a lot of urgent issues that need our attention as Canadians, climate change, healthcare, tariffs. You might be wondering, is a stronger military really that important, at least on the scale of things we need to tackle?

Rick Hillier: This is not about becoming a military power. It’s about meeting our responsibilities as a sovereign nation, as a G seven country, as a founding member of NATO, as a founding member of the United Nations, and as a nation in the UN who brought forth the resolution to protect and say we would not stand highly by when peoples around the world were being persecuted.  The next decade will judge us by what we build, so we have to get to work.

John Stackhouse: General Hillier’s passion for this country comes through loud and clear. And when he says, get to work, you know, he means it. We’ve got a lot to do. So let’s get to it.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors the Canada Project. This season we’re taking you on a journey across the country to meet some of the visionaries who are using technology to tackle our most urgent challenges. And in the process, create a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive, more resilient Canada.  Today’s destination, Newfoundland the Rock, a granite gateway to this part of North America. Those of you who know your Canadian history know that during World War II, when Newfoundland was still a British territory. The waters around the rock were frequented by German U-boats, and in the many decades since they’ve been trespassed upon by others who use the ocean as a gateway into Canadian territory.  Today that matters more than ever. Because our national defense and our sense of sovereignty is again at a new height. Canadians are about to make the largest peacetime investment in defense in our history. Hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent over the next decade, and we have a generational choice of how to spend that money.  The threats that you might see from Signal Hill in Newfoundland today are not U-boats or even submarines. They’re cyber attacks, digital incursions, and something. Most of us never think about the cutting of underwater cables that carry the bulk of internet traffic and the digital economy. If Canadians want to stay connected to the world around us, we’re going to need to protect those waters more than ever.  In today’s episode, we’ll meet Dave Shea, the CTO of Kraken Robotics. And we’ll discover how a provinces where generations have read ocean conditions for survival is now creating the technology that lets navies see underwater threats and may just give Canada the maritime defense edge we’re going to need.

John Stackhouse: Dave, welcome to Disruptors. Oh, thanks for having me. First of all, great name for a company, especially for certain Seattle Hockey fans. Tell us a bit of the origin story of Kraken Robotics.

David Shea: When we were founding the company, our, our founder, Carl Kinney, was looking for a name. There was a lot of tech companies out in the industry, you know, digital sonar this, and electronic, underwater that.  And we were looking, really looking for something to differentiate us and to stand apart. One of his favorite novels at the time was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. So of course the infamous Kraken coming from that. So trying to, uh, really differentiate ourselves. We started out with the name Kraken Sonar, and then over time.

David Shea: As we kind of expanded our product portfolio, really we wanted to redefine what we were doing and be more holistic. Uh, we adopted the Kraken robotic Systems.

John Stackhouse: Dave Krakens culture is famously relentless. That’s one thing in Canada, but how does that translate into your ambition on the global stage?

David Shea: The ambition is really to be the world leader in undersea, uh, subsea and seabed intelligence. We are a highly technical focused company. One of our mantras internally is innovate or die. We truly try and drive forward technological innovation in everything that we do from in our headquarters in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and, uh, working across the world now. Built in Newfoundland, competing everywhere.

John Stackhouse: I love it. Krakens reputation really took off with a single breakthrough. It’s called synthetic aperture. Sonar. Can you walk us through that?

David Shea: So Kraken started out, our first innovative product was our synthetic aperture sonar. That’s probably what we’re best known for. That’s been our bread and butter for many years. So that’s a very high resolution seabed imaging sonar system. So much like synthetic aperture radar. It allows you to stitch together multiple pings from a sonar system and make a a one meter long sonar array look like it’s a 25 meter long sonar array. So we can image from a small underwater robot. So that allows us to generate some fantastic images of the sea floor to identify almost with optical quality, small objects. Most of our business is in mine countermeasures, mine warfare. So being able to identify these objects and really give operators Navy sailors the ability to say, yes, that’s a mine. We need to dispose of it. Or no, that’s just a piece of. Something natural that we don’t have to do anything about.

John Stackhouse: Of course, as all of us know, from taking pictures with our phones, incredible images require a steady hand, and in this case, depend on a rock steady platform. You built a custom one. To deliver that sonar, it’s called Katfish.

David Shea: The Katfish is the Kraken active tow fish, so it’s an actively stabilized towed underwater vehicle. It’s essentially an an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, but without a propeller, so it’s towed from either a crude or un crewed surface vessel. It’s designed to be the optimal sonar delivery platform, so it’s a highly specialized capability built around our synthetic aperture sonar.

David Shea: So it is meant to be the most stable platform for delivering our sonar out into the field that allows us to operate the catfish, the Toad system in very high sea states. So if you’re in very rough waters, you know the ship’s bouncing around, the cable’s being pulled as the vessel’s towing it. The catfish can compensate for all of those motions. It has its own control system on board, so it’s looking ahead to see is there a bottom, is there a rock, is there a shipwreck coming up? It can also choose where it wants to be in the water column so it can optimize itself for the mission that it’s driving there and look and tell you, and it can feed back up to the surface vessel and say, Hey, I need you to give me a little more cable out. Or, Hey, I need you to pull more cable in.

John Stackhouse: What’s the competitive advantage right now, especially on the East Coast in centers like St. John’s and Halifax versus, say, a Boston or other great maritime knowledge centers that are presumably working on similar technology opportunities.

David Shea: I think one of the great advantages that they have in Newfoundland and that we’ve had starting our company there and growing our company there is the Newfoundland people.  And the Newfoundland culture. It is one, it’s a very hardy group of people. It is a challenging environment. Anyone who’s ever been there, the weather is hard. It’s hard to get into and out of, and you go out on the ocean. It is not long before you are in the middle of the North Atlantic. So it is one of the harshest climates in the world, and when we talk about hardening technology, building technology, proving that it can work, and we’ve said for many years, if we prove it can work off the coast of Newfoundland, then it can work anywhere.  And that’s a significant advantage for Newfoundland technology companies. I think one of the other core advantages we have is where in the US uh, a lot of companies and entities can rely on the defense industrial complex. They can rely on a lot of government support, a lot of government funding. You know, they have advantages there.  In Canada and in Newfoundland in particular, we don’t have the same support from the government. We don’t have the same budgets that are being poured into that, so we’re forced to. Focus on exports. So we take our technologies around the world, we take our people, our capabilities, our innovative solutions around the world, and that’s allowed us to foster relationships and really prove these technologies, prove these capabilities in other environments with other nations, with our NATO allies.

David Shea: We say many, many times when we talk about the quality of the technology that we use, if it doesn’t work, it gets left on the pier, right? When you’re out there, when you’re a war fighter, when you’re a sailor, you’re in an operational environment. You need to know that the kit that you have is gonna do the job that you need to do, because their lives very much depend on those capabilities. So that really drives us to harden these capabilities because they have to work. They have to be proven out there in the world. And we have to, you know, provide support for our customers in that way,

John Stackhouse: Technology, this advanced doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a disruptor’s mindset. Questioning assumptions that industries have lived with for decades and the stakes are real. Here’s General Rick Hillier again.

Rick Hillier: The threats are now measured and change in hours, not months or years. And the Arctic sovereignty now is not a slogan in Canada. It’s logistics and domain awareness. Which are crucial for actually securing our North and exercising our sovereignty in the Arctic. The imperative in all of our defense platform, air, land, sea, special Forces and more is simple. Build that home, build it fast, and build it with our allies. We’ve gotta invest in engineers and technology. Operators and operators on the ground because the workforce. Those men and women who will make this happen for us are the most crucial part.

John Stackhouse: For General Hillier. It’s not only a matter of sovereignty and national defense, it’s about strengthening our participation in the global economy and our ongoing ties with our allies.

Rick Hillier: You cannot join the European Club and increase our trade with them unless we have an investment in security in defense, which is much greater than what we have now. We cannot have any kind of a relationship going forward with the United States of America unless we increase our investment in defense in security. One of the great challenges, of course, is finding the companies which could produce all the things that we need for our armed forces, for our security, and for support to our allies around the rest of the world as we seek to help stabilize that international community. And therein allow us to thrive. So what do we need to do right now?  Set along a rise in demand, single, multi-year commitments that let firms invest with confidence. And that’s one of the things that’s been missing over this past decade or so. Streamline procurement. So we can test, we can fail, we can learn, and we can feel in months, not years or decades.

John Stackhouse: One thing’s clear. Canada needs capability fast, and we need to think about getting a lot more bang for our military buck. For innovators, the challenge is twofold. We need to question the premise and respect the constraints. Don’t just build the best, build what Canada and our allies can actually buy, deploy, and maintain at scale and beyond one customer.  That’s the hard leap. Turning a breakthrough into something usable and affordable across many markets.

David Shea: One of the principles behind Krakens technology development was commercialization of high-end, high quality military technologies, but at a price point, at a cost point where they are commercially relevant.  We wanted to build things that are accessible, that are available, not these bespoke, highly specialized unicorn solutions that are being built traditionally in the defense space. Develop technologies that can be used by the military, but they’re built for a commercial application that allows us an export opportunity. So when you have dual use in the context of export control, it means we can sell things more easily. It means I can sell a device, not just holding my breath, waiting for a Navy to buy one of these things, but in the meantime, I can sell 4, 5, 6, 10 of them too. Commercial survey companies, offshore energy companies, I can sell them to commercial habitat mapping or Ocean Geographic research.

John Stackhouse: General Hillier would concur with this approach. By the way, we asked him how he thought military spending should break down. And here’s what he said.

Rick Hillier: The vast majority of the investment can be used in dual use technologies. A drone is equally good for sussing out force fires or wildfires, and how we can prevent, and how we can fight, and how we can recover from them as it is for flying in hostile territory.

John Stackhouse: Dual use technology can of course, widen the market and speed adoption. You’re not relying on one order, one purchaser or one application. But it can also get complicated in a hurry with multiple demands on a single technology. What are some of the smarter ways to invest so that we’re both learning and moving at the speed that the market demands?

David Shea: The challenge that we have is really one of risk tolerance. We are focused so much on compliance because we’re so afraid to take risk, and in this time, you must go fast. You must take risks. You must be willing to allow some of those things to fail, and we learn from failure. We learn more from failure sometimes in engineering and in science and r and d than we do from success.

David Shea: If you build something and it fails, it breaks, it implodes. As an engineer, you don’t get to ignore it, then you have to explain what happened. You spend time analyzing it, understanding it, really digging into the core principles there, and that helps inform the next version, the next phase. From the procurement side, we need to be willing to spend money on things that might not work. We need to be willing to, to take some of those risks on the financial side and on the technological side,

John Stackhouse: And according to both Dave and to General Hillier. As a country, we’ve gotta get faster and bolder in the development of new defense technologies.

Rick Hillier: The clock is ticking in Ukraine right now. Every three months, a new generation of drones is introduced into the conflict.  We’ve got to be able to match those timelines. If we are gonna be serious about our defense insecurity with our allies.

David Shea: The best time to invest in that defense industry would’ve been, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. The second-best time to invest into it is today. So if we want to have these capabilities going forward into the future, if we want to be able to secure our own national security, protect our own borders, and know what’s going on in our waters, in our coastline, in our airspace, we really have to be fostering that development in that capability.

John Stackhouse: If we get this  right five years from now, what does Newfoundland look like as a defense tech center?

David Shea: I think that Newfoundland is uniquely positioned both geographically and economically and technologically to be a potential hub for this type of defense technology development. We are positioned out in the North Atlantic. We have access to amazing testing grounds, very challenging testing grounds, which is exactly what we need to harden these technologies. We have an enormous number of highly motivated, very intelligent, very capable people. We have great academic institutions for training the next generation of, of engineers, technologists, scientists, and we have a, a motivation. The Newfoundland people have, have gone through a number of challenges historically from the cod moratorium to the collapse in oil prices. And the Newfoundland people are, are highly resilient and they are motivated to develop new capabilities and export them onto the world stage. So well said.

John Stackhouse: Dave.Thanks for being on Disruptors.

David Shea: Oh, well, thank you very much for having me

John Stackhouse: Standing on Signal Hill, you realize something profound about this place. For over a century, this has been where new technologies often first touched North America. Take for example, Marconis Wireless Signal in 1901. Or radar systems during the Second World War and now some of the world’s most advanced underwater detection systems.

John Stackhouse: In a world where underwater cables carry our digital economy and Arctic shipping lanes are opening as ice melts. The ability to see what’s happening beneath our waters isn’t just about defense, it’s about sovereignty, and it’s about economic opportunity. What Dave Shea and the team at Kraken have proven is that world-class maritime defense technology can be designed, built, and exported from Canada’s Eastern most province.

John Stackhouse: We can create so much here, especially using that maritime DNA, that comes from generations of Newfoundlanders who learn to read the ocean because getting that wrong was a matter of life and death. This is how a province that was built on reading the ocean is now teaching the world to see beneath it.

John Stackhouse: You’ve been listening to disruptors. I’m John Stackhouse. Thanks to Dave Shea of Kraken Robotics and General Rick Hillier for sharing their thoughts on national security and the future of defense technology. And thank you for joining us on this part of our journey across Canada. And stay with us for lots more ahead.