What each reader can get, in what order, and how a conversation starts. Every path opens a conversation, never a checkout: no prices are published anywhere on this site, and a quote follows scope.
A government ministry, a prime or an OEM, a supplier and the press each want a different next step, so each one gets its own path through the same desk.
Four readers, four next steps. Behind all four sit the same two lines: the machines Canadian Shield builds, and the operator it fits to machines somebody else owns.
A capability brief and an evaluation discussion. Sovereign, machine-specific, optionally uncrewed capability with Canadian sustainment; allied conversions follow a Canadian reference. Screened before any discussion, with permits per shipment. Read the government path.
Teaming, integration and manufacturing for a prime; licence, co-development or an OEM-integrated path for a machine builder. One architecture, two doors in. Read the primes & OEMs path.
Qualification and capability submission. Canadian and allied suppliers of compute, sensors, actuators and safety hardware, placed on the sovereign supply-chain register by criticality. Read the suppliers path.
Press, analysts and everyone else. Start an enquiry and choose media & general, or reach us directly through contact us.
Two lines answer to this desk, and most readers arrive for one of them. The fleet is the machines Canadian Shield builds: the Goose CS-110 launch chain in the air, CDNS KAOS on the ground, the water and underground programs beside them, and the Forward Manufacturing Cell, a containerized slice of the Goose line commissioned on an ally's own floor so the rounds are born in-country. Its front door is the fleet, and the lead program has its own page at Goose.
CDNS Autonomy is the operator for the machines a customer already runs. A removable unit sits in the seat under the machine's own lap belt, works the joysticks, levers, pedals and switches the manufacturer fitted, and lifts back out in minutes. Nothing is cut or reprogrammed, it never connects to the machine's CAN bus, ECU or firmware, and one fused feed from the accessory point is the only wire between them. Its front door is CDNS Autonomy. A ministry that buys platforms before it buys a retrofit reads the fleet first; an operator with machines already in the yard reads the conversion first. Both end at this desk.
Two further readers reach it as well. Defence infrastructure contractors and civil resilience agencies are customers of the same two lines; a civil resilience agency's need is hazard response, and its route is a dual-use machine conversion. Both are screened before anything is discussed, and both start where every other reader starts.
Every reader on this page is talking to the same architecture, whatever door they use to reach it. It is set out in full on the doctrine page.
Access escalates in four tiers, T0 to T3, and nothing below the first is reached by a form alone.
Intellectual property, operational security and export sensitivity govern what sits at each tier. A reader learns the thesis and the architecture at T0; the implementation detail waits for a screened relationship, whoever is asking.
Everything at T0 is already on this site. The whole roster is set out on programs, and the mechanism both lines run on is described on technology.
| Tier | Access | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| T0 · PUBLIC | This site | Capabilities, programs, architecture and manufacturing — everything on this site. |
| T1 · PARTNER | On request, after screening | Program briefs, sanitised interface descriptions, the qualification plan, supplier and production overview. |
| T2 · EVALUATION | Under agreement | Machine configuration records, detailed test plans and results, integration requirements, cyber and support documentation. |
| T3 · CONTROLLED TECHNICAL | Under NDA, export and security controls | Drawings, bills of materials, detailed hazard analyses, vulnerabilities and restricted technical data. |
Moving between tiers is an agreement, not a click.
What governs a defence conversation on either line is settled before the conversation starts.
Export posture is counsel-first. Controlled goods leave Canada only under permits issued per shipment by Global Affairs Canada, under the Export and Import Permits Act, and a permit cannot be pre-committed by Canadian Shield.
The edge of the scope is set before a conversation starts, so nobody discovers it midway through a program.
What a buyer scopes against is a conversion family and a supported configuration inside it, and the engineering behind both is built to repeat.
Canadian Shield markets conversion families publicly rather than dozens of machine SKUs. The family is the unit a buyer scopes against, and it is the unit the engineering is organized around: a single architecture, authority order and safety layer carried across the machines in a family, with a reusable core underneath and the machine-specific work confined to the parts that are genuinely machine-specific. A supported configuration is a named machine inside a named family: surveyed, fitted with its own kit, calibrated and recorded. The supported list grows one qualified configuration at a time.
That machine-specific work has a fixed shape, because the kit is engineered around six interface families. Every conversion is a set of engineering choices inside them, so a family is a product rather than a run of one-off installations.
The public unit of sale is the machine family, not the individual machine. A family gathers the equipment one engineering approach covers, and it is what a buyer selects, scopes and is quoted against once a screened enquiry has established scope.
Beneath the families sits a reusable core. The architecture, the authority order and the safety layer do not change from machine to machine; the survey, the kit adaptation, the drawings, the calibration and the validation are what a new configuration adds.
Support is organized the same way. Spares kits are packaged by machine family and line-replaceable units are serialized where appropriate, so a converted fleet is supported by family rather than one installation at a time.
A prime or a machine builder meets the same discipline from the other side. The family and the core are what a licence, a co-development or an OEM-integrated path is written against, under a defined IP and data boundary; the machine-specific work is what a machine engineering fee covers. Both routes are set out on the primes & OEMs page.
What an enquiry opens, what it does not open, and what every answer is written against. The order is the same for a ministry, a prime, an OEM and a supplier.
Nothing submitted creates an obligation on either side, and no order exists until a contract does. The exchange runs by email and by meeting: doctrine fit first, then integration, then scope.
Every response is made against the published record for the platform concerned: its own program page. A government enquiry moves toward a screened evaluation discussion; a prime or an OEM enquiry moves toward the interface and the boundary that matters to it; a supplier enquiry moves toward the sovereign supply-chain register.
Work involving controlled goods is arranged so that every requirement of the Controlled Goods Program is met before a unit is assembled or examined.
What happens to what you send is set out in the privacy notice.
Allied government procurement, primes and OEMs, and suppliers each has its own page to read before a screened enquiry starts.
Sovereign, machine-specific, optionally uncrewed fleet conversion; for allied ministries, allied-supported legacy-fleet autonomy with local operation. The offer is a Canadian machine-conversion evaluation program, or for allies, a country-specific conversion pilot. The conversation starts with a screened enquiry, then a partner brief.
A prime integrates an autonomy subsystem with isolated machine authority; its own command-and-control system reaches a mission gateway in high-level task vocabulary, and nothing else. An OEM licenses the same architecture, co-develops against it, or carries it into an OEM-integrated path, under a defined IP and data boundary.
Qualification and capability submission for Canadian and allied suppliers of compute, sensors, actuators and safety hardware, placed on the sovereign supply-chain register by criticality.
Behind every door, the fleet.
Eleven programs and CDNS KAOS: every one of them a carrier, every one of them built in Canada. Where an ally needs its own line, the Forward Manufacturing Cell stands up Goose airframe and launcher production on that ally's own floor, and only that. A ministry scoping platforms reads this first. Its front door is the fleet.
Behind every door, the conversion.
CDNS Autonomy converts the machines a customer already owns: a removable unit in the seat, working the machine's own controls, fitted to a supported configuration and lifted back out in minutes. An operator with a yard full of iron reads this first. Its front door is CDNS Autonomy.
Which door you come through decides what the first brief covers. A screened enquiry starts the conversation, and a quote follows the scope.
What can be bought is fixed, and none of it is priced here: hardware, a machine engineering fee, software and support, an evaluation lease or pilot, a licence, an allied production partner, and training and sustainment. Each door's own brief scopes it; none of them prices it.
Where manufacture is part of the answer, Canadian design and configuration authority sits behind it, with qualified local assembly through an allied production partner where that is the right shape. How Canadian Shield builds sets out the floor, and sovereignty sets out what stays under Canadian control. Whether the next step is a capability brief, an integration conversation, a licence, or a place on the supply-chain register, it starts the same way: a screened enquiry, read by the people who run the program.
Nothing on this site is an offer, a commitment or a representation to any government body.
