None of the rockets from the big defence contractors were built without DoD money paying for R&D, though. Even Artemis uses portions of STS which was developed with DoD money.
So "not taking military money" could be a viable categorisation for it being first "civilian" rocket.
Concordia University collaborates with the Chinese Military, so by your analysis, perhaps the rocket is not civilian. The article mentions Concordia, and hints at possible collaboration of “space science with Chinese military scientists” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-chinese-mil...
Also Electron is a far bigger rocket than Concordia’s: Rocket Labs was civilian (I believe) with their first rocket design in New Zealand. Rocket Labs was bought out by US interests, I guess because of difficulties for a New Zealand company to access the US market. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/
As someone who did some work on Starsailor's avionics, and was quite involved in the rover club (not the rocket project). I can attest the chinese government isn't helping Space Concordia. I think the main point here is that this rocket is built by students, not some private company with a ton of investor funding bringing in top talent. It's just some students that are passionate about their big rocket.
Pretty sure the Falcon 1 was developed and built without any DoD R&D money, and flights 4 and 5 achieved orbit. Not sure why that wouldn't count as a civilian launch?
> Is Arianespace purely civilian, or partially funded by military?
Depends what you mean by _funded_, but certainly a lot of its customers are military or military-adjacent. Also, these days (it's had a _really_ complex ownership history), it's owned by a joint venture between Airbus and Safran, both of which are, amongst other things, defence contractors.
Realistically, _any_ large aerospace venture is going to involve, at a minimum, working with defence contractors; that's just how the industry is.
So "not taking military money" could be a viable categorisation for it being first "civilian" rocket.