This year’s Canadian Seapower conference once again brought together senior leaders from the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the Canadian Coast Guard, northern governance bodies, academia, and the defence industry to confront the hard realities shaping maritime security today.

This year’s discussions moved well beyond fleet procurement and focused on maritime security as a national ecosystem challenge that depends on persistent domain awareness, integrated data, infrastructure resilience, climate adaptation, and coordinated governance across multiple agencies.

Speakers underscored that the maritime environment is now fundamentally data driven. Autonomous vehicles, synthetic aperture radar, advanced analytics, and space-based tracking are transforming how nations monitor their oceans. Yet Canada’s surveillance and information systems remain fragmented across departments, creating gaps in real-time awareness.

In this blog, Penny Switzer, Director for Defence and Security at GSTS, shares her insights from key conference sessions and conversations.

The Navy Canada needs

Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, RCN’s 38^th Commander, delivered a blunt assessment: Canada’s maritime security challenges are growing faster than the tools and structures designed to manage them. Fleet readiness and procurement schedules still matter, but they are no longer enough to keep pace with today’s threat landscape.

Modern risks include hybrid tactics such as data spoofing, covert seabed mapping, and the use of unmanned systems to probe defences while maintaining plausible deniability. Threat actors are also turning to attribution-ambiguous methods, such as AIS manipulation and dual-use “research missions,” to obscure their true intent and frustrate traditional enforcement.

Topshee underscored how climate change is reshaping the operating environment, especially in the Arctic. Melting ice is creating new navigable routes and drawing in global powers, commercial operators, and scientific expeditions. Meanwhile, Canada’s surveillance and enforcement footprint remains limited, leaving large expanses of northern waters unmonitored.

Topshee noted that Canada must shift from seasonal presence to persistent domain awareness. That means layered sensingacross ice-capable platforms, underwater sensors, satellites, coastal infrastructure, and Indigenous and community-based monitoring networks.

He also emphasized that the future Navy must be data-enabled, technology-integrated, and fully networked. Ships alone cannot deliver maritime security at scale. The Royal Canadian Navy needs a modern system that integrates vessels, autonomous platforms, coastal sensors, and AI-powered analytics to create a dynamic, real-time maritime picture. This requires changes in procurement priorities and mindset, moving from asset-based readiness to domain-based readiness.

Topshee’s modernization priorities:

• Expanded use of autonomous underwater and surface vehicles for seabed monitoring, Arctic surveillance, and intelligence collection.
• Digital twin capabilities that help predict maintenance needs and optimize fleet sustainment.
• Stronger cyber resilience to protect navigation, command, and communication systems.
• Deepened integration with allied surveillance and intelligence frameworks across NORAD, NATO, and Five Eyes.
• Accelerated recruitment and training in cyber operations, robotics, remote sensing, and maritime information analysis.

Topshee closed with a central point that the Navy will remain the backbone of Canadian maritime security. Still, its effectiveness will depend on its ability to see, sense, and decide faster than emerging threats.

Canada’s need for a maritime grand strategy

RCN Rear-Admiral (retired) Brian Santarpia put a spotlight on a national contradiction. Canada is a vast maritime nation with growing responsibilities, yet its preparedness, policies, and investments are not keeping pace. The country lacks a unified maritime strategy that connects its priorities across sovereignty, security, environment, and economic interests.

Santarpia outlined how Canada is now facing a tightly interlinked set of risks:

• Grey zone operations that blur the line between civilian, commercial, and state-directed missions.
• Attribution challenges that make it difficult to identify intent or assign responsibility in contested waters.
• Cyber threats targeting navigation systems, ports, and shipping logistics.
• Increased foreign activity in Canadian waters, including unregistered research, surveillance, and deep seabed mapping.
• Climate change is opening the Northwest Passage to commercial and strategic traffic.
• Rising dependence on underwater cables and offshore energy infrastructure.
• New regulatory and security challenges surrounding offshore renewable energy projects.

These threats cut across the mandates of the Navy, Coast Guard, Transport Canada, Fisheries, Indigenous governments, and national security agencies. Yet these groups still operate under separate authorities, data systems, and planning processes. The result is an uneven and fragmented maritime security posture.

Four key pillars

Santarpia argued that Canada needs a national Maritime Grand Strategy built around four key pillars:

1. Strategic direction – A clear articulation of national priorities related to sovereignty, security, environmental stewardship, trade routes, and alliance responsibilities. Canada must define what it is trying to achieve and what risks it is prepared to manage.
2. Integrated governance – Modern mechanisms for coordinated planning between the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Coast Guard, Transport Canada, northern and Indigenous partners, and the national security community. Maritime challenges do not respect departmental boundaries, and governance must reflect that reality.
3. Technology and domain infrastructure – Investment in layered surveillance systems that include satellites, seabed sensors, autonomous vehicles, Arctic communications, and AI-enabled interoperability. These capabilities form the backbone of a modern maritime security architecture.
4. Sustainable capability planning – A long-term roadmap that synchronizes fleet procurement with investments in domain awareness and digital resilience. This roadmap must withstand climate pressures, geostrategic competition, and rapid technological change.

According to Santarpia, Canada cannot afford to make maritime decisions in isolation. It needs a unified strategy that integrates naval power, coast guard presence, civilian protection, Indigenous partnership, and Arctic governance into a single national framework.

The Coast Guard and its evolving security role

Director General Robert (Robb) Wight, Director General of Vessel Procurement at the Canadian Coast Guard, highlighted a major shift underway within the department. Traditionally viewed as a safety, environmental response, and search-and-rescue organization, the Coast Guard is increasingly recognized as a frontline contributor to national security, particularly in the Arctic and coastal approaches.

Climate change is amplifying that shift. Longer navigation seasons, volatile weather patterns, increased tourism, and expanding commercial traffic are creating new risks in remote regions. These pressures are manifesting as increased vessel groundings, spill risks, illegal marine resource extraction, and unmonitored foreign activity in environmentally sensitive waters. Several of these activities fall into the grey zone space, where interference, mapping, or probing behaviours are intentionally subtle, deniable, and difficult to attribute.

Wight outlined several structural challenges affecting the Coast Guard today:

• Limited persistent surveillance capacity in the Arctic
• Aging vessels and long timelines for fleet renewal
• Communications gaps in high latitudes that restrict situational awareness
• Lack of modern digital systems that integrate environmental, vessel, and security data
• Rising cyber vulnerabilities within navigation and distress communication networks.

Future-ready capabilities

To meet future demands, the Coast Guard is prioritizing a set of future-ready capabilities:

• Ice-capable multi-mission and polar-class vessels suited for year-round northern operations.
• Satellite-enabled monitoring for vessel tracking, ice forecasting, and spill detection.
• Unmanned aerial systems for rapid assessment and coastal patrols.
• Resilient Arctic communications through low Earth orbit satellite networks.
• Digital platforms that integrate weather, vessel behaviour, and operational intelligence.
• Enhanced cyber protection across critical navigation and port-adjacent systems.

A key point emphasized throughout his remarks was the need for close operational alignment between the Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Navy. As threats become more hybrid, environmental, and technologically sophisticated, no single agency can manage the full spectrum alone.

Indigenous and northern communities were highlighted as essential partners. Their local knowledge, continuous presence, and monitoring capabilities provide early awareness of maritime changes that national systems often miss.

According to Wight, Canada’s future maritime security posture depends on a modernized, digitally connected Coast Guard fully integrated with national security partners.

Arctic: Strategic pressure and operational gaps

The Arctic panel delivered some of the most urgent and eye-opening insights of the conference. The North is transforming faster than any other region in Canada, and that transformation is reshaping sovereignty, security, and operational planning in real time.

Melting sea ice is opening new navigable routes, drawing in commercial traffic, scientific missions, and foreign state activity. Many of these vessels operate far from the limited infrastructure Canada has in the region and beyond the reach of traditional surveillance tools. This expanding activity is creating visibility gaps at a moment when geopolitical interest in the Arctic is sharply increasing.

Panelists highlighted several key challenges:

• Seasonal routes that are becoming increasingly reliable for global transit.
• Foreign research and surveillance expeditions with unclear intentions.
• Grey zone manoeuvres that exploit sparse surveillance and challenge Canada’s ability to attribute actions in real time
• Vulnerabilities to undersea cables, seabed mapping, and other critical infrastructure.
• A lack of deepwater ports and logistics hubs along most of the Arctic passage.
• Severe constraints on emergency response in remote, high-cost regions.
• Environmental volatility, including coastal erosion, ice hazards, and spill risks.

Speakers agreed that Arctic sovereignty cannot rely on periodic naval patrols. It requires persistent domain awareness supported by real-time sensing, integrated data, and strong partnerships with northern and Indigenous communities.

How to close the gap in the Arctic

To close these gaps, the panel identified several priorities:

• Under-ice and sub-surface autonomous sensors capable of detecting activity where satellites cannot.
• Real-time domain awareness created through layered satellite, radar, acoustic, and drone systems.
• Mobile or climate-adapted infrastructure that can serve as flexible command, logistics, and emergency response sites.
• Machine learning tools for ice forecasting, hazard prediction, and route planning.
• Indigenous community-based monitoring integrated directly into national situational awareness systems.
• Dual-use Arctic facilities that support both civilian and defence operations.

Madeleine Redfern, Executive Director of the Northern Branch, Arctic360, emphasized that Indigenous-led monitoring is essential, not optional. Northern communities are often the earliest observers of environmental changes, unusual vessel traffic, and emerging risks. Incorporating that local knowledge into national monitoring strengthens both sovereignty and safety.

Building nextgen of maritime security

The future technology session highlighted a core reality for Canada: maritime security is shifting from asset-centric operations to information-centric operations. The question is no longer only how many ships Canada can deploy. It is how effectively the country can sense, interpret, and act across a vast and increasingly complex maritime domain.

Speakers emphasized a wave of emerging technologies that will define the next generation of maritime security:

• Autonomous surface and underwater vehicles capable of long-duration patrols in high-risk or inaccessible areas.
• Satellite constellations that combine AIS, synthetic aperture radar, electro-optical imaging, and radio frequency detection.
• AI systems that flag unusual routing patterns, detect identity spoofing, and identify suspicious behaviour far earlier than human operators alone.
• Digital twins for maintenance planning, Arctic logistics modelling, and incident response simulations.
• Quantum-resistant and cyber-resilient communications networks that protect critical maritime operations.

Dr. Csenkey, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government and the Canadian Maritime Security Network, stressed that the challenge is not simply collecting more data but making sense of it. Canada’s maritime data volume is growing too quickly for traditional analysis models. Future readiness depends on systems capable of correlating multi-source information, filtering noise, and delivering insights in real time.

Dr. Salt, researcher with Triple Helix at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, focused on the growing threat of cyber intrusion. As ports, navigation systems, offshore installations, and vessels become more digitally interconnected, cyber vulnerabilities can create significant operational risks. Maritime cyber defence is no longer a supporting function but a frontline requirement.

Maritime security themes

Several themes emerged from the session:

• Canada must invest in scalable and modular systems that can be upgraded rapidly.
• Long procurement cycles create risk when technology is evolving every year.
• Interoperability across departments and allied nations will be essential.
• Data fusion, automated analytics, and resilient communications will define decision advantage.
• Unmanned systems and satellites will become core components of persistent awareness in the Arctic and offshore environments.

Canada does not need to match larger powers ship for ship. It needs to develop a maritime security architecture that integrates sensors, satellites, cyber tools, and advanced analytics into a single, coordinated operational ecosystem.

Domain awareness for modern maritime security

The domain awareness session reinforced what had become the central theme of the entire conference: Canada cannot protect its maritime interests without a real-time understanding of what is happening across its waters.

Ships and aircraft remain essential, but they cannot deliver continuous visibility across three ocean basins, the Arctic, and the North Atlantic approaches. Modern maritime security depends on the strength of Canada’s sensing, integration, and information-sharing systems.

Speakers highlighted that domain awareness today goes far beyond radar and AIS. It includes satellite imagery, autonomous sensors, environmental intelligence, cyber indicators, port data, Indigenous reporting networks, and commercial information streams.

The panel identified several persistent challenges:

• Fragmented data spread across the Navy, Coast Guard, Transport Canada, Fisheries, and national security agencies
• Large sensing gaps in the Arctic due to polar night, severe weather, ice cover, and communications constraints
• Increasing “dark vessel” activity as ships disable or spoof AIS. These behaviours often form part of broader grey zone campaigns, where vessels mask identity, manipulate data trails, or conduct dual-purpose missions that complicate attribution and response
• Difficulty detecting underwater threats, including interference with seabed cables and unmanned underwater vehicles
• Limited integration between commercial, environmental, and classified information systems.

Recommendations for increasing maritime security

Speakers agreed that closing these gaps will require a unified national effort, not departmental workarounds. Several priorities were recommended to strengthen Canada’s maritime domain awareness posture:

• Develop a Canadian Maritime Domain picture that integrates data from all federal partners
• Deploy seabed and underwater acoustic networks to protect cables and detect sub-surface activity
• Use AI and machine learning to identify unusual routing, identity manipulation, or behavioural anomalies
• Incorporate Indigenous and coastal community-based monitoring as a formal layer of national surveillance
• Expand Arctic communications using low Earth orbit satellite networks to maintain situational awareness year-round
• Establish a National Maritime Operations Intelligence Centre to support joint decision-making and coordinated response.

New maritime era for Canada

The conference made one message unmistakably clear. Canada is entering a new maritime era shaped by climate change, geopolitical competition, rising Arctic activity, and growing dependence on digital and undersea infrastructure. Traditional patrol models and siloed departmental systems cannot keep pace with these pressures.  

Many of the behaviours now observed in Canadian waters sit in the grey zone, intentionally crafted to obscure intent and complicate attribution. This makes integrated, real-time domain awareness essential to identifying and countering hybrid maritime threats. The future of Canada’s maritime security will depend on how well it can sense, interpret, and respond across its enormous ocean spaces.

As a Canadian company developing maritime intelligence solutions, GSTS sees these conference themes as directly aligned with the operational challenges we aim to address. OCIANA® was built to provide the advanced analytics, multi-source fusion, and persistent awareness capabilities that speakers identified as critical gaps.

While technology alone cannot solve national maritime security challenges, we believe platforms like OCIANA® can serve as important enablers as Canada builds the integrated, data-driven posture outlined at the conference.

Contact us to learn more about OCIANA®.