For 24 years, DEFSEC Atlantic has been a cornerstone of Canada’s defence calendar. Now, with a landmark inaugural event in Calgary, the family-run institution is proving that the appetite for serious defence collaboration stretches from coast to coast – and that the right venue can make all the difference.
When Colin Stephenson, executive director of DEFSEC Atlantic and DEFSEC West, talks about why his team looked westward, he doesn’t reach for the language of corporate strategy. He talks about a gap – and about the responsibility to fill it.
“We were in a position to fill the gap that we all saw,” he says. “A venue and an event formula that focuses on SMEs connecting with primes as its primary function. One where government facilitators on four levels can act as catalysts, advisors and facilitators to help partners find the right programmes to promote partnership and success.”
That gap, identified through years of relationship-building and a connection in Alberta who could see the model’s potential, led to the inaugural DEFSEC West at the Calgary TELUS Convention Centre – an event that drew over 1,700 delegates from across Canada and as far afield as Japan, and which has already sold two-thirds of its space and sponsorships for 2027 before the exhibition floor had even been cleared away.
Sitting at the heart of downtown Calgary, the Calgary TELUS Convention Centre offered delegates more than a convenient address. Connected directly to the city’s hotel network and the +15 Skywalk system and steps away from world class restaurants, the CTCC ensured that arriving, moving, and meeting felt effortless from the moment delegates arrived. The energy of downtown Calgary, a city with a distinctly entrepreneurial character, permeated the convention floor, giving the event a momentum that was impossible to manufacture and only a city like Calgary could provide.
The right formula, the right place
DEFSEC has spent more than two decades establishing itself as Canada’s second-largest defence and security forum. Its reputation is built on something deceptively simple: getting the right people in the same room. Small and medium-sized enterprises on one side, prime contractors and government stakeholders on the other, with a structured business-to-business meeting system doing the heavy lifting in between.
The question was whether that formula – proven in Halifax across 24 years of DEFSEC Atlantic – would travel. The answer, emphatically, was yes. But the choice of venue was never incidental to that success. It was central to it.
“Calgary’s easy connections to Ottawa and central position in the West make it well suited,” Stephenson explains. “The TELUS Convention Centre puts it over the top.”
It is a telling phrase. The CTCC did not merely accommodate DEFSEC West; it elevated it. Dedicated meeting spaces allowed hundreds of one-to-one and small-group conversations to unfold simultaneously – the kind of introductions that rarely happen by accident in the ordinary course of business. For an event whose entire value proposition rests on the quality of connection rather than the volume of footfall, the venue’s capacity to facilitate those moments was everything.
Levelling the playing field
At the heart of the DEFSEC model is a conviction that access should not be a privilege of scale. For many smaller companies in the western Canadian defence sector, a conversation with a prime contractor is not a routine occurrence – it can be a genuinely business-defining one. DEFSEC West was designed to make those conversations possible, and to remove the barriers that typically disadvantage smaller players.
“We must make it easy for participants to inquire, learn, make choices and participate at their level,” Stephenson says. “No membership requirements, no mystery as to how you can succeed. Our team is laser focused on being helpful and welcoming.”
Colin Stephenson
The B2B meeting system, which allows non-exhibiting attendees to arrive with a full diary of pre-arranged meetings, proved as effective in Calgary as it has in Halifax. “With advance work, one can arrive with a full slate of meetings and be confident of success before they make the drive or the flight,” Stephenson notes. More than half of the 1,700-plus delegates came from Calgary and the surrounding region – a clear signal that the demand was real and the appetite had simply been waiting for an outlet.
What struck Stephenson, too, was how naturally the western Canadian defence community fitted into the DEFSEC culture. “There is no great difference in the quality of talent, the energy, honesty and drive of our Atlantic or Western attendees,” he reflects. “We are all Canadians. It’s a very big country and at the same time, a very small country.”
A family affair – in every sense
To understand what makes DEFSEC different from the corporately managed events that dominate the conference calendar, you have to understand the people behind it. This is, genuinely, a family operation and not merely in the metaphorical sense that trade publications are sometimes inclined to deploy that word.
For DEFSEC West, Colin Stephenson’s extended family, many of whom travelled from Halifax specifically for the event, were present throughout, working alongside the professional team. It is, Stephenson acknowledges, a model that carries its own demands. “This venture is one of commitment in time and energy. One of risk and sacrifice. We could not have done it in seven months if our entire family was not committed.”
The motivation runs deeper than commercial ambition. Stephenson speaks movingly about the fathers and grandfathers whose careers in the Canadian Armed Forces shaped the family’s sense of duty. “Being a part of the transformation of our Canadian Armed Forces – the largest investment and growth since the end of World War Two – we owe it to our Dads. My Dad, John’s Dad, Tim and Ben’s grandfather made their careers in the CAF. They set an example of duty and leadership. We honour them by doing this well.”
That personal investment, visible at every level of the operation, produces something that larger events struggle to replicate: a warmth, and a sense that the people running the show genuinely care about the outcome for every delegate who walks through the door.
SisterShip: a community legacy written in Calgary
Perhaps the most striking moment of DEFSEC West had nothing to do with contracts or prime contractors. It came when DEFSEC presented a cheque to SisterShip Dragon Boat Club – a Calgary team made up of breast cancer survivors – to fund their travel to an international regatta in Paris.
The connection came through family, as so many DEFSEC connections do. “We found SisterShip through my cousin in Halifax, who is on a team in Nova Scotia,” Stephenson explains. “We needed experience, reliability, professionalism and a great team. We found it.”
More than 40 SisterShip members volunteered across all aspects of the event – from registration and delegate support to logistics – bringing with them an energy that Stephenson says was infectious and helped to create exactly the atmosphere the team had hoped for. The financial contribution that followed was, in his words, “one of the happiest cheques we’ve ever written.”
It is a gesture that speaks to a deliberate philosophy about what an event like DEFSEC West should mean to the cities it visits. The legacy of a business event is not measured solely in economic impact reports and delegate numbers; it is also measured in the communities it touches and the stories it helps to write.
Looking west – and forward
The results of year one has clearly emboldened the team. Plans for 2027 include a 50% increase in booth space, a doubling of business-to-business capacity, and a dramatic expansion of meeting space. “Passing 2,000 attendees in 2027 seems like a low bar,” Stephenson says – a statement that would sound like hubris from almost anyone else, but which is grounded in the concrete reality of bookings already secured.
The longer view is equally ambitious. “We will develop deep relationships with the key communities and leaders in the region,” Stephenson says. “We will follow the pace set by our government’s commitments to our shared defence and play our role in bringing talent to bear on our shared challenges.”
For the Calgary TELUS Convention Centre, DEFSEC West represents exactly the kind of event that demonstrates what a world-class convention facility makes possible – not just the logistics of space and connectivity, but the catalyst role that only the right venue can play. In a sector as relationship driven as defence, the room in which people meet matters. The CTCC, it turns out, is very much the right room.
“Our role is to make the complex feel effortless,” says Kurby Court, CEO of the Calgary TELUS Convention Centre. “With over 50 years of experience, our team anticipates every detail so that planners can focus on what matters most. When an event like DEFSEC West comes to Calgary, we bring everything we have to ensure the venue never gets in the way of the mission, and the connections made on the floor speak for themselves.”
For the wider Canadian defence industry, the expansion westward creates a new node in a national network that has long been better connected along the Atlantic seaboard than across the Rockies. If the conversations started in Calgary bear even a fraction of the fruit that Halifax has yielded over a quarter of a century, DEFSEC West will have more than justified its existence.
As Stephenson puts it simply: “We measure success on the quality of connection rather than on the numbers of participants. If the right two people are in the same room, the potential is there.”
In Calgary, they found the room. The rest, as they say, is just beginning.
