Cumulative, not annual: Figures reflect observed values across the past 10 years of procurement disclosure, grant records, and Controlled Goods registrations.

Coverage gaps: Classified spend, foreign military sales, and call-ups against standing offers are undercounted. The data is a directional market map, not a financial statement.

Data limitations: This is published government data - and therefore, there are flaws as is true with all government data. We use our system to mitigate them, but ultimately, there can be issues such as misclassified contracts or duplicate vendors.

Professional services is the broadest competitive field: 615 vendors splitting $2.55B, the largest active supplier count of any category in the data. Average spend per vendor is under $4.2M, which makes it the most accessible category for new entrants without a platform anchor.

MRO and sustainment is a sleeper category: 509 vendors and $2.73B in observed spend, nearly matching engineering services in both supplier breadth and dollar value. Fleet life-cycle work is quietly one of the largest competitive markets in defence, and it gets almost no policy attention compared to platform procurement.

Industrial supplies has the lowest dollars-per-vendor ratio: $3.04B spread across 514 vendors, or roughly $5.9M each. Compare that to aerospace at $193M per vendor or marine at $138M per vendor. Industrial supplies is where the supplier base is widest and the individual contracts are smallest, which is consistent with a commodity category serving every department.

Foreign-owned firms hold the dollars: Roughly 17 percent of the supplier base and around 55 percent of observed procurement value.

Canadian-owned firms hold the bench: Six times the supplier count, three times the grant capture, and six times the Controlled Goods registrations of their foreign-owned counterparts.

The pots flow to different populations: Foreign-owned firms convert their presence into contracts; Canadian-owned firms convert their presence into grants and clearances.

The prime-heavy end: Weapons procurement runs at an HHI of 6,223, which is the kind of number antitrust regulators usually associate with monopoly conversations. Five firms hold 96.5 percent of observed value. Ground vehicles and marine are not far behind. These are categories where the supplier base looks like a small handful of integrators with a long subcontractor tail.

The competitive end: Professional services sits at an HHI of 309 with 615 active vendors. AI and software, C4ISR, and cyber are all in the moderately competitive range. These are the categories where new entrants still have room.

For primes building ITB commitments: This is the long list of potential Canadian content partners. The categories with the largest cleared rosters and smallest procurement totals are the ones with the most underused capacity.

For SMEs without a prime relationship: This is the peer set worth knowing. Engineering and technical services in particular shows 463 cleared firms against only $2.05B in observed procurement, suggesting a wide, competitive supplier pool that has not consolidated.

For government policy teams: The Canadian-owned share of the Controlled Goods register sits at 84 percent. The industrial base that policy is trying to protect is mostly already cleared, mostly Canadian-owned, and mostly not winning prime contracts.

Marine is the standout in absolute terms: $37.9M in grants associated with firms now holding $416M in defence procurement. That return reflects the National Shipbuilding Strategy's deliberate use of grants to build out the supplier base ahead of major builds.

Aerospace converts at a lower rate but at much greater scale: 115 grant recipients, 43 of which became procurement vendors, holding $4.49B in observed converted procurement. The category does the most absolute work even though it converts less efficiently than marine or engineering.

The cyber, AI, and C4ISR conversion rates are the ones to watch: All sit in the 40-50 percent range today, which is reasonable given how recently these have been treated as defence priorities. The conversion rates here are early indicators, not steady-state numbers.

Advanced materials is the conversion laggard: 13.3 percent. 15 grant recipients, only 2 of which appear in procurement. That category may be earlier in its development cycle, or it may be that domestic advanced materials production feeds non-defence buyers more readily than DND.