Ask most Canadians where the country’s cybersecurity industry lives, and Toronto or Ottawa would be the obvious guesses. But for the better part of a decade, a lot of the real momentum has been building somewhere smaller: Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Where it started
The story traces back to 2016, when the provincial government under then-premier Brian Gallant launched a deliberate bet on cybersecurity as an economic strategy. Gallant framed it as chasing a piece of the action that had made Israel a cybersecurity powerhouse, and the province stood up an agency called CyberNB to lead the push. The plan had five interlocking parts: a business accelerator called CyberSparkNB, an education pipeline called CyberSmartNB, a startup incubator called CyberInnovateNB, and a research arm — the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, housed at the University of New Brunswick.
That last piece mattered more than it might sound. Institute director Ali Ghorbani held the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity at UNB and had previously served as dean of the university’s Faculty of Computer Science, giving the effort real academic weight from day one, and IBM signed on as the institute’s first R&D partner.
New Brunswick also had a quieter advantage nobody built on purpose: proximity to Canadian Forces Base Gagetown and the Communications Security Establishment helped seed a pool of security-minded talent in and around Fredericton long before “cybersecurity hub” became the official pitch.
The buildout years
Through the late 2010s and into the 2020s, the province kept stacking investment on top of investment. Siemens opened a cybersecurity centre in Fredericton’s Knowledge Park, with officials framing it as a signal to the world that New Brunswick was becoming a major cybersecurity player. Federal and provincial governments later put over $3.1 million and $956,000 respectively toward a dedicated Cybersecurity Innovation Centre at Knowledge Park, envisioned as a shared space where critical-infrastructure operators — banks, hospitals, power generators — could collaborate on security practices alongside universities and colleges.
Homegrown companies grew alongside the government push. Beauceron Security, a Fredericton-founded firm, is the most-cited example: CEO David Shipley has described it starting with $1,500 and growing into a multimillion-dollar business with 40 employees — though the company has grown well past that since.
The stumble
The hub’s growth wasn’t a straight line. CyberNB itself — the flagship nonprofit meant to be the ecosystem’s connective tissue — didn’t survive to see the sector it helped launch mature. In early 2022, CyberNB shut down and laid off its staff after Opportunities New Brunswick declined to release the final installment of transitional funding it had been providing, citing the organization’s failure to hit self-sufficiency milestones on its business plan.
What’s notable is how little that shutdown actually slowed things down. Beauceron’s David Shipley argued CyberNB had done its job sparking the industry, which by then was thriving on its own, while Ignite Fredericton reported the sector employed over 700 people in the city with $55 million in direct payroll. Local leaders were candid that it stung — Ignite CEO Larry Shaw called it “unfortunate” but said the opportunity for the region ran much deeper than any single organization.
Where things stand now
The ecosystem regrouped under Opportunities New Brunswick’s own cybersecurity division, still branded CyberNB, and the momentum has largely continued. By 2024, CyberNB’s own sector report counted 45 cybersecurity companies in greater Fredericton employing over 1,200 people — roughly 38% of Atlantic Canada’s total cybersecurity employment. The provincial government also reported around $120 million in annual technology spending, with procurement patterns favouring New Brunswick-based firms, giving local companies a home-field advantage on government contracts.
International players kept arriving, too. Defence and aerospace giant Thales opened a National Digital Excellence Centre and a Cyber Security Operations Centre for North America in New Brunswick, developed with UNB’s McKenna Institute and local economic-development agency Ignite, alongside a Cyber Security Operations Centre for North America — part of what Thales called a commitment to establishing Atlantic Canada as a leader in cybersecurity innovation and talent development. Canadian Nuclear Laboratories also set up shop, explicitly framed as joining a growing list of companies transforming the province into Canada’s cybersecurity research and innovation hub.
What comes next
2026 has brought a fresh round of signals that the province intends to keep pushing:
- Defence is entering the picture. In August 2026, New Brunswick premier Susan Holt joined the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and cybersecurity firm Lastwall for a defence-and-cybersecurity announcement at the Cyber Centre in Fredericton — the clearest sign yet that the province is angling to connect its cyber cluster to Canada’s broader defence-spending priorities.
- The research pipeline keeps expanding. UNB’s Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity hosted the Privacy, Security and Trust Cybersecurity Summit in August 2026, backed by $50,000 in federal funding through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, bringing together industry, government, academia and students to work on cybersecurity, AI and security applications. A federal MP for the region called Fredericton a centre of excellence for cybersecurity research and innovation.
- Talent recruitment is being sold as a structural advantage. Immigration-focused guides now pitch Fredericton’s Atlantic Immigration Pilot pathway — permanent residency in 12–18 months versus 36–48 months in Toronto or Vancouver — as a genuine edge for companies trying to build technical teams quickly.
The honest caveat is that some of the province’s own promotional and consultant-produced material leans on rounded, hard-to-verify statistics, so figures like the exact employment and payroll counts are worth treating as directional rather than precise. But the underlying pattern is real and independently corroborated across a decade of coverage: a small province used sustained, deliberate industrial policy — research funding, a dedicated agency, procurement preferences, and persistent international courtship — to build a genuine cybersecurity cluster, survived the failure of its flagship promotional body, and is now trying to graft defence spending onto what it built. Whether Fredericton becomes something closer to a genuine North American security-industry node, or stays a well-marketed regional cluster, likely depends on whether that defence connection turns into real contracts rather than announcements.
