The federal government recently released an announcement that reads like it was written by a committee that watched too many late-night techno-thrillers and then tried to turn the dialogue into policy. Ottawa is directing $20.3 million to defence contractors and academics to establish the Quantum Defence Innovation Secure Hub—DISH—under a new program called BOREALIS, the Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science. You can almost hear the consultants reverse-engineering a string of important-sounding words until the acronym finally spelled something that sounded cold, northern, and expensive.
What the announcement actually offers is a militarized and colonial idea of security. It is not safety for communities. It is a set of technical systems designed to make the state more capable in environments where it meets resistance. The alternative is not more hardware. It is demilitarization, the return of land, and the practical work of building safety through mutual aid, housing outside the market, and forms of care that do not depend on hierarchy or force.
The press release leans hard on “Canada’s sovereignty,” a “sovereign defence innovation ecosystem,” and “Made-in-Canada quantum technologies.” It does not mention the land. The University of Calgary-led hub sits on Treaty 7 territory—the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Piikani, Kainai), the Tsuut’ina Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda. To the Blackfoot this place is known as Moh’kins’tsis. The state is investing in technological sovereignty on territory it continues to occupy under a treaty whose original understanding of shared use has been systematically broken. Indigenous nations already hold sophisticated, place-based knowledge of land, movement, timing, and relationship that does not require satellites. Treating “Global Navigation Satellite System-independent navigation” as a purely technical military problem quietly sets those knowledge systems aside and recentres the state’s ability to move and monitor on contested ground.
When officials warn about threats like GPS spoofing, the language is doing familiar work: turning abstract danger into justification for large budgets. Follow the money and the picture sharpens. The University of Calgary consortium is not a neutral gathering of researchers. It includes Lockheed Martin Canada, General Dynamics Mission Systems-Canada, CAE, Dell Canada, and Calian—companies that sit comfortably at the centre of the military-industrial complex. Their products support the projection of force and the maintenance of control. Research that might otherwise move more freely is placed behind security clearances so that technical development remains aligned with the state’s monopoly on organized violence.
The release speaks of the need to operate in “contested environments.” Contested environments are places where the state encounters resistance—whether from other powers or from people defending land and life. The Canadian Armed Forces and related agencies have a documented history of being used against Indigenous land defenders. Strengthening the military’s ability to function in those spaces is not neutral preparation. It is preparation for continued assertion of control. Security does not come from hardened technical systems or “hardware assurance.” It comes from reciprocity, accountability to land, and the absence of domination.
In Sarnia, living beside Chemical Valley makes the costs of extractive industry concrete. Health and land are routinely subordinated to industrial priorities. The state’s version of quantum technology continues that pattern. Quantum systems require extreme energy for cooling, rare-earth minerals, data centres, and eventual e-waste. Expanding them into “mission-ready capabilities” depends on infrastructure that reproduces the same extractive relationships that have long damaged Indigenous lands and waters.
BOREALIS and DISH are almost perfect examples of how the state takes problems of power, poverty, and violence and reframes them as technical challenges that can be solved by a closed circle of ministers, universities, and defence contractors. While the government finds $20.3 million for this project—and additional funds for Maritime and Uncrewed Systems hubs—it continues to leave off-market housing, clean water on reserves, and community-based supports underfunded. High-value jobs in the military-industrial complex are subsidized while ordinary living costs remain difficult for many people.
The press release is an exercise in bureaucratic language that manages to sound both futuristic and faintly ridiculous at the same time. What it proposes is a further investment in militarized capacity on occupied land. The clearer path runs in the opposite direction: less military infrastructure, the return of land, and the steady work of building actual resilience in communities.
