Good morning. Canada’s Davie Shipbuilding was flirting with bankruptcy 14 years ago. Today, its name is synonymous with shipyards as far as Pori, Finland, a mid-sized city on the country’s west coast. I’ll take you there today, along with a trip to Bay Street to talk mortality.

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Hi, I’m Pippa Norman, and I cover innovation and the defence industry in Canada. In February, I found myself standing on the sand dunes of Pori, talking to the city’s vice-mayor about the impact Canadian shipbuilder Davie was having on his community.

The company is currently experiencing one of its best boom cycles since 2012, when the British-based firm Inocea bought the shipbuilder. It’s growing its international presence through acquisitions in Finland and the United States, and its recent inclusion in Canada’s National Shipbuilding Strategy means it’s well-positioned to bid for a stream of future federal contracts.

Davie moved into Pori’s Mäntyluoto shipyard in 2025 with big plans to utilize it for steel production and to feed into the company’s growing icebreaker production supply chain. The sale brought hope for long-term growth to the Finnish city, where the shipyard sits across from a large factory that the region lost to a fire.

It may seem far away, geographically, from Davie’s headquarters in Levis, Que., but that’s precisely the point. Davie is building one of two new heavy icebreakers for Canada through the country’s National Shipbuilding Strategy. And while the superstructure, or top half, of the vessel will be built in Canada, the hull, or bottom half, will be built in Helsinki and Pori before being shipped to Quebec.

The inside of Pori city hall is unlike most Canadian institutions of the same vein. It’s opulent, filled with works of art and chandeliers, and there’s so much light streaming in through the mayoral office’s windows on a sunny February day that it’s almost dizzying.

Government responsibility is delegated differently in Finland than in Canada, giving municipalities much more power. Hence, the ornate offices I found myself in.

I went there to speak with the mayor and vice-mayor about the shipyard’s presence and what Davie’s acquisition of it meant for the community. But first, of course, we went for lunch.

Kitty corner to the mayor’s offices, we walked into the basement of the old city hall, where a local restaurant now operates. It’s the same restaurant where one of Finland’s former presidents got married, since his wife is from Pori. In true Finnish fashion, we feasted upon an array of fish prepared at least four different ways: smoked, brined, pickled and seared.

The interior of the restaurant was warm and cozy, with small windows letting in light from above ground. The chef even came out to shake our hands, beckoned by the mayor to make a good impression on us, a Canadian journalist and executives from the company that recently moved into their region. That’s because Pori is hopeful about its new connection to Davie, and the source of consistent employment that they anticipate it will represent.

Pori is a city on a mission to reindustrialize itself. And it has the means to do it. This includes a cool climate and bountiful energy resources to host a growing data centre industry; sawmills and metal refineries producing some of the city’s main exports; and a six-kilometre stretch of sandy beach to convince people relocating to the area for work to stay.

Plus, a shipyard that’s double the size of Canada’s largest and, thanks to Davie, will once again be used for shipbuilding after years of manufacturing offshore oil and gas rigs. It has just entered into a 50-year land lease with the city under its new ownership.

In addition to its presence in Canada and Finland, Inocea, Davie’s parent company, also owns a U.S. defence arm, Davie Defense. That puts the company at a critical nexus between the three Arctic countries that have agreed to work together on building icebreakers, the heavy hulking vessels considered critical for northern sovereignty. It’s an advantage that no other shipbuilder can claim, and one for which Davie has faced several setbacks and challenges in its journey toward achieving.

But the federal government has said it wants to make Canada an icebreaker-exporting nation, and Davie believes it can help make this true.

Standing in the centre of the large shipyard in Helsinki on a bitterly cold February day, and peering down at the 280-metre-long dry dock, it’s hard to imagine Davie won’t succeed. It has the resources and, seemingly, it has the demand. But only time will tell if Davie can pull it off.

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