GOVERNMENT FUNDING & NEWS

Ottawa moves to designate the first three projects of national interest under the Canada Building Act

The Government of Canada is initiating the process toward potential listing of three major projects – the Mackenzie Valley Highway Project, the Grays Bay Road and Port Project, and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s (NWMO) Deep Geological Repository or DGR (illustration at right) – as projects of national interest under the Canada Building Act. They would be the first projects listed under the Act.

In March 2026, the Grays Bay Road and Port project and the Mackenzie Valley Highway project were referred to the Major Projects Office (MPO). Ottawa is now is referring the DGR to the MPO as well.

Located in northwestern Ontario, near Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Township of Ignace area, the DGR project is a world-recognized best practice solution for safe, long-term storage of all used nuclear fuel from Canada’s existing nuclear reactor fleet, as recognized under the federal government’s new Nuclear Energy Strategy, Ottawa said.

Listing these projects under the Canada Building Act would streamline and consolidate key federal permits and authorizations, subject to a document outlining the conditions under which the project may proceed.

National interest listing of the project would provide confidence that key federal permits and authorizations for the project will be granted, shifting Canada’s regulatory focus from “whether” the project should proceed to “how” it will proceed.

The support of Indigenous communities for these projects is critical, the government said. To determine if these projects are of national interest and should be listed under the Canada Building Act, consultations will be held with impacted Indigenous rights holders and communities, provinces and territories.

Consultations for each project will begin over the coming weeks, with the aim of supporting a listing decision by the federal government in relation to the projects in fall 2026.

Reasons these projects are candidates for listing under the Canada Building Act:

• By delivering on Canada’s commitment to safe, long-term management of used nuclear fuel, NWMO’s DGR project presents the potential to unlock clean nuclear energy projects that strengthen Canada’s autonomy, resilience and security; ensure best-in-class safety and environmental standards; and catalyze new investment and create jobs.

The opportunity presented for safety, security, economic growth, and Indigenous partnership aligns with the federal government’s new Nuclear Energy Strategy. The construction and operation of the DGR will generate sustained economic activity – including through Indigenous participation plans; and support the continued safe operation and expansion of Canada’s nuclear power facilities, in line with Canada’s Nuclear Strategy.

The NWMO proposes to construct the DGR approximately 650–800 metres underground in northwestern Ontario, near Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Township of Ignace area. It will consist of a network of tunnels and placement rooms designed to safely contain all used nuclear fuel from Canada’s existing nuclear reactor fleet.

• Since their referral to the MPO in March, the Mackenzie Valley Highway and Grays Bay Road and Port projects have advanced as critical infrastructure priorities for Canada and the North. The projects would help connect communities, enhance Arctic security, and unlock significant economic and export potential in the North by creating vital trade and transportation corridors and enabling new natural resource exploration and development, especially for critical minerals. The MPO has assessed that listing these projects under the Act could improve predictability, efficiency and coordination, and reduce risks of delays or cost increases.

The Mackenzie Valley Highway is a proposed all-season road that would run from Wrigley to the Dempster Highway (south of Inuvik), creating a continuous overland route through the Mackenzie Valley.

The Gray Bay road and Port project would establish a new trade route to global markets, unlock critical minerals development and enhance Arctic security. The Kitikmeot Inuit Association is a significant shareholder of West Kitikmeot Resource Corp., the project proponent.

We the Nuclear Free North, a group representing communities and First Nations in northwestern Ontario, said it “vehemently opposes” the federal government’s aim to designate the NWMO’s DGR as a project of national interest under the Canada Building Act.

“Such a designation would mean guaranteed approval of the DGR, despite any lack of evidence to support the safety of the project,” the group said.

“If the federal government does designate the NWMO’s DGR project as a Project of National Interest, it is very likely that the full Impact Assessment of the Project, currently underway, would be discontinued,” said Brennain Lloyd, project coordinator with Northwatch, an environmental advocacy group in northeastern Ontario.

“At best, the remaining vestiges of environmental assessment and licencing would be simply adding details to a done deal. Project approval would be a foregone conclusion,” Lloyd said.

We the Nuclear Free North noted that in the case of the two other projects – the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the Grays Bay Road and Port projects – the federal government committed that the project moving forward would be “contingent on both projects successfully completing treaty-based impact assessment and regulatory processes.”

“No such statement was made with respect to the proposed deep geological repository in Treaty 3 territory,” the group said.

Grand Council Treaty #3 Chiefs in Assembly passed a unanimous resolution opposing the project in October 2024, just weeks before the site selection was announced, and Wabigoon Lake Ojbway Nation, whom the NWMO refers to as a “host” for the project, responded to the site selection by announcing that they would be holding their own sovereign regulatory assessment and approvals process.

“There is no acknowledgment of the treaty rights or respect for a treaty-based impact assessment for the deep geological repository project in [the federal government’s] announcement,” We the Nuclear Free North said.

The Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation said it will determine whether the DGR on its territory can proceed.

Chief Clayton Wetelainen of Wabigoon Lake told The Globe and Mail that although he supports the move to speed the project’s development, he stands by the nation’s host agreement with the NWMO, which says his nation has its own regulatory approval process based on cultural values related to land.

Wetelainen said he has been assured by the federal government that his nation’s ability to assess the project will be maintained. One Canadian Economy

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Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson announced that the federal government will prioritize financial and regulatory support for the following transmission projects:

• The British Columbia-Yukon Grid Connect – The project is an approximately 800-km, +200-kilovolt, high-voltage, direct current transmission line connecting Yukon’s grid to British Columbia. The project would support industrial and economic development in Yukon, including the critical minerals sector. It has been supported by a $40-million investment from Natural Resources Canada.
• Restoring capability on the Alberta-British Columbia intertie – Restoring the Alberta-British Columbia intertie will increase electricity trade capacity by about 150 megawatts (MW) between the two provinces, enhancing reliability and affordability for British Columbians and Albertans.
• Upgrading the Alberta-Saskatchewan intertie – This project involves replacing and enhancing the McNeill converter station near Medicine Hat with updated technology to increase the existing intertie’s trade capacity by approximately 250 MW and extend its lifespan.
• The Saskatchewan-Manitoba intertie expansion – The scalable project would expand that intertie's transfer capability by up to two gigawatts along the Regina-Winnipeg Corridor, significantly enhancing the energy partnership between the two provinces.
• The Prince Edward Island-New Brunswick Interconnection Expansion Project – The proposed project includes new sub-sea cables connecting PEI and New Brunswick while also reinforcing the transmission system linking Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI. The project would enhance regional system reliability and trade in the Maritimes. 

Through the Energy and Mines Minister’s Conference (EMMC), the National Electricity Strategy, the Transmission InterConnect Investment Strategy, and other work being advanced, the Government of Canada is also:

• Moving forward with support for electricity projects, including interties, via the Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, and Natural Resources Canada’s Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways program.
• Implementing a Federal-Provincial-Territorial Framework on Interties, as supported by Ministers at EMMC 2026. The Framework will establish collaborative mechanisms to support regional system planning and co-ordination and develop a standard cost allocation mechanism to guide and arbitrate costs among project participants, including the federal government.
• Examining federal supports, including targeted investments for infrastructure, energy planning and deployment of made-in-Canada technologies, such as advanced grid controls and digitalization, that contribute to reliability and affordability in the North. Natural Resources Canada

 British Columbia Premier David Eby is cutting short his trade trip to China to return to Vancouver on July 2 for a “potential announcement of a finalized MOU” with B.C., he said. The MOU could involve federal funding for the George Massey Tunnel replacement in Metro Vancouver, and the North Coast Transmission Line, BC Hydro’s multibillion-dollar project to expand the electrical grid in northern B.C., among other projects, he said. Anti-pipeline activists fanned out across the country last week – including outside the office for Vancouver Liberal MP Hedy Fry – pushing back on the separate memorandum of understanding between Alberta and Ottawa for a proposed oil bitumen pipeline to B.C.’s coast. “The federal government is propping up Big Oil with all kinds of money, and it’s about time for that to stop,” said protest organizer Andrea Godding. Alberta is expected to formally apply for federal approval for that pipeline by July 1. Eby has repeatedly opposed the idea. CTV News

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Canadian Centre for Cyber Security warns organizations across Canada to take action now on emerging AI-driven cyber risks

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (Cyber Centre), part of the Communications Security Establishment Canada, is urging organizations across Canada to take action on emerging cyber risks linked to frontier artificial intelligence.

This call to action follows the joint statement issued by the leaders of the Five Eyes cyber security agencies, urging senior decision-makers around the world to strengthen their cyber defences now before a cyber incident escalates into a major operational and financial crisis.

Powerful AI models capable of devastating new cyber attacks on governments and businesses are mere months away, the Five Eyes agencies warned.

AI is rapidly reshaping the cyber threat landscape, the Cyber Centre said. As outlined in its Frontier artificial intelligence advisory, these models can help cyber threat actors find and exploit vulnerabilities – including software flaws and weaknesses in security controls – much faster than before.

“This significantly shortens the time defenders have to respond – in some cases from days or weeks to hours – and increases the likelihood of successful cyber attacks.”

The Cyber Centre’s National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026 and Ransomware Threat Outlook 2025-2027 assess that AI is also lowering barriers to entry for malicious cyber activity. Threat actors are already using AI to:

• create more convincing phishing, vishing (voice scams) and deepfake impersonation faster and at greater scale.
• find and combine weaknesses to carry out attacks, a technique known as vulnerability chaining.
• make it easier for less skilled actors to carry out more sophisticated cyber attack.

AI also introduces risks from within organizations, including unapproved use of AI tools, exposure of sensitive data, and the potential for systems to rely on inaccurate or manipulated outputs.

“This is not just a technical issue,” the Cyber Centre said. For Canadian businesses, critical infrastructure operators and public sector organizations, AI-enabled cyber incidents can disrupt businesses, operations, expose sensitive data, damage trust, as well as create financial and regulatory risks. Strengthening cyber resilience requires sustained leadership attention, not just IT action.

The Cyber Centre supports organizations in assessing risks, strengthening defences and adopting secure-by-design practices through practical advice and guidance, and organizations have a key role to play in putting these measures into practice.

Leaders should look at how AI can support their own defences, particularly by identifying exposures earlier, testing controls and improving response time, the Cyber Centre said. This includes integrating AI into software development processes to identify vulnerabilities earlier in the development lifecycle and strengthen secure-by-design practices.

Organizations across Canada should:

• apply security patches promptly and keep systems up to date.
• limit exposure to the Internet and reduce attack surfaces.
• implement strong authentication, including phishing‑resistant multi‑factor authentication.
• centralize logs across systems and environments so unusual activity can be detected sooner.
• separate key systems, a practice known as system segmentation, so an attack is easier to contain and less likely to spread.
• address unsupported or legacy systems.
• test incident response plans and plan for containment and recovery.
• build internal awareness and clear guidance on the appropriate and responsible use of AI tools, including how to handle sensitive information.

Organizations that rely on third-party service-providers should ensure those providers are also applying strong cyber security measures, the Cyber Centre said.

Practical resources are available to support these actions. The Cyber Centre’s Top 10 IT security actions and Top 10 artificial intelligence security actions: A primer - ITSAP.10.049 provide clear, prioritized guidance to help strengthen cyber resilience.

Organizations can also stay informed through the National Cyber Threat Notification System (NCTNS), which provides timely alerts on emerging threats. Communications Security Establishment

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Uncertainty over the North American trade pact is weighing on business confidence, but early signs point to a modest economic recovery in 2027, according to the latest quarterly outlook from Deloitte. Deloitte now expects Canada’s GDP to rise 0.7 per cent in 2026, lower than the 1.2 per cent the firm forecast in its April outlook. Yet even if the review of the Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement goes beyond July 1, Canada is likely to keep its duty-free access to the U.S. for most goods, Deloitte said. Canadian sales to the U.S. are down two percent since late 2024 before the U.S. government policy on trade changed. “Canada’s economy is stagnating, not contracting, as weakness remains narrow rather than systemic.” Speeding up major infrastructure projects and expanded capital cost allowances could also help drive investment next year, Deloitte said. Deloitte

China-based automakers Chery, BYD, Geely, and Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology are all willing to explore creating joint ventures to manufacture electric vehicles in Canada, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said after meeting with the companies during her recent visit to China. Joly said she wants to see Canadian companies engaged in contract manufacturing for Chinese EV makers in Canadian factories or plants. She said she told the Chinese companies that any joint venture must meet four conditions under the Investment Canada Act: be majority Canadian-owned; meet the domestic industry’s labour standards; use Canadian parts; and use secure software. Joly suggested both the strict import quota, which starts at 49,000 Chinese EVs per year, and the conditions for building in Canada would reassure the United States as it seeks to align tariffs on Chinese goods across North America. The Globe and Mail

The Department of Finance Canada published proposed anti-fraud and open banking regulations, including proposed regulations to combat consumer-targeted fraud for a 30-day comment period, as a first step ahead of the government’s broader work to develop a National Anti-Fraud Strategy. These new regulations are needed to operationalize the amendments to the Bank Act enacted through Bill C-15, which require banks to have policies and procedures to detect and prevent consumer-targeted fraud and to mitigate its impacts. The regulations specify that banks must obtain consumers’ express consent prior to enabling electronic funds transfer capabilities like wire transfers as well as which capabilities consumers can disable, the timelines for banks to process requests to change transaction limits, and what information banks must collect and report for each case of fraud and when it must be reported to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. In  addition, proposed Consumer-Driven Banking Regulations were pre-published for a 60-day comment period, supporting the coming into force of the Consumer-Driven Banking Act that will enable open banking system. This marks a key step toward implementing the Consumer-Driven Banking Framework, which will increase competition in the financial sector, allow Canadians and businesses to securely share their financial data with the approved service providers of their choice, give consumers greater control over their financial data, and better tools to manage their finances. Department of Finance Canada

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said the expansion of 17-Wing Winnipeg air force base was made possible because the provincial government rejected proposals for a 141-hectare hyperscale data centre on farmland south of Winnipeg in June. “The exciting expansion at 17 Wing Winnipeg is exactly the kind of project we want to prioritize when connecting new demand to Manitoba’s hydro grid,” Kinew said in a release. “Saying ‘no’ to AI hyperscale data centres allows us to say ‘yes’ to nation-building projects like 17 Wing.” Kinew said hyperscale data centres aren’t in the best interest of Manitobans and cited concerns over impacts on the environment, rural life and whether economic benefits would persist beyond initial development. Manitoba has not banned data centre development, but Kinew said the province would prioritize small-scale data centres, instead. The government said the air force base expansion will include construction of a substation connected to Manitoba’s hydroelectric grid, increasing the base’s energy capacity to support armed forces modernization. BetaKit

Draft rules from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) would create a new temporary “bridging” pathway for data centre developers, giving projects that bring their own natural gas-fired generation access to the province’s electricity grid for up to three years. The proposed 1.6-gigawatt bridging pool of interruptible power demand on the grid will let new projects move ahead beyond the two already approved under Alberta’s initial 1.2-gigawatt program cap.  Alberta’s United Conservative government has made clear its goal to make the province a global magnet for AI data-centre investment, but rising electricity demand has raised questions about how the province can handle it. AESO’s draft rules offer one solution by letting more data centre projects that commit to building their own gas-fired power generation proceed, but strict new development requirements could limit which projects advance. The Logic

 Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson announced investments of up to $73 million for 12 projects across Canada that will advance Canadian mining and build the infrastructure needed to connect Canadian critical minerals to global markets. These investments include:

• Up to $51.57 million through the First and Last Mile Fund for five projects to advance critical minerals production and supply chains.
• $19.6 million under the Energy Innovation Program for five projects to advance clean energy and industrial decarbonization technologies that strengthen Canada’s economic and climate competitiveness.
• Nearly $2 million under the Indigenous Natural Resource Partnerships program for the Tahltan Central Government’s project to co-develop, assess and participate in decision‑making on major critical minerals resource projects. Natural Resources Canada

The Government of Canada is advancing the Canadian Digital Core Library (CDCL) – a national platform that will facilitate access to digitized drill core data from across the country. Federal Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson highlighted newly signed memoranda of understanding with Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, and Yukon, which will work with the federal government to advance priority actions needed to achieve the CDCL’s objectives. This includes supporting drill core scanning in their jurisdiction, accelerating the availability of geoscience data in priority regions, and co-developing sustainable digital library solutions with other jurisdictions and industry partners. Core scanning is to begin by September 2026. Hodgson also announced up to $15 million for Creative Destruction Lab, a global not-for-profit network, to develop the CDCL platform. Once operational, the platform will improve data accessibility, reducing exploration risk. The government said this will allow enable investment and innovation across Canada’s mining sector while supporting Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All by enabling the use of AI in priority sectors – including natural resources – to drive productivity and economic growth. Natural Resources Canada

Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions (CED) announced nearly $34 million in funding for 52 businesses and organizations in Quebec’s biofood sector. This CED investment in the biofood sector focuses on the secondary processing and marketing of products from Quebec. These investments – which align with the vision outlined in the National Food Security Strategy launched by Prime Minister Mark Carney on June 11, 2026, and with the Strategic Response Fund call for proposals announced by Industry Minister Mélanie Joly on June 22, 2026 – support a range of projects, including through research, innovation and automation. They will enable businesses and organizations to integrate new technologies, improve their processes, increase their productivity and develop innovative solutions and products. It will also be possible for them to strengthen their competitiveness and better process and promote food produced in Canada. CED

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced $21.6 million in federal funding for a suite of projects that will transform how electricity is generated and managed in Sayisi Dene First Nation, located in the community of Tadoule Lake in northern Manitoba. This is the first phase of a First Nation-led initiative to develop Manitoba’s first integrated renewable energy microgrid, combining bifacial solar photovoltaic power and battery storage with a microgrid controller, to generate clean electricity. Once commissioned in fall 2026, the microgrid will reduce emissions by an estimated 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year and lower power costs for the community over time. NRCan

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced over $19.4 million for 13 projects in Alberta that will advance clean energy innovation, improve reliability and enhance energy efficiency in Canada’s industrial sector. These investments support the federal government’s broader work to modernize and expand electricity systems, strengthen grid reliability and affordability, and meet growing electricity demand as part of the National Electricity Strategy. The largest investment –  $10 million – will go to Emissions Reduction Alberta to support industrial facilities in Alberta to improve energy performance, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen competitiveness through energy management practices and efficiency measures. NRCan

 Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced $17.2 million in federal funding to support four remote renewable energy projects in Nunavut:

• Over $4.8 million from NRCan and Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) to Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation to advance a solar, wind and battery microgrid project through feasibility and front-end engineering design studies for Sanirajak, Kinngait and Qausuittuq with the goal of offsetting future diesel consumption by more than 50 percent.
• Close to $8.5 million from NRCan and through the CIRNAC-delivered Indigenous Community Infrastructure Fund to Nunavut Nukkiksautiit Corporation for the construction of a clean energy system for the new Aqsarniit Hotel and Conference Centre, which would demonstrate operational viability of a microgrid using solar energy and air-source heat pumps in the Arctic.
• Over $1.3 million from NRCan for Qulliq Energy Corporation to accelerate renewable energy projects in the 25 diesel-dependent communities across Nunavut. 
• $2.5 million from NRCan for Sakku Investments Corporation to demonstrate the first solar and battery project in Nunavut that is able to operate both connected to the local microgrid and in islanded mode. NRCan

Health Canada announced an investment of over $17 million through the Climate Change and Health Capacity Building program to support 24 community-designed projects that advance knowledge, capacity and innovation in adapting Canada’s health sector to climate change. The program includes two streams:

• climate-resilient and low-carbon health systems (HealthADAPT).
• protecting Canadians from extreme heat (HeatADAPT).

Many regions across Canada experience extreme heat events, often referred to as heat waves. Through HeatADAPT, over $13 million has been allocated, including to the University of British Columbia (UBC) and B.C.’s Provincial Heath Services Authority, which together received nearly $1.1 million in funding. UBC’s research is examining the complex health risks faced by individuals with schizophrenia during extreme heat events and chronic heat exposure. This will help to develop critical insights into the roles housing security, indoor environmental quality and social inequities play in vulnerability to heat and other climate change events. B.C.’s Provincial Health Services Authority’s work will help strengthen partnerships, research and data expertise to better understand and respond to extreme heat impacts, including heat-related illness and mortality. As part of HealthADAPT, nearly $4 million has been allocated to organizations across Canada to support efforts to build climate-resilient and low-carbon health systems. Health Canada

 Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced over $16 million for five clean energy infrastructure projects in British Columbia, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. From renewable energy to energy storage and grid modernization, these projects will strengthen energy security and reliability in the West and North, reduce reliance on diesel, lower emissions, create new opportunities for Indigenous ownership and participation, and catalyze new clean energy jobs, the federal government said. NRCan

The Public Health Agency of Canada announced more than $4.8 million in funding through the Healthy Canadians and Communities Fund for projects that will promote health in communities across Canada. Chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, remain among the leading causes of illness and death in Canada. The projects will help address key risk factors linked to chronic disease by improving access to healthy food, strengthening community supports and creating healthier environments for people experiencing health inequalities. Food First NL in Newfoundland and Labrador is receiving more than $2.6 million for its Great Things in Store project. The project works with grocery stores and local retailers, where most families already do their shopping, to make healthy food more affordable and accessible. The Canadian Red Cross is receiving over $2.1 million to launch the ASPIRE - Advancing Social Prescribing Implementation, Research and Evaluation project across British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. This project will address the needs of older adults, including people living with disabilities and other chronic health conditions, individuals with lower income, people who identify as 2SLGBTQI+, and people from Indigenous and racialized communities, who experience intersecting barriers to well-being and to accessing community support. Public Health Agency of Canada

Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan) announced over $3.2 million in funding for three Manitoba organizations through the Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP). This strategic investment will help Black entrepreneurs in Manitoba strengthen their skills, develop sound business plans, access financing and prepare for growth. The federal government is investing $1.5 million in Black-Manitobans Chamber of Commerce to strengthen the growth and sustainability of Black-owned businesses in Manitoba. The government also is investing $1.25 million in Amicale de la Francophonie Multiculturelle du Manitoba to support business growth programming for Black Francophone entrepreneurs in Manitoba. Also, the government is investing $500,000 in Rahma Community and Youth Centre Inc. to help Black and racialized youth build entrepreneurial skills and grow their businesses. PrairiesCan

The U.S. must maintain “a strategic technical advantage” in quantum information and science and technology (QIST) and solidify the nation’s position as “the world’s QIST superpower,” according to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump. He ordered the Department of Energy to work with industry to develop a quantum computer that’s useful for scientific discovery. He also instructed federal departments and agencies to switch to cryptography that’s resistant to such machines by 2031. “It is the policy of my Administration to ensure that the United States maintains a strategic technical advantage in QIST and leads the development of a robust and trusted quantum ecosystem across QIST research, manufacturing, commercialization, and application,” the executive order said. Within 60 days of the date of the order, the Secretary of War is to identify at least three next-generation quantum sensor projects to prioritize in order to field these sensors by September 30, 2028. Trump also ordered national federal agencies to update the National Quantum Strategy with policies intended to support the maturing QIST ecosystem, including promoting commercialization and deployment of QIST, supporting the quantum-enabling technology ecosystem, and encouraging partnerships with U.S. industry. The White House

RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

 Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen), in partnership with National Research Council-Industrial Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP), will provide eligible Canadian manufacturers with a reimbursement of up to $15,000 to offset the professional fees charged by AI service providers in undertaking feasibility studies to evaluate their AI readiness and developing AI implementation plans to improve their production processes. Manufacturers with fewer than 500 employees that are incorporated and operating in Canada. Manufacturers must be NRC-IRAP eligible and obtain a reference from a local NRC-IRAP Industrial Technology Advisor. Applications will be received until funds expire. They will be reviewed and considered for funding on a first-come first-served basis. NGen

The federally funded, Regina-based Protein Industries Canada innovation cluster launched a new project with Summerland, B.C.-based Crush Dynamics and Kelowna, B.C.-based Atomic47 Labs to develop an AI-enabled fermentation platform using industrial sensors and machine learning to continuously infer fermentation conditions, food safety indicators energy performance and process health in real time. Crush Dynamics and Atomic47 Labs plan to integrate artificial intelligence into Crush Dynamics’ fermentation platform. The technology aims to reduce energy consumption, improve product consistency, strengthen food safety controls and increase production efficiency by accelerating the conversion of agricultural byproducts into food ingredients. A total of $1.4 million has been committed to the project, with Protein Industries Canada committing $607,000 and the partners together providing the remainder. Protein Industries Canada

Toronto-headquartered GDE Grocery Delivery E-Services Canada Inc., commonly known as HelloFresh, received conditional approval for an Agri-Processing Investment Tax Credit of up to $2.3 million for its investment in a new state-of-the-art agri-food processing facility in Calgary. The company was also awarded a grant of up to $1.3 million through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership Emerging Opportunities Program, which supports projects focused on innovation, company growth and sector impact. Under its Factor Meals brand, GDE Grocery Delivery E-Services Canada produces and distributes chef-curated, ready-to-eat meals that can be tailored according to diet and lifestyle goals including ketogenic, calorie conscious or high protein. All meat and produce in the meals will be sourced from Alberta-based agricultural suppliers, building on the value-added sector while encouraging domestic food production. Construction on the facility, which will help the company meet growing demand for meal kit and ready-to-eat food delivery, began in July 2025 and was completed this spring. Govt. of Alberta

Dimensions Canada announced a new cohort of five postsecondary institutions through the Dimensions Canada recognition program, administered by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, in collaboration with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The program acknowledges institutions’ ongoing efforts and achievements in advancing equity, diversity and inclusion, while supporting them in strengthening research excellence, fostering inclusive research environments, and gaining national recognition for their progress. This new cohort expands a community of 35 institutions that have participated in earlier cohorts. The 2026 cohort includes one college, one research institute, and three universities representing four provinces across Canada. Notably, this is the first time the program will include a health research institute, bringing new perspectives and further enriching knowledge sharing among participants. NSERC

Vancouver-based incubator Althra opened applications for its third cohort. Althra aims to find six to 10 promising, early-stage startups looking to build in person, alongside their peers. The incubator’s latest free, four-month program is scheduled to run from September until December, giving participating founders a dedicated workspace in downtown Vancouver, $12,500 in initial funding, $50,000 in potential follow-on support, and connections to established entrepreneurs. Applications close July 31. Althra has supported 18 Canadian startups across two cohorts and closed a $500,000 fund to back portfolio companies. Version One Ventures general partner Boris Wertz has bought into Althra’s vision, becoming a limited partner in Althra’s fund alongside Loopio co-founder and CTO Matt York and others. BetaKit

Applications are now open for the second 2026 cohort of Invest Nova Scotia's Accelerate program, which provides funding and support to help Nova Scotia startups prepare for investment and grow their businesses. The milestone-based program now offers two streams aimed at companies at different stages of development. The Growth Stream is designed for technology startups that are already in the market and are ready to increase revenue, expand market share and strengthen commercial traction. Invest Nova Scotia said the stream is particularly suited to companies using artificial intelligence and advanced software. The Development Stream targets earlier-stage ventures developing products for complex, regulated or hardware-intensive markets, including deep-tech companies that are still refining product-market fit. Successful applicants can receive non-dilutive grants of $30,000. Up to $15,000 of the funding may be used for founder salaries. Participants also receive mentorship, workshops and access to business resources. Applications close July 8. Entrevestor

The Saskatoon-based Linux Association of Canada launched an open source national jobs board designed specifically for Canada’s technology sector. It has a strong focus on Linux, Open Source, DevOps, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Software Development, Systems Administration, Networking, Data, AI, and other IT-related careers. The platform is designed to connect people with opportunities across the country. The association also launched a data-verification program for the association’s open-source library and community group listings. The Linux Association of Canada is a Saskatoon-based organization founded and directed by Andre Duttmann, and is aimed at bolstering Canadian’s access to digital sovereign, open-source software. Linux Association of Canada

Brampton-founded, now Sudbury-based Enabled Talent plans to launch the Canada Disability Entrepreneurs Network (CDEN), an accelerator-like program meant to help disabled Canadians become entrepreneurs by providing community and mentorship, as well as assistance with finding funding pathways and business growth opportunities. Enabled Talent founder and CEO Amandipp Singh, who will lead the new initiative separate from his company, told BetaKit that Canada has “extensive” but fragmented resources that CDEN can help prospective disabled entrepreneurs navigate. Singh started Enabled Talent to help organizations hire disabled people by matchmaking them with jobs that fit their abilities, as well as providing tools that make those jobs and the hiring process more accessible. The platform recently launched PowerSpeak, a new free tool designed to help those with speech and communication-related disabilities. BetaKit

There aren’t enough skilled subtrades to meet current and future demand, which will impact Canada’s push to advance major projects, develop new infrastructure, increase defence spending and connect the North, Kieran Hawe, CEO of EllisDon, said in a CIBC thought leader article. Hawe also warned, at the SiteSummit in Toronto, that “there is going to be a shortage of labour.” As of 2023, Canada employed 1.6 million skilled tradespeople, which includes plumbers, electricians, carpenters and construction workers, representing 7.8 percent of total employment in the country. The federal government estimates that by 2033 there will be more than 410,000 construction job openings, with 189,000 of them stemming from retirement. Given that youth unemployment is hovering around 12 percent and many Gen Z and Millennials are worrying about buying a home, one might think there would be more demand for these jobs, the CIBC article said. Yet, enrolment in post-secondary education continues to outstrip vocational education by a wide margin. While the country depends on skilled trades, the Conference Board of Canada estimates that shortages cost the economy $2.6 billion in 2024, and the industry is no longer seeing new trade companies emerge at the pace they once did. “And when that capacity isn’t there, projects face significant challenges, from delays to cost pressures, that ultimately impact our ability to deliver the infrastructure Canadians depend on,” Hawe said. CIBC

Canadians are spending more time in the emergency department (ED) for assessment, diagnostic testing, treatment and, for some, inpatient admission. This contributes to longer wait times, increased ED crowding and reduced timeliness of care, according to a report by the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI). In 2024-2025, half of ED patients spent four hours or less in care, and over a third spent five to 14 hours in the ED. One in 10 spent more than 14 hours there, representing an increase of 28 percent from 2018-2019. Most ED visits (88 percent) ended in discharge, and among these patients, nearly nine in 10 spent less than 10 hours receiving care and treatment. About 12 percent of ED visits resulted in hospital admission. These patients experienced markedly longer stays in the ED. In 2024-2025, half of admitted patients spent less than 16 hours waiting for transfer to an inpatient acute care bed, while one in 10 admitted patients spent almost two days or more in the ED. Total time in the ED while receiving care (length of stay) was longer for admitted patients than for those who were not admitted, regardless of acuity level (as assigned using the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale based on clinical assessment of patient risk and presenting symptoms). After the decision to admit is made, patients are monitored in the ED until an inpatient bed becomes available. In 2024-2025, half of admitted patients waited less than five hours, but one in 10 admitted patients waited more than 36 hours for an inpatient bed. This represented a 45-percent increase since 2018-2019, largely driven by higher admission rates among older and more complex patients. Waiting for an inpatient bed accounted for an average of 59 percent of an admitted patient’s total ED stay. “This highlights that hospital resources, such as staffing and availability of appropriate beds in acute care (e.g., isolation or specialty beds), are a significant contributor to prolonged ED wait times, rather than ED processes alone,” the report noted. CIHI

A survey of Ontario’s emergency room physicians suggests the majority are struggling with severe overcrowding, hurting the ability of some to see patients as quickly as they should. A study released by the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) polled ER doctors across the province to build a snapshot of the struggling health-care system. “The survey reveals a health-care system in profound crisis, with overwhelming consensus among emergency department physicians about the severity of challenges facing Ontario’s EDs,” the OMA wrote. About 15 percent of the emergency room physicians in the province responded to the survey – with the vast majority of those polled reporting issues. Seventy-four percent of those who answered said overcrowding was either severe or critical; 75 percent said ER beds or treatment spaces were occupied by patients awaiting admission on nearly every shift; and 76 percent reported that overcrowding affects their ability to deliver timely care on most or nearly every shift.  Global News

Hamilton City Council has given municipal staff three weeks to write a bylaw that would impose a moratorium on compute facilities. Proponent councillor Nrinder Nann said the measure would give Hamilton time to assess data-centre impacts and its own rules on energy, water, heat and noise. Hamilton is one of multiple communities in which residents have protested data centre projects, including Vancouver and Regina. Last month, a Hamilton council committee denied investment firm Slate Asset Management permission to split its plot of land lot so it could use one part for compute facilities, following local objections. People told the committee they worry about the impact of AI on the environment, employment and creativity, and shared fears about pollution from a data centre negatively affecting their health. The investment firm has said the data centres could be part of a bid by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, a federally-backed non-profit, to build a national supercomputer. Canada already has five hyperscale data centres. Another 96 are in development. CBC News

Montreal is among 41 cities from six continents, representing more than 90 million people, that have signed The Global Urban Data Centres Pact led by climate-focused mayor network C40 Cities, which calls for compute facilities to be sustainable, resource efficient and engaged with local communities. Mayors across the world called on the data centre and AI industry to work with them to create a more sustainable and equitable future. Other cities backing the pact include Barcelona, Johannesburg, London, Rio de Janeiro, Athens, Milan, Mumbai, Melbourne, Copenhagen, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Phoenix, Austin, Cleveland, Palo Alto, and Seattle. The pact provides a clear roadmap for how companies and investors can work with cities and avoid having their applications to build denied. C40 Cities

Adoption of artificial intelligence is widespread but most professionals feel AI isn’t delivering the expected benefits, according to a report by Thompson Reuters. Organizations are seeing growing risks from this value gap, such as shadow AI use, lack of alignment with company strategy, and even potential talent loss as professionals consider leaving if AI value falls short. “As AI adoption becomes more widespread in professional services – more embedded in professional workflows, offered services, and client expectations – it’s actually compounding the kind of challenges that service professionals can no longer ignore,” Thompson Reuters said. The report involved a survey, of 1,816 workers in 62 countries, found 74 percent of respondents saying they use AI tools several times a week and 44 percent saying they rely on those tools multiple times a day. However, about 34 percent were using AI tools outside their companies’ approved technologies, such as consumer-grade chatbots, in fields like law, accounting and compliance. While 78 percent of clients say AI-enabled quality improvements are essential, only six percent say they are consistently receiving them, and that can damage a client relationship. The report shows that more than one-third of professionals surveyed admit they use AI tools that their organization hasn’t sanctioned or in ways it can’t see, simply because they are frustrated by the quality of sanctioned tools or the lack of a clear AI strategy. Almost one-third of professionals whose firm or department has a stated AI strategy say that strategy is not visible on a day-to-day basis; and 18 percent say their organization has no strategic direction on AI at all. The report shows that almost three in 10 mid-career professionals would change jobs within the next two years if AI fails to deliver the value they expect. Thompson Reuters

Toronto-based startup Signal 1 signed up New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, which has seven hospitals and three schools in the Big Apple, to try its software that helps hospitals monitor and manage their AI tools. Nova Scotia Health, Ontario’s Trillium Health Partners and Washington, D.C.-area Inova Health System also reportedly use the technology. Signal 1’s platform automatically monitors the AI applications running through a health care system, including predictive tools, diagnostic imaging products and generative AI agents, and reports back to the customer. Signal 1 enables Mount Sinai to quickly establish broad, consistent governance and monitoring capabilities across its AI portfolio – delivering enterprise-wide visibility, standardized evaluation, and operational efficiency without requiring them to build and maintain that infrastructure themselves, Signal 1 said. Signal 1

Automaker Ford hired, promoted, or brought back more than 350 experienced engineers to fix errors introduced by its AI-driven design and production systems, executives said, crediting the rebuild for the company's first No. 1 finish in JD Power's initial quality ranking in 16 years. The admission is unusually direct for a Detroit automaker: Ford's automated systems weren't as reliable as it had assumed, and reversing the slide required pulling veteran humans back into the loop. Charles Poon, Ford's vice-president of vehicle hardware engineering, said the company believed that plugging AI into existing design requirements would produce high-quality vehicles on its own. It didn't. Some of Ford's most experienced personnel had already left, taking institutional knowledge with them before it could be encoded into the automated tools meant to replace their judgment. Poon said the rehired and promoted engineers are now mentoring younger staff and rebuilding the data pipelines that feed Ford's AI training. The effectiveness of those models, according to Ford, depends almost entirely on the quality of the underlying data, and the data wasn't capturing what veteran engineers knew from working through multiple vehicle-development cycles. AI CHAT/Daily

Chinese supercomputer LineShine is the new No. 1 in the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, displacing El Capitan at the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – which fell to No. 2. Frontier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S. was No. 3, Aurora at the Argonne National Laboratory was No. 4, and JUPITOR Booster at the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Germany was No. 5. The top-ranked Canadian supercomputer is the TELUS Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Que., at No. 78. The Fir supercomputer at Simon Fraser University fell from No. 78 last year to No. 106 on this year’s TOP500. TOP500 The List

IBM has developed the world’s first semiconductor chip that’s less than one nanometer (nm), in an industry that’s facing the physical limits of traditional chip scaling. A single strand of human hair is about 80,000 to 100,000 nm wide, a water molecule is less than 1.5 nm wide, and a single atom is about 0.1 to 0.3 nm in diameter. Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, communication devices, transportation systems and critical infrastructure. IBM’s new sub-1 nm chip packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail, nearly twice the density of IBM’s 2-nm chip, unveiled in 2021. Enabled by a series of structural and material innovations, including IBM’s three-dimensional nanostack architecture, the technology demonstrates how continued gains in performance and efficiency remain possible even as chip features approach atomic dimensions. Published technical results report the new chip is projected to offer a substantial leap in capability – up to 50 percent more performance, or 70 percent greater energy efficiency than IBM’s 2-nm node chip. IBM

Montreal-based AtkinsRéalis Group filed paperwork with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get the company’s CANDU reactor technology licensed in the United States, as the firm seeks to capitalize on data centre-driven growth in power demand. AtkinsRéalis Group is competing with Westinghouse, owned by Canadian firms Brookfield and Cameco, in both the U.S. and Canada. AtkinsRéalis owns the exclusive commercial rights to the CANDU technology, one of the world’s most established large reactor platforms, with 34 units built globally and nearly 1,000 reactor-years of experience. The Enhanced CANDU®6 design is a 700+ megawatt-class pressurized heavy water reactor that uses natural uranium fuel and online refuelling, enabling continuous operation without shutdown for refuelling outages. AtkinsRéalis is engaging U.S. utilities, state governments and prospective anchor power purchasers, including hyperscale data center operators and large industrial users, to evaluate potential deployment opportunities. AtkinsRéalis

A shovel-ready, $400-million facility proposed for Edmonton that would convert landfill waste into electricity could be cancelled after a recent carbon tax agreement between the Alberta and federal governments. The national industrial carbon price was supposed to rise to $170 a tonne by 2030, but a deal signed in May by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith means the price would instead reach $130 a tonne by 2040. For Varme Energy, the policy change is putting its proposed waste-to-energy project on life support. The facility would capture greenhouse gases and store them underground. The project would also generate carbon credits that could be sold. However, a lower carbon price means those credits would be worth less. Without further government policy changes over the next few months, Varme Energy chief executive Sean Collins warned that the company may have to pull the plug on the project. Varme Energy already has agreements in place with the City of Edmonton's landfill, as well as provincial permits to produce electricity. The proposed project has received funding from the Alberta government and support from the federal government's Canada Growth Fund to ensure the carbon credits are sold for at least $85 a tonne. Still, the project has an expected operating cost of about $118 a tonne, said Collins. That would have made financial sense under the federal government's previous plan to raise the price to $170 a tonne by 2030. The federal policy change “in schedule and the lower price makes pretty much every carbon capture and storage project in Canada not viable," said Jamie Stephen, managing director of Torchlight, a Nova Scotia-based bioenergy developer. Torchight is developing a $2-billion carbon capture and storage project at a pulp mill near Hinton, west of Edmonton. CBC News

Brampton, Ont.-based MDA Space Ltd. was awarded a $688-million contract by the Canadian Space Agency to supply an advanced, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite that will operate with the RADARSAT Constellation Mission satellites. In addition to the space segment, the contract provides for launch and the enhancement of the satellite ground control, security and data management systems. The new SAR satellite will be based on MDA CHORUSTM, the company’s new fourth generation of Earth observation technologies and capabilities. Now in its final integration phase before it is expected to launch late this year, MDA CHORUSTM will include day-night, all-weather broad surveillance area data across the globe that supports a wide range of critical services for Canadians. The satellite will be assembled, integrated and tested at the MDA Space facility in Montreal. MDA Space

Edmonton-based satellite imagery company Wyvern is among 14 companies selected to join NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program. Under the CSDA, NASA purchases Earth observation data from commercial satellite companies and uses it to fuel research and contribute to the wider earth sciences field. Wyvern’s admittance to the CSDA marks the first time a pre-Series A company has been accepted. Wyvern’s Dragonette satellite constellation captures hyperspectral imagery in 31 bands at a five-metre ground sampling distance, revealing patterns invisible to traditional sensors. The company’s imagery helps teams in agriculture, energy, defence and environmental management make faster, more confident decisions. Christoper Robson, CEO and co-founder of Wyvern on LinkedIn

Nova Scotia-based Maritime Launch Services (MLS) is facing a lawsuit from Toronto public-relations firm One Network Productions and former RT – Russia’s English-language state broadcasting service – news anchor and correspondent Alex Mihailovich. They allege the space-launch company hired them to raise its profile and find new investors in 2024, then reneged on a promise to pay them in stock options. The company told The Logic it will respond through the courts. In autumn 2024, MLS was almost out of cash and funding itself by selling equity and convertible debentures, and the options that One Network and Mihailovic say they earned were all but worthless. Now, MLS has a $200-million federal lease on a Nova Scotia launchpad and an investment from MDA Space. With MLS shares trading around 50 cents, the plaintiffs say they want their five- and 10-cent options – amounting to a net value of just over $1.1 million at 50 cents per share. The Logic

VC, PRIVATE INVESTMENT & ACQUISITIONS

 Canada’s venture capital crunch is squeezing early-stage startups

New data from RBCx reveals Canada’s early-stage startup ecosystem is facing growing pressure, with both the number of companies raising venture capital and the total amount raised falling 40 percent year-over-year in Q1 2026.

The findings follow RBCx’s Capital Under Pressure report, which found Canada’s VC market has become increasingly concentrated, leaving less capital available for early-stage startups than expected based on historical data.

Key findings include:

• 40 percent fewer early-stage founders raised capital in Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025.
• Emerging managers raised $2.8 billion – 36 percent below anticipated levels.
• Five well-established funds accounted for 80 percen of the total capital raised in 2025.
• Excluding those five funds, fundraising among all other funds fell roughly 90 percent since 2021.

RBCx tracked the fundraising activity of over 700 pre-seed and seed-stage companies headquartered in Canada across a two-year period.

The data shows a sustained decline in the number of companies raising capital since the start of 2025, with Q1 2026 down 31 percent from Q4 2025 and 40 percent from Q1 2025.

While the number of companies raising capital has continued to decrease, the average seed round size has remained stable at approximately $3 million across 2025 and into Q1 2026.

This suggests the amount of funding needed by early-stage startups has not changed, yet fewer founders are entering the market, RBCx said.

While AI tools are being touted for reducing operational costs for some startups, deeptech sectors, especially cleantech and life sciences, remain heavily reliant on venture funding.

“Venture capital plays an important role in the early stage, especially for businesses in cleantech and life science with heavy upfront costs in research and development. Without funds available, the innovation pipeline narrows,” said Tony Barkett, RBCx’s head of banking.

On the other side of the equation, emerging managers are facing a capital funding gap. Additional analysis of the data used to generate RBCx’s 2025 Capital Under Pressure report was conducted on historical fundraising patterns, and it tells a troubling story:

Emerging managers were expected to raise approximately $4.3 billion over the past three years.

Actual fundraising amounted to approximately $2.8 billion – nearly a 36-percent gap.

In 2025, the top five largest VC funds captured nearly 80 percent of the total capital raised, compared to a 46 percent and 67 percent share in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

Since 2021, there has been a 50-percent drop in the amount raised by the top five funds compared to a 90-percent drop in the amount raised by the rest of the market.

While fundraising overall has declined, the drop outside the top five largest VC funds has been far more severe. Fundraising levels among the top five fell from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $1.7 billion in 2025, roughly a 50-percent decline.

All other funds combined dropped from $4.5 billion to $444 million over the same period – close to a 90-percentdrop.

As the majority of VC funds raise dramatically less than they have in previous years, particularly emerging managers, there will be a structural shift in the tech ecosystem, RBCx said.

Emerging managers have historically been the most willing to back early-stage startups, underwriting the higher risk bets that turn innovative ideas into transformational companies. With less capital available to them, first-time founders are left with fewer fundraising options.

“Emerging managers are the engine of early-stage innovation in Canada. They’re willing to take on the riskier bets by backing first-time founders solving problems the market hasn’t fully recognized yet,” said Matt Roberts, RBCx managing director, venture coverage.

“That diversity of risk appetite is what keeps a healthy ecosystem moving. When emerging managers are underfunded, it’s not just a financing gap – it’s an innovation gap,” he said. RBCx

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Defence tech companies have raised US$12.3 billion from venture capital investors since the start of 2026, nearly double the amount raised in the same period last year, according to numbers PitchBook provided to the Financial Times. The spike in deal-making comes as wars in Ukraine and the Middle East highlight the military value of drones, autonomous systems and battlefield AI. PitchBook’s data shows that American startups have captured most of the funding so far. In Canada, investors are increasingly eyeing defence tech as well, as Ottawa promises billions in new spending and procurement reforms. But many remain cautious, arguing that long procurement cycles, heavy capital requirements and uncertain government buying timelines make defence a difficult fit for the traditional venture capital model. The Logic

Toronto-headquartered Portage led an almost €100-million Series D round for Munich, Germany-based FINN, which offers shorter-term car leases it calls subscriptions. Additional growth capital is being provided by BC Partners and Runway Growth through debt financing facilities. Existing investors have also reaffirmed their confidence in FINN, including UVC Partners, Planet First Partners, Korelya Capital, White Star Capital, HV Capital, and Picus Capital. The round valued FINN  at over €1 billion. Portage

Toronto-based fintech Float raised $85 million in an all-equity Series C funding round led by Inovia Capital. BDC Capital and Northleaf also joined the round, as well as existing investors Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Garage Capital and Teralys Capital. Float, which provides prepaid corporate credit cards and other financial products to small and medium-sized businesses, plans to use the money to expand across the country, hire staff and develop AI software. Since closing its Series B round, Float said it has grown its active customer base 100 percent to more than 7,500 Canadian businesses and grown revenue over 120 percent. Float

New York-based Tetrix, led by Montrealer Olivier Babin, raised US$15 million for its AI-powered data harvesting and structuring tools for institutional investors. The round was co-led by White Star Capital and Innovation Endeavors, with participation from several high-profile angel investors. Tetrix said the funding will accelerate product development, team expansion, and global growth as the company scales to support its clients in the rapidly expanding alternative markets ecosystem. Business Wire

Toronto-based Sellit9 secured $4.1 million in seed funding to expand its “recommerce” trade-in platform into more categories of goods and begin moving into the United States. Sellit9 aims to provide Canadians looking to get rid of old household items with an alternative to throwing them out or selling them on existing platforms like Facebook Marketplace. The startup’s seed round was led by BDC Capital’s Seed Venture Fund, with support from fellow new backers AQC Capital and Anges Québec, and existing investor MaRS IAF. Sellit9 plans to use this capital to grow its 14-person team, expand across Canada, enter the U.S., and move into new categories like luxury purses, luggage and eyewear. BetaKit

Sherbrooke, Que.-based quantum technology company Qubic raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by Two Small Fish Ventures, with participation from UC Investments, Quantacet and UCeed. Qubic is developing low-noise cryogenic amplifiers solving one of the major bottlenecks for scaling for quantum computing and with promising applications in sensing and defence. The company said the financing will be deployed to accelerate the development and commercialization of the technology, build out greater manufacturing capability, and bring to market a radio frequency quantum sensing platform. Qubic

Calgary-based early-stage fintech startup Anchorbase raised US$2 million in a pre-seed funding round. Anchorbase announced the raise in an interview with BetaKit, outlining that U.S. venture capital firms TTV Capital and Cambrian VC have invested a combined US$2 million in the company’s pre-seed round. Anchorbase intends to use the capital to grow its engineering and product teams, with active recruiting underway. Anchorbase is both a payments platform and an automation tool for mid-market businesses like car dealerships and medical and home services. Using AI that integrates with whatever legacy software a company is using, Anchorbase’s platform automates payment collection, business reporting and back-office workflows. BetaKit

Vancouver-based Blossom Social, a social network for investors, raised more than $2 million through a new equity crowdfunding campaign.  Blossom co-founder and CEO Maxwell Nicholson said in a LinkedIn post that the social network for investors raised nearly $2 million in just two hours on FrontFundr. One day later, the campaign had solicited a total of $2.2 million from just over 1,000 investors.  The campaign can no longer accept investments from non-accredited investors because it has exceeded the Canadian crowdfunding exemption. The company will use funding to continue its global expansion, including a full launch in the United Kingdom later this year, following its successful entrance into the United States. Maxwell Nicholson on LinkedIn

B.C.-based hydrogen fuel cell company Ballard Power Systems Inc. announced an agreement to acquire U.K.-based GeoPura Limited, a zero-emission hydrogen-based power solutions provide. Ballard will pay £275 million up front for the company and issue about 50.8 million shares at US$5.02 each, with another payment contingent on certain financial milestones. In total, the enterprise value after assuming GeoPura’s net debt is about US$400 million. Ballard said the deal will let it bundle more services for its customers, since Ballard makes the fuel cells while GeoPura sells fuels, sells and leases power units and is a joint partner in a hydrogen plant. The deal positions Ballard as a potential vendor for supporting electricity grids at a time when utilities are beefing up their systems to support data centres. GeoPura provides grid support and off-grid power for projects like the film industry and defence, working with companies like Disney and data centre firm Equinix, and the U.K. defence ministry. Ballard Power Systems

Ottawa-based Calian Group Ltd. acquired Mississauga, Ont.-headquartered Galaxy Broadband Communications for $24 million upfront, with up to $27.5 million in earn-outs over three years. Calian is a mission-critical solutions company focused on defence, space, health care and other strategic critical infrastructure sectors. Galaxy is a Canadian leader in satellite communications and remote connectivity solutions. Calian said Galaxy’s satellite communications and multi-orbit expertise complement Calian's existing capabilities and expand its ability to support customers operating in complex and remote environments. Calian

Toronto-based Cognota  acquired New York City-based Learnexus, another startup developing learning and development (L&D) technology for large enterprises. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Cognota founder and CEO Ryan Austin said the deal expedites the startup’s plans to help large enterprises not only manage their internal learning efforts, ranging from skills to leadership training, but also facilitate them. Cognota aims to help achieve that with Learnexus’ on-demand L&D talent marketplace, which features 3,000 vetted freelancers – from subject matter experts to technical writers, designers, developers and facilitators – and accompanying investments in agentic AI. BetaKit

San Francisco-headquartered Superhuman, formerly known as Grammarly, acquired New York City-based GPTZero, an AI detector that checks for large language model (LLM)-generated content across the internet. The two companies, both with founders with Canadian roots, said the deal produces a combination they said is meant to build the internet’s “authenticity layer.” While Superhuman’s platform already has AI detection capabilities, the company said that detectors can often deliver conflicting results and that GPTZero’s expertise “can create a more complete and reliable picture of authenticity.” The two companies are betting that, in a world where synthetic generation on the internet is increasingly overtaking human-crafted content, people will care to know the difference. BetaKit

REPORTS & POLICIES

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of an article posted by Eeman Khan to his LinkedIn. Research Money has split the lengthy article into two parts. Part 2, in which Khan offers his diagnosis and prescription for Canada, will be published on July 8, 2026.

10 months in America taught me why Canada is falling behind

OPINION & ANALYSIS

Eeman Khan is Director, Strategy at ExecCap Advisors and an MPP Candidate at the University of Chicago. This article first appeared here as a Linked In post.

It's not equalization payments to Quebec. It's not Indian international students. It's not one prime minister, one scandal, one province or one political party.

I've spent the last 10 months in the United States studying public policy at the University of Chicago, working in private equity, and building things inside one of America's most entrepreneurially active ecosystems. After 10 months of watching how this country actually operates – its institutions, its professional culture, its instincts – I've arrived at a diagnosis that is harder to dismiss than blaming a government or a policy, and harder to fix than passing one.

Canada's problem is not a policy problem: it is a cultural problem.

More precisely: Canada's institutional culture, historically designed to protect what exists, is now hindering its potential. For a long time, this culture worked, but now this same culture is costing Canada the people and ideas that would build what comes next, and the people running Canadian institutions have not yet decided whether that tradeoff is worth it.

I want to acknowledge something before I go further. My American experience has been drawn from particular environments: an elite policy school, a private equity firm operating in an entrepreneurially oriented niche and a growing business network across the lower 48. These are not representative of all of America, but they are exactly the environments that generate the innovation, the capital and the organizational momentum this article is about.

The gap between Canada and the United States is not best understood by comparing the median Canadian with the median American: It is best understood by comparing the institutional cultures that produce builders and asking which system, by design, produces more of them.

I'm also not writing this from a place of comfort. I grew up without money, attended an undergraduate university no one in finance or policy had heard of, and built a career that never followed a recognizable template. The observations that follow are not the views of someone who parachuted into a prestigious institution and decided Canada was beneath him; they are the views of someone who has navigated both systems from the bottom up and paid close attention to the differences.

Part I: The Execution Gap

Canada has one ladder – America has two

Before I left Canada, I was told – sometimes directly, more often through the cumulative weight of small signals – that my path was unconventional in a way that counted against me. Lakehead was not a prestige institution. My trajectory across Canadian politics, engineering, infrastructure sales, private equity, graduate school and several other pursuits didn't fit a recognizable template.

The implicit message, repeated in various registers across various rooms: you should have done this differently.

In America, the same background reads differently. Not universally: there are corners of the American economy that are as pedigree-conscious as anything in Canada. Certain private equity mega-funds, white-shoe law firms and specific investment banks screen as hard for institutional pedigree as any Canadian firm. But outside those narrow circles, Americans appear unusually willing to overlook an unconventional background when the results are obvious.

I think of this as the difference between one ladder and two.

Canada's primary ladder runs through institutional legitimacy: the right university, the right professional designation, the right employer, the right endorsement. Getting on it early matters enormously. Where you started becomes a permanent part of how you are read. The credential is not merely a signal of capability – it is a proxy for the quality of the institution that produced you, and that proxy travels with you.

America has that same ladder, but it also has a second one. The second ladder runs through demonstrated momentum: what you started, what you built, what you sold, what you shipped, who you organized, what results you produced. You can get on it from almost anywhere, provided you can show the output.

The consequences compound. The two-ladder system does not simply make life more pleasant for unconventional people (though it does that too): It draws from a larger pool of potential contributors, routes capital and attention toward builders rather than credential-holders, and creates a feedback loop in which demonstrated results generate access to more resources, which generate more results.

The one-ladder system does the opposite: it routes capital and attention toward people whose quality has been pre-certified by existing institutions, which means the people most likely to disrupt those institutions are systematically under-resourced.

The data is not ambiguous on what this produces. Canada's business formation rate has fallen from approximately 25 percent of active businesses in the early 1980s to 12.3 percent in 2023 – roughly half what it once was, according to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.

The number of self-employed Canadians with paid employees, the businesses most likely to scale and hire, fell by 18 percent between 2005 and 2025 despite population growth of more than nine million people.

The one-ladder system is not malicious. It reflects a rational preference for reducing uncertainty – institutions hire and fund people whose quality has been pre-certified by other institutions. But that preference, applied systemically and over time, produces administrators, not builders.

The cycle time advantage

One of the first things I noticed after arriving in the United States was how quickly organizations respond to new ideas.

A common Canadian pattern, particularly in institutional settings: Let's study this. Let's consult the relevant stakeholders. Let's strike a working group. A common American pattern: Let's try it. If it works, we'll scale it. If it fails, we'll learn and adjust.

This is not a claim that Americans are smarter. It is a claim about cycle time – and cycle time, compounded over years, is one of the most powerful forces in organizational life.

Consider two institutions, equally talented, each generating 10 good ideas per year. The first implements one. The second implements five. After five years, the gap in real-world experience, feedback, iteration and credibility between them is enormous – not because the first institution lacked intelligence, but because it ran fewer experiments.

Research on organizational learning consistently finds that institutions which shorten their feedback loops outperform those that optimize for decision quality at the expense of decision speed; the value of a correct decision degrades rapidly when the window for acting on it closes.

I arrived in the United States expecting to find smarter institutions. What I found, more often, were institutions that move much, much faster. While speed is not always wisdom, it generates something wisdom alone cannot: real-world feedback. And feedback is the raw material of improvement.

A natural experiment: Alberta vs. Missouri

In June 2024, I approached the Associate Dean of Education at the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta with a proposal to explore Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (i.e. search funds) as an emerging area of business education.

I had spent years in the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) ecosystem: I had supported a successful search fund in California, and I had designed and taught Canada's first ETA curriculum through Canada's first ETA accelerator. I believed the University of Alberta had a genuine opportunity to be the first institutions in Canada to engage seriously with this field.

To their credit, the proposal was reviewed internally within the Finance Department. I shared an overview of the ETA ecosystem, examples of programming from leading U.S. business schools, and a sample syllabus.

In December 2024 – six months later – I was told that the professors consulted had little interest in proceeding.

Now consider what happened on the other side of the border.

In November 2025, I spoke to the ETA Discovery Cohort at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. After the talk, I wrote a white paper and shared it publicly. This led to a connection with faculty at Washington University's Olin Business School, who were considering building ETA programming. I shared resources, alongside 70 other academic and professional contributors.

By January 2026, Olin's first ETA course was built. By February 2026, their first class was taught. By March 2026, I was in conversation with the professor leading the initiative about internship opportunities at my firm. Today, one of those MBA students is on my team, conducting work on live acquisitions.

That entire cycle – initial conversation, curriculum development, classroom delivery, student placement – took approximately six months.

The Alberta process also took six months and produced no course, no students, no relationships and no momentum.

I want to be precise about the lesson here. It is not that the Alberta School of Business is staffed by lesser people. The faculty there are serious professionals. The lesson is about what happens when institutional culture systematically favors deliberation over action. Olin is now accumulating experience, alumni, industry relationships and credibility in an emerging field. The gap will compound. It always does. The institution that runs the experiment gets the feedback. The institution that studies the experiment gets just the report.

Part II: The Recognition Economy

Packaging vs. sharing

There is a dimension of the execution gap that is subtler than cycle time, and I didn't expect to notice it as sharply as I did.

Unlike Canadians, Americans don't just have ideas. They operationalize them – and they have built an extraordinary infrastructure for doing so.

Here is what that infrastructure looks like in practice: venture capital networks that fund commercialization before a product is proven; business school ecosystems that connect founders with lawyers, operators and early customers; IP law firms that specialize in protecting and licensing nascent frameworks; consulting firms and book publishers that exist specifically to scale new management ideas.

The result is a system in which any insight – regardless of where it originates – is far more likely to reach commercial scale if it passes through an American ecosystem than if it doesn't.

This matters for Canada in a specific way. The sequence of American commercialization tends to look like this: observe a phenomenon, give it a name, build a framework around it, create intellectual property, then teach it, market it and scale it.

The underlying observations behind many of the frameworks that now dominate global business education were not uniquely available to Americans. Smart people in many countries noticed similar patterns.

The difference is that Americans had an infrastructure to catch those patterns, formalize them and release them at scale, and that infrastructure produces winners regardless of where the original insight came from.

A Canadian might discover a genuinely useful concept and share it in a meeting, publish it in an academic paper, or include it in a policy report. The insight might be correct. It might even be important. But without the commercialization infrastructure – the agent, the publisher, the VC, the business school incubator – it often stays in the meeting room.

Consider this: Canada produces some of the most cited AI research in the world, with institutions like the Vector Institute, Mila, and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute representing genuine global leadership. Yet the companies that have captured the commercial value of that research - the firms that turned those insights into products, platforms, and market dominance –  are overwhelmingly American. The ideas were Canadian, yet the infrastructure that monetized them was not.

The distinction I keep returning to: Canadians often ask whether an idea is true. Americans often ask whether an idea is useful – and then, immediately, whether it can be scaled.

Both questions matter, but only one of them generates a business. And when Canadian insights are routinely packaged and monetized by American operators, the economic loss compounds in ways that never appear in any single year's GDP figure but are legible across decades.

Two kinds of credentialism

One of the more counterintuitive things I've noticed is that America, despite its reputation as a meritocracy, may actually be more credential-obsessed than Canada. Just in a different dimension.

Canada's credentialism is institutional. It asks: Which university? Which professional designation? Which firm? Which body endorsed you? The credential is a proxy for the institution that produced you, and institutions are trusted to have pre-selected for quality.

America's credentialism is achievement-based. It asks: What have you accumulated? What have you won? What list were you on? The American achievement stack is extraordinary in its scope – Eagle Scout, All-American, Dean's List, Forbes 30 Under 30, Inc. 5000, Bronze Star, Ranger Tab. America has created a recognition infrastructure that spans every domain of life, with rankings, badges and titles for almost everything.

The upside of this system is real. Recognition motivates effort, visible ladders create ambition, and public distinctions produce role models. The downside is equally real: the system can tip into credential inflation and résumé optimization, where people begin collecting distinctions rather than creating value. In a culture that conflates the two, that distinction is easy to miss.

But the structural point matters more than the cultural one. Achievement-based credentials are more portable and more legible to outsiders than institution-based credentials. A Forbes 30 Under 30 listing or an Inc. 5000 ranking communicates something across industries, geographies, and networks that a designation from a specific Canadian professional body does not. The person with the achievement stack can walk into a room of strangers and be read immediately. The person with institutional credentials depends on the room already knowing which institutions matter.

The net effect: in a room with a Canadian and an American competing for the same opportunities or impact, these incentives, over time, shape who gets funded, who gets listened to and ultimately who builds things.

What Canada does with eccentricity

America is not, in my experience, universally more accepting of unconventional people. What it is more accepting of is eccentricity paired with ambition. The weird founder. The obsessive inventor. The relentless salesperson. The person who doesn't fit any obvious category but is visibly, undeniably producing something – these people often find more room to operate in America than in Canada.

Two cultural norms capture the difference with more precision than most analyses give them credit for:

Canada's stronger norm: Don't take yourself too seriously.

America's stronger norm: Show me what you're building.

There is something genuinely appealing and humane about the Canadian norm. It checks arrogance, creates social cohesion and makes rooms more comfortable. But it also, at the margin, exerts pressure on ambitious people to modulate their ambition in order to fit a recognizable pattern, i.e. to not seem like too much.

The deeper formulation I keep returning to: Canada often rewards coherence. America often rewards intensity.

A Canadian might look at a non-linear résumé and ask: Why is this person doing so many different things? An entrepreneurial American might look at the same résumé and ask: How did they manage to do all those things?

My own background illustrates this. I have been a politico for a national political party, an engineer in the manufacturing sector, a technical salesperson, a private equity professional, a graduate policy student, a published writer, and a TV commercial actor.

In many Canadian professional rooms, the polite version of the feedback is: you should pick a lane. In the American entrepreneurial environments I've spent the last 10 months in, the more common response is genuine curiosity about how the pieces connect.

The second-order effect here is the one that should concern Canadians: the people most sensitive to the "pick a lane" signal are exactly the people most likely to build things. The unconventional builder who hears, repeatedly and from multiple directions, that their non-linearity is a liability will eventually find an environment that doesn't say that. Many of them find it precisely south of the border.

The evidence for this is significant and worsening. A record 126,340 Canadians emigrated in 2022 – the highest annual exodus in over 50 years. Among those who leave, approximately 70 percent hold at least a university degree, dramatically higher than the 33 percent university attainment rate in the working-age population at large.

The median pre-tax wage for tech workers in the United States is 46 percent higher than its Canadian counterpart, according to TD Economics – and that gap doesn't even account for the dramatic decline in the Canadian dollar over recent years.

I want to be direct about what this data does and doesn't tell us. Wages clearly matter. Anyone who tells you the brain drain is "purely" a culture story is ignoring the compensation reality. But wages explain volume, while culture explains who leaves.

The people most sensitive to cultural signals – the unconventional, the non-linear, the builders who don't fit a template – are not the marginal earner calculating the after-tax difference. They are people who have already received, in a hundred professional interactions, the message that the system wasn't built for them. When the wage differential is also present, that combination is hard to reverse.

I am not suggesting that America is right to valorize intensity or that Canada is wrong to value coherence. Both norms have costs. America's tolerance for eccentricity is not a quality filter – the same openness that gives unconventional talent room to operate also gives charismatic frauds and founders with no business building companies the same room. The WeWork phenomenon is an American phenomenon. The point is not to import American norms wholesale. It is to ask whether Canadian norms are quietly telling the country's most driven people to leave. Eeman Khan on LinkedIn

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Canada’s research budget does not match its innovation strategy

OPINION

By Lawrence Zhang

Lawrence Zhang is head of policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness (ITIF). This op-ed first appeared here on the Washington, D.C.-based ITIF’s website.

Canada says it wants an innovation economy. The research budget tells a different story.

The federal government has spent the past several years talking about productivity, domestic technology firms, AI, biomanufacturing and quantum technologies as national economic priorities.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has tied his economic message to closing Canada’s productivity gap and building firms that can compete in strategic sectors. But the 2026–27 Main Estimates still allocate research funding as if the central task is to maintain rough parity across the Tri-council agencies’ system.

The numbers are hard to square with the rhetoric: $1.62 billion for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), $1.49 billion for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and $1.41 billion for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Natural sciences and engineering, health research, and the humanities and social sciences sit within a few hundred million dollars of each other. That is a defensible allocation if the goal is fairness and balance across disciplines, but it is not the allocation the government would design if the goal is to build industrial capacity in AI, biomanufacturing, quantum technologies, advanced materials, and other capital-intensive technology sectors.

The Bouchard report pushed Ottawa to modernize the structure and coordination of the federal research support system, but the harder question is whether Ottawa will rebalance the money or keep praising innovation while preserving the existing split.

Of course, research in the humanities and social sciences deserves public funding. SSHRC supports work that helps a country understand itself and govern itself: law, public administration, history, language, culture, political institutions, social change and the human consequences of new technologies.

Some of that work feeds directly into regulatory capacity, public policy and institutional competence. Some of it matters for reasons that have little to do with productivity, and that is fine.

But the question is weight. When roughly a third of federal research council funding flows to disciplines whose contribution to productive industrial capacity is nonexistent or at best indirect, the budget is making a choice.  

Other countries fund the humanities and social sciences, but they do not ask every part of the research system to carry the same economic load. As Figure 1 below shows, Canada has divided the research pot in a markedly different way from other countries.

                                                                             Figure 1: Distribution of research funding by field, 2025

In the United Kingdom, most core research council funding goes toward the natural sciences and engineering, while the humanities and social sciences receive a much smaller share.

The United States is even more lopsided, with federal research funding dominated by health and biomedical research, while humanities funding sits at the margins.

To be sure, recent political disruption to the U.S. research system does not make it a model to copy. But it does not change the structural point: American humanities and social sciences funding has never occupied the same budgetary weight as health or science funding.

Canada is different. It is the only one of the three countries that treats the major research buckets as roughly equivalent.

Canada’s near-equal split is a vestige of how the Tri-council system was built. SSHRC was carved out of the Canada Council in 1977 and placed alongside NSERC, and later the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, as one of the country’s main research councils.

Unlike the United States, where humanities funding sits in a separate cultural and civic institution, or the United Kingdom, where a full arts and humanities research council came much later, Canada gave the humanities and social sciences a seat at the same main table as natural sciences, engineering, and health research.

That may have made sense as a settlement among disciplines. It makes less sense as the operating budget for a country trying to build firms in capital-intensive technology sectors.

That inheritance now has real costs. A dollar spent to maintain the existing balance is a dollar not available for the parts of the research system where Canada’s commercialization and industrial capacity gaps are most acute. Good research is rationed everywhere. Every year, strong projects in engineering, materials science, AI, oncology, clinical research and biomanufacturing also lose out.

A serious rebalancing would reduce SSHRC’s appropriation over a multi-year period and redirect the savings to NSERC and CIHR, the councils most directly tied to commercialization, industrial research, and health innovation.

An SSHRC budget closer to $700 million would still leave Canada funding the humanities and social sciences generously by peer-country standards. That money would fund more work in the parts of the system most directly tied to industrial capacity, health innovation and technology commercialization.

Some will object that this would leave excellent research in the humanities and social sciences underfunded. It would. But the current split should not be mistaken for a neutral measure of Canada’s research base.

It does not mean that one-third of Canada’s strongest research opportunities sit in the social sciences and humanities, one-third in health, and one-third in the natural sciences and engineering. It means Ottawa has chosen to allocate money that way.

Plenty of excellent research is already left on the cutting room floor every year across all three councils. The current split only decides which pile of rejected good projects is larger. That is not a law of nature. It is a budget choice.

The softer alternative is to grow NSERC and CIHR without touching SSHRC. That is easier politics, but it still dodges the core issue. Canada can always say the answer is more money, and departments often do. But what should Ottawa do when the next dollar is scarce?

New research spending competes with the Defence Industrial Strategy, rising health care costs, the Build Canada Homes initiative, major infrastructure projects, industrial subsidies and debt servicing.

Simply adding funding to NSERC and CIHR while leaving the inherited split intact would raise their budgets, but it would also leave the current settlement in place. Productivity would become an add-on to the system, not the organizing principle.

Canada has spent a decade saying it wants to be a technology and innovation economy. Its research budget says it wants to be a country that treats every discipline fairly. Both are defensible positions, but they are not the same position.

If the first is the actual goal, the budget should reflect it. The Carney government should start by cutting the social sciences and humanities budget by 50 percent and allocating the money equally between NSERC and CIHR.

Distribution of research funding by field, 2025

Sources:

Canada: Figures are from the 2026–27 Main Estimates.

United Kingdom: Figures are from UKRI’s 2025–26 Budget Allocations.

United States: Figures are from FY2025 appropriations.

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Canada’s health care supply chain faces multiple risk internationally and domestic manufacturing capacity is needed

Canada’s health care supply chain faces numerous risks internationally, underscoring the importance of building domestic manufacturing capacity, according to a report from the C. D. Howe Institute.

Risks noted in the third meeting of the C. D. Howe Institute’s Health Sector Growth and Resilience Working Group include:

• concentration of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing in hurricane-prone Caribbean jurisdictions.
• wildfire exposure in California.
• Taiwan’s dominant position in specialty semiconductor production.
• regulatory volatility around sterilization technologies in the United States.

“There was consensus that Canada is not yet adequately prepared for the full scope of these risks,” the report said.

Significant analytical work is underway, however, including third-party analysis of billions of dollars in spend data to map U.S. exposure by clinical category and product criticality, and vendor-led efforts to identify the most vulnerable MRI systems (which used internationally obtained helium) across the country,

Alternative routing strategies and manufacturing options have been developed with the vendor community for many high-risk categories, and this work is being shared with government, according to the report.

Working group participants noted that nearly all personal protective equipment used in Canada’s healthcare system can now be produced domestically – a direct legacy of pandemic-era investment – and argued that a similar approach should be extended to other critical medical supplies.

Helium emerged as a particularly compelling case. Saskatchewan was identified as holding significant reserves in nitrogen-rich geology.

But participants emphasized that domestic helium production remains a long-term opportunity that would require significant infrastructure investment.

Despite these near-term constraints, the potential for Canada to become a strategic helium supplier was framed as both an economic development opportunity and a meaningful contribution to global health care resilience, and was linked to a broader economic resiliency paper that the group is developing.

Participants also emphasized the need for stronger engagement with federal bodies, including the national defence establishment and health emergency readiness agencies.

The federal Defence Industrial Strategy includes provisions for medical countermeasures and supply chain vulnerability assessments, and participants suggested that these agencies may currently have more direct influence on government priorities than Health Canada.

There was candid acknowledgement that provincial governments have often been more agile than federal agencies in responding to supply chain pressures, and that coordinated interprovincial action can sometimes advance priorities more quickly.

On the innovation front, a participant highlighted that a recent national procurement exercise had, for the first time, included helium-free MRI systems as a standalone category. This is a signal to the market that it is expected to accelerate the adoption of next-generation technology.

The contrast between older and newer systems is stark: legacy MRI units require 1,500 to 2,000 litres of liquid helium, while the latest models require as few as seven litres.

The group viewed procurement innovation of this kind as a practical lever for reducing long-term dependence on a volatile global helium market.

Overall, there was consensus that the immediate health supply chain risk to Canada from the Middle East conflict is primarily a cost risk, not a scarcity risk.

Raw materials continue to flow and production remains operational, distinguishing the current situation from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“However, sustained cost pressure, particularly on petroleum-derived inputs and fuel, poses a real threat to health system budgets and the viability of community-based care providers operating on thin margins,” the report noted.

Proactive and disciplined supply contracts are the first line of defence against price volatility. Organizations with robust contracts, including firm pricing and clear force majeure definitions, are better positioned to manage near-term volatility.

Procurement agencies that proactively go to market to lock in prices reduce the risk of further price escalation in the near term. Jurisdictions currently going to market face the greatest exposure to elevated prices.

Canada’s health care supply chain remains structurally vulnerable to a range of geopolitical, environmental, and regulatory disruptions beyond the current conflict. The analytical foundations for understanding these vulnerabilities are being built – through spend data analysis, vendor mapping, and clinical alternative planning – but significant gaps remain, particularly at the federal level.

Domestic production capacity should be treated as a strategic priority, building on the personal protective equipment manufacturing gains of the pandemic era and extending them to other critical supply categories, the report said.

International collaboration remains essential. Canada should work with like-minded nations to maintain free trade in critical health care inputs, signal that health care should be prioritized in times of scarcity, and coordinate on longer-term innovation to reduce dependence on volatile supply chains.

Regulatory agility, particularly in the approval of alternative pharmaceutical products and the adoption of next-generation medical technologies such as helium-free MRI systems, is a key enabler of supply chain resilience and should be treated as a policy priority. C. D. Howe Institute

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Canada needs to make cloud infrastructure competitive, where workloads move freely, to benefit users: report

Canada needs to make cloud infrastructure a fungible resource where interoperability standards allow workloads to move freely between providers, according to a report by the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project.

Growing calls for massive investment in domestic cloud alternatives are understandable but risk being counterproductive, the report said.

Without corresponding competition policy and regulation, directing public funds to Canada’s domestic telecommunications oligopolies, without clear conditionalities for interoperability based on de facto standards, would merely transfer market control to these firms – “a maple-washed dependency that replicates the structural problems of the current market with inferior performance. Domestic monopolies are still monopolies.”

“The metric for success is not who owns the infrastructure, but whether customers can credibly switch between both international and domestic providers. A market in which workloads move freely is a market in which lock-in loses its power, and in which dependency concerns can be more easily mitigated,” the report said.

Three American firms hold 66 percent of public cloud global market share – Amazon (with 31 percent), Microsoft (24 percent) and Alphabet (11 percent).

As much as 75 percent of global AI compute power is now controlled by five firms, Amazon, Google, Microsoft as well as Meta and Oracle, with Google alone controlling 31 percent of global AI compute.

In Canada, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet control 85 percent of Canada’s public cloud market, according to the report.

In 2025, the Canadian market for cloud computing services was estimated to be worth roughly $18.5 billion.

The federal government alone spent over $156 million on cloud services in 2022–23, the majority of it flowing to Microsoft and Amazon. For Canadian businesses, from early-stage startups to the country’s largest enterprises, there are no practical alternatives.

“That concentration is a competition problem,” the report said. Vendor lock-in through proprietary technologies, opaque and complex billing, bundling and tying, and the foreclosure of adjacent markets, including the evolving market for artificial intelligence, are  predictable consequences of this oligopoly market.”

The reliance of commerce and public services on a small number of providers has made critical systems brittle, with outages causing major economic losses.

In October 2025 an Amazon Web Services outage brought down technology services across the globe. The outage occurred, in part, because many applications running globally depended on a single server cluster, AWS server us-east-1, to function.

When this server was no longer available, systems went down in over 60 countries. Estimates of economic losses went into the hundreds of billions. Services like Netflix, Zoom, Fortnite and others were down, and, concerningly, banking systems like Venmo and trading platforms also experienced disruptions.

AI Infrastructure is underdeveloped in Canada’s, and Canadian firms of all sizes rent these resources from hyperscalers.

Control over computational infrastructure, as well as control over data resources necessary for training models, and control over foundational models themselves, gives hyperscalers immense gatekeeping power, essentially acting as unavoidable tollbooths for those seeking to enter the market.

Hyperscalers are uniquely positioned to influence the development path of technology, and do so in ways that extend their dominance, foreclose the emergence of competitors, and bend global investment for technology development.

Hyperscalers operate businesses across the technology stack, giving them a high degree of market knowledge and business intelligence. They control resources and infrastructure necessary to launch new products and businesses, including training data, foundational models, and computing infrastructure.

Hyperscalers are optimally positioned to capture emerging value in the technology markets, ensuring that the most innovative and potentially profitable technologies succumb to their gravitational pull.

Hyperscalers have engaged in decades of strategic investments in startups and innovation hubs. In terms of acquisitions, investment and support, one estimate puts nearly 6,000 companies in Google’s orbit.

These investments entrench hyperscaler (and U.S. big tech) power globally through a cultivated dependence that makes innovation technically, infrastructurally, and financially dependent on dominant firms who provide infrastructure, data and proprietary technologies.

Also, the fact that most cloud infrastructure is U.S.-based means these firms can be leveraged – and can themselves leverage – in trade negotiations and regulatory disputes, compounding the difficulty of diversifying markets or regulating the sectors in which hyperscalers operate.

Canada’s dependence on a handful of U.S. hyperscalers represents a risk to sovereignty as well as competition, the report noted. “A country locked into a small number of providers lacks meaningful choice, whether the threat is coercion by a foreign government or rent extraction by an uncontested monopolist.”

Concentrated control over cloud infrastructure has been identified as posing high and even critical risks to Canada's digital sovereignty, effecting the ability for Canada to protect sensitive data and enforce laws, to guarantee reliability and security for public services, to effectively control its public technology assets, and for private sector businesses to effective bargain with suppliers and resist economic coercion.

“This is not a theoretical risk.” American tech companies have already demonstrated a willingness to use access as leverage: Google threatened to withdraw search from Canada and Australia during disputes over news media regulation; Meta followed  through and removed news from its platforms in Canada entirely.

In 2025, Microsoft disabled the accounts of International Criminal Court officials in response to U.S. government sanctions, a move that alarmed governments across Europe and Canada.

The report argues that that the most effective response to both the competition and sovereignty dimensions of this problem is to promote the commoditization of cloud infrastructure via a public procurement strategy supported by targeted competition enforcement and international engagement.

To create a competitive marketplace for compute, policymakers should:

• Require interoperability and portability certifications in all federal cloud procurement, ratifying dominant de facto standards rather than inventing new ones.

The federal government should use that purchasing power to only procure cloud infrastructure – from both domestic and international providers – that adopt de facto or dominant standards wherever they exist.

• Attach binding interoperability conditions to any domestic cloud investment programs, to avoid entrenching new domestic monopolies.
• Coordinate with like-minded middle powers to align procurement standards and create demand-side pressure no single country can generate alone.
• Eliminate egress fees, ban self-preferencing and discriminatory bundling, and treat cloud computing as utility-like infrastructure subject to neutrality rules.
• Designate a dedicated industry regulator with the technical capacity to monitor and enforce conduct and standards requirements.
• Direct the Competition Bureau to launch a cloud market study and open enforcement proceedings targeting bundling, tying, predatory cloud credits and discriminatory licensing.
• Prioritize removal of CUSMA’s constraints on digital market regulation in Canada’s 2026 renegotiations.

“The cloud computing market is broken in ways that competition policy and procurement strategy can fix,” the report said.

A small number of firms have used proprietary lock-in, high switching costs, and vertical integration to entrench their dominance, foreclose alternatives, and  extract rents from customers who cannot meaningfully switch providers.

“These are market failures with real costs – to Canadian businesses, to government efficiency, and to innovation in the broader technology sector.”

Canada’s problems and interests are shared by states and organizations the world over, and international effort around the commoditization of cloud services would only increase the effectiveness of such approaches.

Collaboration can occur across all three interventions, by adopting similar procurement standards, by building similar regulatory regimes, and by coordinating intelligence and action around competition enforcement.

“Such coordination not only lessens international public sector commercial dependence on hyperscalers, but sets the stage for a more diversified, competitive, and global technology market open.” Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project

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Companies are incurring “AI waste” and failed R&D because they’re not using AI to gather intelligence at the earliest stage of project development

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the pace of change faster than most organizations can adapt, and the two forces together are fundamentally reshaping what it means to win in R&D, according to a report by PatSnap.

Most R&D organizations are losing ground the same way: too slowly, with too much waste, and without the intelligence to know which bets are worth making, the report said.

More than half of respondents say fewer than half their R&D projects ever reach market. Nearly four in 10 respondents report spending between 25 percent and 40 percent of their entire R&D budget on projects that ultimately fail.

“This is a structural problem with identifiable causes,” the report said.

When asked to name the single biggest bottleneck they would eliminate, R&D leaders pointed overwhelmingly to the same culprit: multilayered approval chains, slow go/no-go decisions, and risk-averse processes that throttle velocity at precisely the moments when speed matters most.

“Good ideas stall not because they lack merit, but because organizations are not built to move on them,” the report said.

The second-biggest bottleneck is informational. Respondents described a landscape of too many sources, too much irrelevant signal, and analysis that arrives too late to change a decision. The result is wasted budget, missed windows and viable ideas that never get the evidence they need to survive internal scrutiny.

Adoption of AI has accelerated faster than the intelligence infrastructure needed to make it effective, the report noted.

As many as 92 percent of respondents say they are using AI in their R&D process at least moderately, and 70 percent report their implementations have been largely or mostly successful.

Yet nearly half say the single biggest improvement to their R&D productivity would be better, faster access to intelligence. The tools are more sophisticated. The underlying gap remains.

The opportunity is most visible where AI is actually being deployed. R&D leaders are applying it primarily to execution-layer work including predictive modeling, routine task automation and design optimization. Competitive intelligence and decision support rank near the bottom.

“In other words, AI has been put to work automating tasks teams already perform. It has not yet been pointed at the decisions that determine whether those efforts were worth making in the first place.”

Waste, process drag and misapplied AI are not three separate problems, the report said. They are three symptoms of the same underlying gap: organizations making consequential decisions without the intelligence to make them well.

PatSnap partnered with Ovation Market Research to survey more than 200 senior R&D professionals across North America, the U.K., and Europe, spanning nine industries. All participating organizations have an annual R&D spend of at least $50 million.

Key findings of the report include:

• 29 percent of respondents cite faster-time-to-market as their single biggest R&D pressure today.
• 28 percent say accelerating time-to-market is their top priority.
• 37 percent spend between 25 percent and 40 percent of their R&D budget on projects that never launch.
• 73 percent say only half or fewer of their R&D projects make it to market.
• 26 percent say the biggest source of viable idea failure is lack of early-stage funding and prioritization.
• 92 percent are using AI in their R&D process moderately or extensively – and 70 percent say implementations have been largely successful.
• 46 percent say better and faster access to intelligence would have the greatest impact on R&D productivity.

When asked to estimate the revenue impact of a 25-percent improvement in speed-to-market, 33 percent of respondents indicated it would generate between $5 million and $20 million in additional annual revenue, while 24 percent placed the gains between $20 million and $100 million.

“The message is consistent: in an environment where AI is accelerating every competitor’s timeline, speed has become a survival differentiator,” the report said.

Half of respondents said it takes an average of one to two years to get a product to market, with 25 percent saying it can take between two and five years.

In a crowded market where customer expectations are changing by the minute, development timelines of this length carry a material risk that demand will have shifted by the time the product reaches the market, the report noted.

Inadequate tools and technology for R&D decision support were identified by 15 percent of respondents as their primary obstacle.

When IP-related barriers are considered together, slow freedom to operate clearance and insufficient patent intelligence early in development account for a further 22 percent of responses, putting them on par with cross-functional alignment as a major constraint on speed-to-market.

Decision quality is also a concern. While 23 percent of organizations rely primarily on data-driven analysis, only 41 percent of respondents describe themselves as very confident in the information available when making critical R&D decisions, with a further 49 percent reporting only moderate confidence.

When asked at which stage better access to competitive and patent intelligence would have the greatest impact, respondents pointed overwhelmingly to the earliest decisions. Early ideation and feasibility assessment each drew 33 percent of responses, together accounting for two-thirds of all answers.

“The implication is clear: intelligence has the most value before significant investment has been committed, not after,” the report said.

While many failures occur early – 35 percent of respondents say between 40 percent and 60 percent are shelved at the ideation and feasibility stage – a significant portion happens much later.

More than one in five respondents (22 percent) say 30 percent or more of their projects are terminated during testing, development, or pre-launch, after most of the investment has already been committed.

Half of respondents confirm that their projects occasionally fail or pivot as a result of intellectual property issues discovered late in development, and 14 percent report that this occurs frequently.

More than a third (38 percent) indicate that late-stage project terminations are costing their organizations between $1 million and $5 million per instance.

Most organizations are already investing in intelligence. Some 46 percent use patent and innovation intelligence on a weekly basis and 10 percent daily.

“But effort does not equal effectiveness,” the report said. More than half of respondents (54 percent) spend between 10 and 15 hours per week consuming and analyzing data from multiple sources. That’s nearly two full working days every week spent gathering information rather than acting on it.

The most common intelligence applications are largely reactive: tracking technology trends (39 percent), searching prior art (35 percent), and monitoring competitor activity (33 percent).

The uses most relevant to earlier stage decisions – identifying white space opportunities, assessing freedom to operate, and finding design-around solutions, rank at the bottom.

“Organizations are using intelligence to monitor. They are not yet using it to shape the decisions that determine which projects get funded in the first place,” the report said.

Some 41 percent of respondents report that AI is extensively integrated into their workflows, while a further 51 percent are currently testing or piloting AI tools. The most common use cases include data analysis (50 percent), predictive modeling (45 percent), and design optimization (36 percent).

Earlier stage uses like idea validation (29 percent) and design around (24 percent) see less adoption. “The opportunity to apply AI further upstream, at the point where project selection and funding decisions are made, remains largely untapped.”

When asked what single intervention would most improve R&D productivity, 52 percent cited earlier identification of non-viable projects, ahead of better and faster access to intelligence (46 percent), reduced approval and administrative times (42 percent) and increased automation (41 percent).

“The primary productivity opportunity in R&D lies not in accelerating existing workflows, but in improving the quality and timing of project selection decisions,” the report noted.

Yet when respondents were asked where they see the biggest opportunity for AI to impact their R&D process, the results reveal a telling gap. Competitive intelligence ranks near the bottom at 15 percent, and decision support sits at just seven percent.

“These are among the least deployed use cases in the report, despite the broader pressure to make faster, better-informed decisions.”

Nearly a quarter of respondents (24 percent) describe their AI implementations as highly successful, while 45 percent say they are mostly successful but still maturing.

The more telling finding is what is getting in the way of going further. Lack of internal AI expertise is the primary barrier cited by 30 percent of respondents, ahead of unclear return on investment expectations (20 percent) and poor data quality (14 percent).

“Organizations are not struggling to access AI tools. They are struggling to build the internal capability to use them well,” the report said.

The organizations that will close the gap between AI adoption and AI impact will be those that direct it at the decisions that matter most: which projects to fund, which to kill and when, according to the report.

“That is where R&D waste originates. And that is where the greatest gains from AI-powered intelligence remain to be captured,” the report said.

“The fix is not more AI. It is better intelligence, earlier. At ideation. At feasibility. Before the sunk cost makes a bad project politically impossible to kill.” Patsnap

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The riskiest way to innovate is also the safest way for venture-funded startups: new study

Startups face a classic dilemma in innovation strategy: should they pursue cumulative, low-risk improvements or disruptive, high-risk breakthroughs?

What if the riskiest way to innovate was actually the safest?

A new study, published in ArXiv, by researchers at Purdue University, Stanford University and University of Chicago, “irrefutably demonstrates this for venture-funded startups,” according to the study’s authors.
Prior research, summarized within the Henderson-Clark framework and Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, taught a generation that architectural innovation, which involves rewiring the components of accepted economic production functions, is the move most likely to topple established firms. It reconfigures relationships on which incumbents depend, so for them it is disruptive and dangerous.
But startups have no legacy architecture to defend. So the researchers asked: If most architectural breakthroughs come from new entrants, does most new entrant success come from architectural innovation?
Building on a complex-economics perspective and advanced computational models, the research team distinguished architectural innovation from modular innovation, which incrementally updates economic modules, and modular invention, which forges new ones, within the entrepreneurship context.

To look at the scale of the whole economy over a half century, the team built a dynamic semantic map of commercial associations using large language model embeddings of business discourse (such as Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Financial Times) and technical designs (tech patents), then placed 298,915 venture-funded startups from 1976-2020 within the evolving space. That enabled the team to measure three strategies directly from company descriptions:

• Modular innovation: swapping one component into an existing system (most common among established firms).
• Architectural innovation: wiring mature, distant parts of the economy together in a new way (think Uber combining GPS, mobile payments, two-sided markets, and the gig labor model, none of which it invented).
• Modular inventions forge new technological components (e.g., academic science-based startups).

“The result inverts the textbook,” the researchers noted.

By comparing the outcomes of architectural and modular innovation and invention, this study reveals that what is typically seen as the riskiest form of innovation can, for startups, be the safest route to success, they said.

Event history models show that architectural innovation is associated with successful initial public offerings and high-value acquisitions, while both modular innovation and invention are linked to increased risk of failure. 

This reconceptualization inverts the trade-off between exploration-exploitation typically assumed in organizational learning, with critical implications for entrepreneurial strategy and innovation policy.

For startups, architectural innovation is the safest path, the study found. It predicts faster funding, more diverse investors, high-value acquisitions, and successful initial public offerings.

Modular innovation, the safest strategy for incumbents, raised the odds of failure. Modular invention produces high-variance outcomes, with the lowest average success because novel technology plays often fail to succeed or scale in time frames demanded by venture capital.
The logic is modularity itself. Recombining proven modules lets a young company move fast, lean on existing infrastructure, and hedge against the collapse that comes from building everything from scratch.
“There is a critical policy lesson, too,” the researchers noted.

Public funding should keep backing fundamental invention, the deep and risky work that invents successfully applied modules in the first place. Venture capital and startups then recombine them through architectural innovation.
Said the researchers: “Starve basic research and you strip the architecture of its raw material.” James Evans, professor of sociology and data science at the University of Chicago on LinkedIn

THE GRAPEVINE – News about people, institutions and communities

Kenneth Corts, an acclaimed economist with extensive academic leadership experience, was named the University of Toronto’s (U of T) first vice-president, people, finance and digital services. U of T’s Governing Council approved the appointment this week for a five-year term running from July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2031. A professor of economic analysis and policy at the Rotman School of Management, Corts brings extensive divisional and institutional leadership experience to the newly created role, which consolidates human resources, labour relations, financial services and information technology under one roof. With more than two decades at U of T, Corts served as Rotman’s interim dean in 2020-2021 and gained broader, institution-wide experience as U of T’s acting vice-president, operations in the fall of 2019. U of T

After 15 years covering Atlantic Canada’s startup ecosystem, the founders of Halifax’s Entrevestor are preparing to write their final stories. Entrevestor publisher Peter Moreira announced that he, and his wife and Entrevestor’s editor, Carol Moreira, will step away from the publication this fall. “We first posted on Entrevestor on Aug. 13, 2011, and about 7,000 articles later, we’re ready to call it a day,” Moreira wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It’s been a tremendous ride, and we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve done over the past 15 years. But we’re now keen to retire and pursue other projects . . . so on Sept. 30, we will post our final article on this site.” Since its inception in 2011. Beyond its news coverage, Entrevestor also collects business data and publishes an annual report on the regional startup sector, which it sells to help finance the organization, and which has become an important benchmark and source of information for the region. BetaKit

Vancouver-based robotics startup Sanctuary AI’s board of directors appointed Daniel Friedmann, who previously served as chairman, as CEO. Friedmann brings decades of leadership experience in advanced technology and innovation. He served for nearly two decades as CEO of MDA, a leading aerospace technology company, and most recently as CEO and chairman of Carbon Engineering, a climate solutions company. He succeeds James Wells, who is leaving Sanctuary, as CEO. Sanctuary AI

Toronto-based legaltech company Dye & Durham announced that George Tsivin is no longer serving as chief executive officer or as a member of the company’s board of directors, effective immediately. The board has determined that, during this transitional phase, a sub-committee of the board (the “Transformation Committee”) will assume the duties and responsibilities of the Office of the CEO and provide executive leadership for the company. The Transformation Committee is chaired by former executive Tyler Proud and includes Mary Filippelli and Angela Zhang. During this phase, the Transformation Committee will work closely with the company’s executive leadership team to drive execution and accelerate key initiatives. The board’s search for a permanent CEO is underway. Dye & Durham

A $20-million gift from chancellor emerita and alumna Suzanne Labarge will help McMaster University accelerate discoveries that support healthy aging and bolster one of the world’s leading aging research ecosystems. The investment will strengthen two flagship initiatives within the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging (MIRA): the Labarge Centre for Mobility in Aging and the MIRA | Dixon Hall Centre. Together, these programs are advancing research that helps older adults remain active, connected and independent while ensuring discoveries are translated into meaningful improvements in everyday life. Since her first gift to the university in 1996, Labarge has contributed more than $62 million to McMaster, supporting research chairs, centres, programs and partnerships that have transformed the study of aging. Labarge’s latest gift will help ensure that researchers, health-care providers, community organizations and policymakers have the knowledge needed to respond to the opportunities and challenges of an aging society. McMaster University

To investigate the early origins of chronic disease, Hospitals of Regina Foundation made a significant investment in pediatrics at the University of Saskatchewan’s (USask) College of Medicine through the establishment of a new clinical research chair. The new Hospitals of Regina Foundation Pediatric Chair in the Origins of Health and Disease is supported by a $4-million investment, the largest single gift ever provided by the Foundation to a research project.
The ultimate vision is to reduce disease, lessen the demand on health care services, and increase health and quality of life for patients and their families now and into their long-term futures. An accomplished clinical researcher will be recruited to build and lead a high-impact research program at USask. The new pediatric clinical researcher will strengthen USask’s Health and Wellness signature research area and collaborate with scientists studying early life, including USask’s Canada Research Chair on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease in Indigenous People, to advance disease prevention strategies and improve health outcomes. USask

University of Ottawa (uOttawa) researchers have developed a new AI-powered system, one that could change how people access mental health care outside of a clinical setting. The prototype, called “UbiMyTherapist” (short for "You Be My Therapist"), works as a digital therapy assistant that continuously monitors a user's emotional state and responds with personalized, clinically informed support. It runs on everyday consumer devices like smartwatches, smartphones and earbuds. The research, led by Dr. Karim Alghoul, part-time professor at uOttawa's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was conducted under the supervision of a team of two researchers from the Faculty of Engineering: Dr. Hussein Al Osman and Dr. Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, and the help of one student from the School of Psychology, Raina Sharma. What sets UbiMyTherapist apart from standard AI tools is its ability to act proactively. Rather than waiting for a user to type out how they're feeling, the system picks up on emotional cues in real time, through physiological signals like heart rate variability, speech tone or written text, and responds accordingly. To do that, it builds and continuously updates what the team calls a "digital twin:" a dynamic profile of each user that combines their medical history, a database of clinical psychology knowledge, and live emotional state data. The result is an AI that can tailor its clinically grounded responses not just to what a user says, but to who they are and how they're feeling in the moment. The team evaluated a working prototype with volunteers and licensed therapists who were able to assess the system's therapeutic soundness. UbiMyTherapist scored particularly high in empathy and personalization compared to existing LLMs like ChatGPT. The team’s research is published in IEEE Xplore. uOttawa

Université de Montreal researchers who looked at media coverage of cases of suicide, hospitalization or psychiatric crisis involving young people who’ve consulted AI chatbots found the technology can make things worse. Alexandre Hudon, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Université de Montréal, and his colleagues analyzed media reports to produce the most comprehensive survey to date of media coverage of the connection between mental health events and chatbots. Their findings were published in the journal JMIR Mental Health. Hudon and his fellow researchers analyzed 71 news articles about 36 cases between November 2022 and December 2025. Among the cases reported in the media for which severity could be fully coded by the research team, suicide was the most frequently reported outcome, occurring in 57 percent of cases. Psychiatric hospitalization was next, at nearly 20 percent. ChatGPT was the most frequently mentioned platform, appearing in 72 percent of the articles. Character AI was mentioned in 14 percent of reports, all involving minors. Ninety percent of the cases involving minors had fatal outcomes, compared with 49 percent for adults. In 74 per cent of the articles, the AI system’s behaviour was cited as the primary cause of the event. “Only six per cent of articles mentioned alternative explanatory factors, such as a pre-existing medical condition, family background or substance use,” Hudon said. He believes the problem isn’t so much AI itself, “but rather the intersection of certain states of vulnerability and the specific characteristics of these tools, which are always available, lack judgment and are programmed to simulate empathy. What makes chatbots appealing can, in some situations, worsen the very problems they seem to alleviate.” Université de Montreal

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