If Ben Seaman’s hopes are realized, the military vehicle his company is unveiling this week could be a sign of things to come for the Canadian defence industry. Seaman’s firm, Convergence Design Services, has built an electric-powered, four-wheeled platform designed to be used in an array of battlefield situations. It can be operated with or […]
If Ben Seaman’s hopes are realized, the military vehicle his company is unveiling this week could be a sign of things to come for the Canadian defence industry.
Seaman’s firm, Convergence Design Services, has built an electric-powered, four-wheeled platform designed to be used in an array of battlefield situations. It can be operated with or without a human driver and deployed in all terrains and weather conditions.
Dubbed the MIL-V, the vehicle might be as notable for how it was built as for what it was built to do.
Every component of the MIL-V was designed and manufactured in Canada by companies owned by Canadians. Thirteen firms in all had a hand in creating the vehicle, many of them based in the Ottawa area.
From Seaman’s perspective, the MIL-V marks a major milestone in Canadian defence R&D. Rarely, he says, have so many Canadian companies come together to develop an entirely homegrown piece of military equipment.
The idea for the vehicle had been percolating in Seaman’s mind for a while. But as the push for more made-in-Canada defence technology began intensifying over the past year, he decided to take action.
“I said before the new year, ‘No one's taking the lead on this. I'm going to take the lead and let's start collaborating, let’s start integrating,’” Seaman says.
“We have the perfect autonomous-ready platform. So, we took the lead on it and said, ‘Let's actually stop talking about it and let's do it.’ And here we are later – and hundreds of thousands dollars later – but we're here,” he adds with a laugh.
Less than six months after the concept came together, the first MIL-V rolled off the production line. Convergence and its partners will showcase the vehicle at this week’s CANSEC defence industry conference in Ottawa, where hundreds of exhibitors from across the country gather each year to display the latest and greatest in military technology.
Defence is big business in Canada. According to the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, the industry generated more than $17 billion in revenues in 2024 and employed nearly 82,000 people.
Industry advocates say those numbers could increase dramatically as the federal government ramps up spending on military equipment and personnel as part of its pledge to invest five per cent of the country's GDP in defence by 2035.
That translates into roughly $160 billion in additional federal defence spending over the next decade. And with the feds planning to prioritize domestic suppliers under the new Defence Investment Strategy, Seaman and other industry leaders say the opportunities for small, emerging companies like Convergence have never been greater.
“All the pieces are kind of set up for explosion in the defence industry, and we just need to continue to get the government to buy Canadian, buy (from) small companies,” Seaman says. “The future of warfare isn't what it was before, where you're buying these big, expensive, we'll call them ‘buy once and maintain it for 20 years’ (projects). (Military users) want to see more adaptability … whether it be drone detection or autonomy or kind of counter-drone measures or soldier recovery or just generalized base support. There's different applications and one size doesn't fit all, so whatever can be adapted and changed with different companies’ technology and integrated on makes total sense.”
To that end, the MIL-V was truly a group effort. When Seaman decided to go all-in on building a 100 per cent Canadian-made vehicle a few months ago, he consulted his rolodex of industry friends and colleagues and quickly found no shortage of willing participants.
Convergence’s 12 partner firms range in size from Kanata-based Calian Group, a publicly traded firm with thousands of workers across the country, to upstart organizations like Calgary’s North Vector Dynamics.
'Compelling point'
Founded just four years ago, North Vector Dynamics has about 20 employees. While it’s a minnow compared with Calian, the Alberta-based company is supplying perhaps the most eye-popping component of the MIL-V: a precision-guided missile designed to track and destroy enemy drones.
North Vector co-founder Paul Ziadé is co-chair of the Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies (ACDC), a new Ottawa-based organization that is lobbying to make it easier for small and medium-sized defence-tech firms to win federal defence contracts.
Convergence is also a member of ACDC, and Ziadé was already familiar with the company from seeing Seaman and his colleagues at trade shows and other industry events. When Seaman pitched the idea of working together on the MIL-V, Ziadé jumped at the chance.
“They're very action-oriented,” Ziadé explains. “We said, ‘Yeah, let's do it.’
“In this era of thinking about sovereignty, where our (defence) supply chain comes from, being self-sufficient, being able to scale up on our own terms, I think being able to provide for our own defence, including air defence, is an incredibly compelling point to be making right now,” he adds.
“And so we want to be that Canadian champion building these systems to protect Canada and its assets. Canadian companies, we want to move quickly. We don't have the luxury of the large primes to be kind of going through these 10-year cycles and just endlessly exploring potential opportunities.”
Calian, meanwhile, is providing state-of-the-art technology that prevents enemy combatants from jamming satellite signals that help guide drones and other military equipment.
Darrell Wellington, who heads up Calian’s global navigation satellite systems division, has known Seaman for years and says he was impressed with the scope of the MIL-V project.
“We support all kinds of customers around the world, but it’s especially important that we support our Canadian colleagues,” Wellington says, adding he’s never been involved in a single defence-related R&D project that involved so many domestic firms. “So this was an easy thing to work with them to integrate our world-class expertise into their brand-new platform, which is pretty ambitious.”
Another Ottawa-based company, Agile Electromagnetics, is supplying the MIL-V’s cutting-edge systems aimed at thwarting belligerent drones. Avery Stone-Peldiak, a project co-ordinator at the five-year-old startup, says partnerships like the one with Convergence help raise the bar for the entire Canadian defence-tech ecosystem.
“I think the more you can collaborate with fellow Canadians and propel each other forward and be able to almost piggyback off of what someone else is (doing) … that's incredibly important, especially with what's going on today.”
The autonomous version of the MIL-V is about 2.5 metres long by 1.5 metres wide, while the manned model is slightly larger, at about 3.3 metres by 1.5 metres. Seaman wouldn’t reveal the total price tag of the first prototype, saying only it cost “in the seven figures” to develop.
Assembled at Convergence’s plant in Arnprior, the MIL-V took about four months to build.
“It's not a made-in-China adapted vehicle,” Seaman says. “This thing is completely ground-floor-up built, designed in Canada (with) Canadian IP.”
The MIL-V isn’t the firm’s first foray into vehicle production. Convergence has designed and built custom vehicles for a few private-sector clients over the years, and its 22-person team includes experts in chassis and drive-train design who’ve worked with high-profile organizations such as NASCAR.
Over the past couple of years, Convergence developed an “industrialized version” of a vehicle similar to the MIL-V for a private partner. Seaman soon realized there could be a new market for the product by adapting it to military use.
“Being fully electric, it's quiet,” he explains. “There's no acoustic signature, or very minimal. There's no thermal signature, and it's a localized power plant. That's one bonus. The other thing is it's easily buildable within the Canadian supply chain. So when we talk about supply chain resilience, it is easy to make locally in our multiple machine shops. There's nothing super-complex about it. It's adaptable, so we can add on all this technology easily. That's what we're also really good at.”
Still, whether the investment will pay off with a lucrative military contract remains to be seen. While Convergence has pending agreements to produce vehicles for a couple of private firms, the company has yet to land a deal with the Canadian Armed Forces.
“That’s been a bit more challenging than we would have anticipated, we’ll just say,” Seaman admits. 
