Gatineau university gets federal funds to build cybersecurity lab for military supply chains

Tashi Farmilo

When ransomware hits a manufacturer supplying parts to the Canadian Armed Forces, the consequences travel far beyond the factory floor. Ottawa announced on March 24 that it would give $3,600,000 to the Université du Québec en Outaouais to build a laboratory where defence suppliers can rehearse their responses to precisely those kinds of attacks, as the federal government works to shore up cybersecurity across military supply chains.

The university will add $900,000 of its own, bringing the project to $4.5 million in total. The centrepiece will be a facility known as a "cyber range," a sealed computing environment in which ransomware attacks, industrial espionage and operations designed to cripple production can be simulated in full, with no danger to real systems. Companies that could not otherwise afford to stress-test their defences will be able to do so here, against threats of precisely the kind that have made defence supply chains an increasingly attractive target.

"This project will better equip companies to deal with increasingly complex cyber threats and protect supply chains essential to our national security," said Industry Minister Mélanie Joly.

The university has spent years building toward this moment. A joint research unit with the National Institute of Scientific Research, founded in 2021, gave it a foothold in cybersecurity and digital trust. Last year, it joined the Multidisciplinary Institute for Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience, a consortium that works with governments and businesses on the hardest problems in the field. The cyber range would put that accumulated knowledge to work on a problem with direct consequences for Canadian sovereignty.

Murielle Laberge, the university's rector, was precise about the ambition. The laboratory, she said, would give Canada a strategic capacity to experiment, train and innovate in cybersecurity applied to transportation, work that she argued would establish the Outaouais region as a national reference point in the discipline.

The grant sits within a broader federal mobilisation. The Regional Defence Investment Initiative, launched in December 2025, carries a three-year budget of $64.9 million for Quebec alone, itself a regional expression of the $6.6-billion, five-year Defence Industrial Strategy announced in last year's budget.

Steven MacKinnon, the Minister of Transport and member for Gatineau, and Greg Fergus, the member for Hull-Aylmer, delivered the announcement jointly on Joly's behalf. Fergus argued that what was taking shape in Outaouais was bigger than a single laboratory. "It allows our region to actively contribute to cybersecurity and to building a more resilient defence sector," he said.