Gatineau reaches for a global defence bank, and the jobs that would come with it

Tashi Farmilo

The Bank

A new multilateral bank designed to bankroll the militaries of Canada and its allies has set off an unusual scramble among Canadian cities, and Gatineau, in tandem with Ottawa, is among those trying to bring it home. The Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, which the federal government confirmed this spring that Canada would host, could employ roughly 3,500 people at its eventual headquarters, according to the development group organizing it, and its backers aim to have it running as early as 2027.

The institution grew out of a straightforward diagnosis. First proposed in 2025 by Rob Murray, a former head of innovation at NATO, the bank is meant to fix a financing gap: traditional development banks were built for poverty reduction and private markets chase short-term returns, leaving neither suited to bankrolling defence production. Modelled loosely on the World Bank, it would pool the credit of member governments and extend long-term, low-cost loans, while backstopping commercial lenders so private money flows more freely to defence firms. The consulting firm KPMG has argued that paying for militaries out of annual budgets forces hard trade-offs against health, education and infrastructure, a strain the bank is meant to ease.

The bid campaign leans hard on treating the two cities as a single unit. Public materials pushing for the headquarters describe Ottawa-Gatineau not as two allied cities but as one ecosystem, where federal decision-makers, defence firms, researchers and an international diplomatic community already operate side by side, and argue the bank belongs wherever that convergence already exists. The pitch treats the border between Ontario and Quebec as functionally invisible, the argument being that the bank's success depends on connecting capital to defence priorities, procurement and allied partners, and that this kind of coordination already happens daily across the region.

The bank itself keeps advancing. At the NATO summit in Ankara in July, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that eight countries had agreed to help found it alongside Canada, though no other Group of Seven nation has yet signed on. The choice of host city is Carney's to make, and the capital faces competition from larger financial centres elsewhere in the country.

The Industry Already Here

Gatineau's stake in the defence industry is bigger than its low profile suggests. Public Services and Procurement Canada, the federal government's central buyer, is headquartered in the city. Under the Defence Production Act, it holds near-exclusive authority to acquire military hardware for the Canadian Armed Forces. The federal agency that resells surplus military and government equipment also runs out of Gatineau.


Local manufacturing plays a role too. Confections Carcajou, a veteran- and family-owned company founded in Gatineau in 2006, sews tactical gear, rifle slings, chest rigs and load-bearing kits to National Defence specifications, supplying the Canadian military directly.

Gatineau has since built on this foundation, forming a strategic committee on defence and cybersecurity. Three local schools sit on it: the Université du Québec en Outaouais, the Cégep de l'Outaouais, and the École nationale d'administration publique. So do three economic-development groups, ID Gatineau, Axeo and Export Outaouais, along with a handful of companies, including the software firm Spiria. The committee's focus is C5ISR, the military shorthand for command, control, computers, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The capital's ambitions now stretch to drones, and Gatineau is angling for a role even without a lab of its own. In July, the federal government launched a Defence Drone Initiative, led by National Defence and the new Defence Investment Agency, opening a standing marketplace for Canadian makers of uncrewed and autonomous systems, a category the government's Defence Industrial Strategy singles out as a sovereign priority. The testing infrastructure sits across the river, where Invest Ottawa opened what it bills as Canada's first drone and advanced-robotics testing zone in June. Gatineau's part in this, so far, is institutional rather than physical: the city's economic-development director, Isabelle Veilleux, has publicly backed the joint Ottawa-Gatineau defence innovation strategy, which counts the region's drone-testing infrastructure among its shared assets. By Invest Ottawa's count, more than 330 defence, aerospace and security firms and upwards of 10,000 workers are active across the two cities.

The bank bid anchors a broader campaign. In February, Gatineau and Ottawa launched a joint defence-innovation task force, co-chaired by their mayors with retired general Rick Hillier as honourary chair, that aims to draw as much as $3 billion in new activity to the two cities; Veilleux is a member of its steering group. This December, an international cybersecurity and defence conference, the INCYBER Forum, will hold pre-event sessions in Gatineau, with its main proceedings at Rogers Centre across the river in Ottawa. Underwriting the effort is a spending surge the federal government says topped $65 billion in a single year, enough to meet NATO's two per cent of GDP target for the first time in a generation, with a pledged climb toward five per cent by 2035. Ottawa's Defence Industrial Strategy, by its own figures, points to roughly $180 billion in procurement and $290 billion in defence-related capital investment over the coming decade.

That momentum got fresh reinforcement recently when Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and Gatineau Mayor Maude Marquis-Bissonnette signed a formal economic-cooperation agreement, timed to Ottawa's rollout of dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs on billions of dollars in comparable U.S. goods. The pact commits the two cities to a joint committee overseeing its rollout and calls for treating the National Capital Region as a single economic zone spanning the Ontario-Quebec border, alongside pledges to strengthen transit links, promote tourism together, and build up the defence and cybersecurity sector. Marquis-Bissonnette framed the move as an effort to consolidate the region's economy and chip away at the barriers still standing between the two provinces.

The Separation Threat

Every part of this plan, including the argument for the bank itself, assumes something the October 5 provincial election could unsettle: that Gatineau and Ottawa operate as one economy inside one country. The sovereigntist Parti Québécois leads a tight race and remains committed, in principle, to a referendum on independence. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has said recently that he will not call one while Donald Trump is in the White House, and pollsters put support for sovereignty near historic lows.

Remote as a vote may be, the project raises a question it cannot fully answer. A federal purchasing office on the Quebec shore, a Canada-hosted bank whose own backers are pitching the region as a single economy, a cross-border task force, a freshly signed economic pact treating the two cities as one zone, all of it rests on Ottawa and Gatineau sharing a country. What would become of them, and whether an independent Quebec would stay aligned with Ottawa on defence or set its own course, are questions no one can yet resolve.