THE DISPATCH

Assemble Here - The Opening

Chinese iron on the show floor. Swedish fighter jets on the assembly line. A $25-billion sovereign wealth fund on the books. The ingredients are all here. The question is whether we're ready to build.

I spent last Thursday on the floor at the National Heavy Equipment Show in Mississauga.

The big American manufacturers, the familiar yellow and red iron that used to anchor half the floor, were largely absent. In their place: Chinese equipment makers, in volume.

Walk up to one of these machines and lift the hood.

The engines are familiar. Cummins. Hyundai. The fittings are standard, the hydraulics off the shelf, the hoses and couplings the same ones on every piece of iron in every yard from Thunder Bay to Fort Mac.

The only meaningful difference between a Chinese machine and the American one that used to sit next to it?

A US steel tariff.

And the steel in that Chinese machine was very likely made with Canadian metallurgical coal and Canadian iron ore.

We ship the inputs west. The finished equipment arrives east. The round trip is cheaper than buying from our largest trading partner.

We are already in this supply chain. We are just sitting at the wrong end of it.

The pattern is not confined to a trade show floor.

Saab has spent the last six months pitching Ottawa on 72 Gripen fighters and six GlobalEye surveillance aircraft, with final assembly in Ontario and Quebec, a sovereign data centre in Montreal, and an industrial package the company pegs at roughly 12,600 Canadian jobs.

The Saab CEO told the Canadian Press in March that a Canadian-built Gripen rolling off a domestic line within five years was "absolutely doable."

Same logic as the equipment floor:

Drive past any of the older industrial corridors in Ontario or Quebec right now and you will see the other half of the story. Lights coming back on in buildings that have been dark for a decade. Companies dusting off mothballed lines, rehiring trades, retooling for orders nobody was placing two years ago.

It is not yet a renaissance. It is not yet a trend you can graph.

But it is happening. And it is happening because the math is finally starting to work.

Yesterday's announcement makes the math work.

Ottawa unveiled the Canada Strong Fund Monday — the country's first national sovereign wealth fund, seeded with $25 billion and tasked with co-investing alongside the private sector in nation-building projects.

The mandate covers four sectors:

• Critical minerals

• Clean and conventional energy

• Agriculture

• Infrastructure

Returns get reinvested. A retail product is in the works so individual Canadians can buy in directly.

It stacks on top of an already-thickening federal toolkit: the $2-billion Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund, the $1.5-billion First and Last Mile Fund, the Canada Growth Fund, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, EDC, BDC, and the new "One Project, One Review" approval regime.

Now look at what is actually on the table.

✅ The minerals. Met coal, iron ore, copper, nickel, potash, rare earths.

✅ The energy inputs. Conventional and clean.

✅ The capital. A sovereign wealth fund and a federal toolkit thicker than it has ever been.

✅ The trade architecture. A strategic partnership with the world's second-largest economy and a goal of growing exports to China by 50% by 2030.

✅ The partners. A Swedish defence prime offering to assemble fighter jets in Ontario and Quebec. Chinese OEMs already selling into the Canadian market in volume.

✅ The infrastructure. We have empty industrial buildings with three-phase power and rail spurs already run to the door.

The opportunity is not to keep selling raw inputs and buying finished goods.

The opportunity is joint ventures.

Build here. Use Canadian steel where we can make it. Bring in foreign partners for the components we cannot produce at scale yet — engines, hydraulic packages, radar suites, fighter mission systems.

The inputs are in the ground.

The capital is now in a Crown corp.

The partners are knocking on the door.

The only ingredient that has ever been in short supply in this country is the will to act on the moment when it shows up.

The moment is here. They are already selling.

The question is whether we are ready to build.

🇨🇦 Introducing: Assemble Here

A new Dispatch series.

Over the next five editions, I am going to introduce you to Canadian companies already doing it:

• The operators running joint ventures with foreign OEMs on Canadian soil

• The owners turning the lights back on in mothballed plants

• The miners and processors going vertical instead of staying upstream

• The Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers riding the defence procurement wave into real production contracts

Five companies. Five proofs of concept. One thesis.

If you are running one of these businesses, or you know someone who is - I want to hear from you. Reply to this email, let’s chat.

Assemble here.

-Lee