Canadian police and defence agencies can now run Team Awareness Kit (TAK) on a Canadian cloud rather than a foreign hyperscaler. ThinkOn, a Toronto-based sovereign cloud provider, and AVSS, the New Brunswick drone manufacturer, announced the partnership on August 9 out of Ottawa.

The announcement reached DroneXL directly from AVSS CEO Josh Ogden on Sunday evening, a month after we covered the company crossing 2,000 systems manufactured this fiscal year. The pitch is jurisdiction, not capability. Field teams see the same map on the same handheld. What changes is which country’s law governs the server holding the location, video, and mission data.

The AVSS side of the partnership pushes live telemetry and video from MAVLink-compatible drones into TAK’s common operating picture and back out to TAK-enabled devices, including ATAK on Android handhelds. Nothing about the field workflow changes. The server underneath moves. AVSS published the full announcement on August 9.

TAK itself is not new and not Canadian. The Air Force Research Laboratory began building it in 2010, and it has spread from special operations units to police departments and volunteer search teams worldwide. DroneXL has covered the reach of that spread before, including a hobbyist who streamed live drone video into ATAK on a $120 build.

The MAVLink detail is worth pausing on. MAVLink is the open protocol behind ArduPilot and PX4 airframes, and AVSS maintains its own AVSSUAS dialect inside the standard. DJI aircraft do not speak MAVLink natively. An agency plugging its fleet straight into this pipeline is not plugging in DJI hardware, at least not without a translation layer sitting in between.

ThinkOn Hosts The Server Agencies Would Otherwise Rent Abroad

ThinkOn describes itself as a channel-first cloud provider headquartered in Toronto, sovereign-certified and government-cleared for more than eight years, with operations in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Caribbean. It was also one of four firms behind an end-to-end Canadian sovereign government cloud announced in October 2025.

“They just haven’t had a sovereign option for TAK until now,” said Craig McLellan, CEO of ThinkOn.

Ogden framed it operationally. “Drones only make a difference in an emergency if the right people can see what the drone sees,” he said.

The announcement names no launch customer, no pricing, and no availability date. Canadian agencies evaluating this will have to ask for all three.

Ontario’s OPP Decision Set The Table

The timing is not accidental. Ontario barred Chinese-made drones from sensitive Ontario Provincial Police work in May 2026 and signalled a broader government phase-out, without publishing a technical vulnerability finding to support it. The Canadian Armed Forces have meanwhile activated counter-drone systems at naval bases, and Transport Canada is midway through the largest rewrite of Canadian drone rules since 2019, with the comment window on NPA 2026-005 open until September 9.

Canadian procurement officers reading all three of those developments at once are exactly the audience for a Canadian-hosted, Canadian-integrated, non-DJI drone pipeline.

DroneXL’s Take

The data residency argument is sound and I will not pretend otherwise. Where a TAK server physically sits, and which country’s courts can compel access to what is on it, is a legitimate question for a police service handling active-incident video. ThinkOn and AVSS are two Canadian companies solving it with Canadian engineering, and AVSS in particular has earned the benefit of the doubt by building actual hardware in actual Canadian factories for nine years.

The “until now” is the part I would push back on. TAK Server is government off-the-shelf software. Any competent integrator could already stand it up in a Canadian data centre or on-premises in a detachment basement. Agencies were never forced onto foreign clouds. They defaulted there because the hyperscalers made it easy and nobody packaged the alternative. I will concede the practical point: a 30-officer municipal service is not going to patch and secure its own TAK Server, so a supported product is worth real money. That is a procurement fix, not the removal of a legal barrier.

My concern is what happens next to the word “sovereign.” Ontario used security language to justify a drone ban it never backed with a published vulnerability finding. Sovereignty is now a procurement advantage in Canada, which means it will be claimed by vendors whose actual claim is thin, and it will be used to disqualify hardware on nationality rather than on evidence. ThinkOn itself has published the sharpest version of this warning, arguing that residency and sovereignty are not the same thing and that Canadian-hosted data on foreign-owned infrastructure is still exposed.

Canadian agencies should hold every sovereign pitch that follows this one to that same standard: which specific components are Canadian-owned, and which are merely Canadian-labelled. AVSS and ThinkOn have the receipts. Plenty of companies about to discover this vocabulary will not.

Sources: AVSS, ThinkOn, press release provided to DroneXL.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.