OTTAWA — The annual Cansec defence trade show began with an ominous breakfast.

On vast video screens in a dark hall Wednesday morning, a video montage flew by. News footage of Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy together gave way to clips of Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte. Interspersed were clips of soaring fighter jets, missiles trailing exhaust, grey navy ships cutting through the sea.

Over the images, a lilting Tears for Fears synth-pop classic played at thundering volume:

All for freedom and for pleasure

No-thing ev-er lasts forever

Every-bo-dy waaants to rule the woooorld…

Shortly, Carney would take the stage beneath the screens to make a flurry of Canada’s-back announcements on defence spending, apparently the first sitting prime minister ever to deliver a keynote at the trade show.

“Just six weeks after forming government, we announced our ambitious plan to rebuild, rearm, and reinvest in the Canadian Armed Forces,” Carney said. That means spending billions of dollars, and that makes him a popular man (unless you want some of the business and don’t get it). After the speech, German reporters mobbed Carney and, later, Canada’s Defence Minister David McGuinty, asking variations of the same question: “What will it take for Canada to buy German submarines?”

Carney took reporters’ questions in the curtained-off corner of a noisy entryway, as if he were in a foreign capital and making do with whatever space his staff could find.

Ottawa’s Cohere Centre, which opened in 2012 as the biggest trade-show venue in the capital, overflowed. Organizers added a tent annex to make more room and closed the site’s parking lot to accommodate heavy armaments, including Airbus helicopters and an actual Saab Gripen fighter jet.

Attendees lined up to sit in the Gripen, which Saab hopes to sell to Canada in place of a full fleet of American F-35s. A record 21,300 had registered in all, according to organizers, almost 50 per cent more than last year’s record.

Inside, the floor was crammed with so many people on Day 1 that moving around was like making your way through the standing-room floor of a rock concert. Instead of sweaty music fans, though, you’d elbow your way past retired generals and admirals in business suits (ex-chief of the defence staff Wayne Eyre and ex-navy chief Art McDonald, for instance), presidents of divisions of U.S. defence contractors, and smaller-time entrepreneurs looking for partners who might get them into meetings with governments that have turned on the money-hoses.

Here was a Roshel armoured car. There was a mannequin in body armour. MDA Space’s CEO Mike Greenley held court amid an open booth bar. Across the aisle was shipbuilder Seaspan, giving away its own cans of citrus-flavoured “Sub Soda.” Besides having its name on the building, defence-eager AI star Cohere had a relatively subdued presence in the back tent, where the theme was less hardware and more cyber. Cohere and Ottawa tech company Calian announced a new partnership timed to the show.

The Logic has told you about many of the companies trying to make names for themselves at Cansec, like Galvion, Wuxly, Palitronica, Volatus and Anvil, and we’ll report on many more in the weeks to come.

Cansec is the marquee event put on by the established Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), which includes subsidiaries of foreign companies. Cansec is big—so very big—but the nationalistic times have spawned a competing group of upstarts in the Canada-only Association of Canadian Defence Companies (if CADSI’s theme song is “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” ACDC’s might be “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”).

(Not on the Cansec show floor but on several attendees’ lips: ACDC member Dominion Dynamics, whose CEO Eliot Pence is the most prominent defence-sector member of Carney’s Canada-U.S advisory committee.)

CADSI’s CEO Christyn Cianfarani exhorted the attendees from the same stage as Carney: “Industry, it’s your time,” she said. There’s a country to defend, and so much money to be made.