CONTENTS:

 Government Funding & News

• Ottawa providing over $541 million in funding under Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada and the Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders programs
• Canada will match U.S. tariffs “dollar for dollar,” while providing a $7.5-billion package of new and enhanced measures to help Canadian businesses

 Research, Technology & Innovation

• Canadian universities struggle to commercialize their research, despite increased research spending

 VC, Private Investment & Acquisitions

• Investment in Canadian fintechs declines as investors focus on companies with scale, specialized AI capabilities and competitive advantages

 Reports & Policies

• Commercialization of “AI scribes” and other AI tools in health care is likely to remain fragmented across 13 separate provincial and territorial procurement processes
• Ottawa is ignoring the beating heart of the life sciences sector
• The economy Canada has – and the one it needs
• Sage roundtable: The costs are local. The benefits are national. Can Canada build the data centres it needs?
• Your high school friends may shape whether you become an entrepreneur decades later

 The Grapevine – News about people, institutions and communities

• New Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada at 13 universities

 GOVERNMENT FUNDING & NEWS

Ottawa providing over $541 million in funding under Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada and the Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders programs

The Government of Canada announced over $541 million in funding for Intake 1 of the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada and the Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders programs.

Launched in December 2025, the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program is the centrepiece of the $1.7-billion Canada Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative (Impact+).

Combining a globally competitive award value with exceptional speed in program delivery, the Research Chairs program gives Canadian institutions the scale and tools to compete globally for world-leading researchers, establish exceptional teams and partnerships, and pursue ambitious research in fields critical to Canada’s prosperity, sovereignty, health and resilience.

By translating discoveries into new technologies, practices and evidence – and training the next generation of research leaders – the program will build enduring research and innovation capacity and deliver lasting benefits for Canadians.

$504 million over eight years will support 64 Research Chairs in Intake 1. These Research Chairs will advance ambitious and transformative projects in Canada’s strategic priority areas, build and maintain exceptional research teams, and collaborate with partners across sectors and borders.

Of the recruits, 48 are from U.S. institutions, including Harvard and MIT. The other researchers are coming from 12 countries including Germany, China, the U.K. and Japan. 

Through research in areas including Arctic governance and community resilience, translational molecular imaging and therapy, and sustainable transportation futures, these investments will strengthen Canada’s research excellence while accelerating the translation of discoveries into real-world benefits that enhance the country’s resilience and prosperity and improve the health and well-being of Canadians, the government said.

Over $37 million in funding will also support institutions in the recruitment of 63 Emerging Leaders over the next year.

Along with the Research Chairs and Emerging Leaders, Impact+ seeks to build Canada’s research talent at every career stage. Additional funding streams support international and returning Canadian research trainees, and provide the infrastructure needed for world-leading research.

The funded researchers represent leading minds from 13 countries, and dozens of Canadians choosing to continue their cutting-edge research at home. “Together, these investments create a strong talent pipeline that will translate research discoveries into real-world applications and tangible health and socio-economic benefits to Canadians,” the government said. Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat

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Canada will match U.S. tariffs “dollar for dollar,” while providing a $7.5-billion package of new and enhanced measures to help Canadian businesses

The Government of Canada announced that Canada will match the new U.S. tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate, with additional Canadian tariffs on U.S. goods.

This focused response will protect Canadian workers, farmers, fishers, families and businesses, defend industries harmed by unjustified U.S. tariffs, and help Canadian producers compete with U.S. products in the Canadian market, Ottawa said.

Effective September 8, Canada will impose counter-tariffs of 15, 25 and 50 percent on products drawn from those targeted by U.S. Section 338 and Section 232 tariffs, with the rate for each product matching the corresponding U.S. rate.

Canada's counter tariffs will apply to products covering $27.6 billion in imports from the U.S. and will focus on sectors such as steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics, that are most impacted by U.S. tariffs. 

In addition, to support Canadian workers and businesses impacted by U.S. tariffs, the government is also introducing a $7.5-billion package of new and enhanced measures that deliver fast, simple and agile supports to Canadian workers and businesses, building on the nearly $25 billion in supports the government has provided since the implementation of the U.S. unjustified tariffs.

 This package includes:

• an additional $1.5 billion investment through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative, delivered by Canada's regional development agencies (RDA), to help small and medium-sized enterprises, including liquidity supports to manage the pressures related to tariffs.
• a new $500-million liquidity stream under the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Pivot to Grow program to help businesses manage immediate cash-flow pressures in addition to targeted programs for the forestry, steel and aluminum sectors.
• broadened access to the Business Development Bank of Canada’s tariff-related programs by lowering the minimum revenue requirement for applicants to $1 million.
• an additional $2-billion investment through the new Canada Strong Diversification Fund – a new stream of the Strategic Response Fund – to support tariff-affected businesses with shovel-ready projects that support ongoing capital maintenance. This new initiative will work closely with RDA programming for project intake and triage.
• a new suite of $3.5-billion Rapid Response Supports for Workers and Employers to help Canadians affected by tariffs. This will help workers access income support when they need it through extended and additional EI temporary flexibilities, and support their transition into new opportunities through new investments in training delivered in the workplace and enhancements to JobBank.gc.ca. This will also help employers keep their workforce through a difficult period with the help of the new Worker Retention and Retraining Program.
• new flexibilities to the Large Enterprise Tariff Loan facility, administered by the Canada Enterprise Emergency Funding Corporation.

The government said it will continue to assess programs and policies to support businesses that  continue to be impacted by tariffs, including expanding the availability of existing measures to newly impacted sectors. Department of Finance Canada

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Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, announced a federal investment of $195 million, through the Strategic Response Fund, in Toronto-based Xanadu Quantum Technologies’ $893-million project to expand its research and development facility and establish advanced manufacturing capabilities in Canada. This project will create 275 high-quality jobs and add the specialized facilities needed to develop, manufacture and commercialize quantum technologies in Canada. It will also support partnerships with Canadian research institutions and small and medium-sized businesses, helping turn more Canadian ideas into Canadian products and jobs. “This announcement clearly signal’s Canada’s willingness to make the investments necessary to position Canada as a global leader in quantum technologies,” industry association Quantum Industry Canada said in a statement. The quantum sector in Canada is projected to contribute $17.7 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product and more than 157,000 jobs by 2045. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

The Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia announced a Strategic Response Fund investment totalling nearly $100 million in B.C.-based life sciences companies Kardium Inc. and Evonik Canada Inc. This investment includes a contribution of up to $31.25 million toward Kardium’s $125 million project to create a world-class manufacturing facility for advanced medical devices in Burnaby, B.C. Kardium has developed the Globe® Pulsed Field System, a novel medical device designed for the treatment of atrial fibrillation, the most common type of cardiac arrhythmia. The device, an integrated mapping and ablation solution, received regulatory approval from Health Canada in July 2026 and from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in September 2025. The project will enable Kardium to expand its cleanroom capacity from 500 units a year to 30,000 to meet growing market demand, create and maintain a total of 1,000 highly skilled jobs in B.C., and retain its intellectual property in Canada. The investment also includes a contribution of up to $68 million toward Evonik’s more than $150-million project to expand its presence in B.C., which includes building and operating a Nucleic Acid Competence Centre. The new facility will enable Evonik to increase its product development and manufacturing capacity for the next generation of mRNA vaccines and therapies, bringing more products from concept to the clinic. The expansion project will create and maintain 260 jobs and is expected to attract additional global investment in Canada’s life sciences industry, while further bolstering B.C.’s international reputation as a hub for cutting-edge life sciences. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced a $50-million investment in the Canadian Agri-Food Automation and Intelligence Network (CAAIN) through the Strategic Response Fund. With global supply chain disruptions and rising food costs posing risks to Canadians, the Government of Canada said it is taking concrete action to help give Canadians access to affordable and healthy food. This investment will strengthen Canada’s agri-food innovation capacity by accelerating the development, demonstration, adoption and commercialization of Canadian technologies.  It will enable CAAIN to expand its national network of smart farms and commercial farm demonstration sites and provide cost-shared support for Canadian businesses developing and adopting innovative agri-food technologies. With this investment, CAAIN is expected to fund at least 40 new technology projects, mobilize $80 million in private sector co-investment, create and maintain 800 jobs, and grow the network to more than 3,000 members. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA) is investing nearly $51 million across 16 new projects worth nearly $180 million that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while driving innovation and economic growth in Alberta. This funding comes from the industry-funded Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund, delivered through ERA. Projects support technology innovation in oil and gas, agriculture, construction materials, transportation, manufacturing, waste, electricity, critical minerals, chemicals and fertilizers, and pulp and paper. The investment supports breakthrough technologies across carbon capture, hydrogen, methane management, critical minerals, nuclear fuel, advanced manufacturing, and resource efficiency. The projects are located across the province including Peace River, Exshaw, the County of Newell, Fort Saskatchewan, Calgary, and Edmonton. Emissions Reduction Alberta

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) announced that the Government of Canada is providing up to $8.7 million to the Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences (CASTL) under the Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program. Through its project, Supporting Workforce Capacity in Canada’s Biomanufacturing Sector, CASTL will help strengthen Canada’s ability to produce life-saving drugs, vaccines and health products that Canadians rely on, right here at home. The project will help fill persistent skill shortages, connect qualified workers with jobs, and open pathways to good careers. Up to 1,800 Canadians, including mid-career and displaced workers, newcomers, underemployed individuals and youth, will get the training and support they need to succeed in these growing fields. ESDC

Patty Hajdu, Minister of Jobs and Families, announced the new Sectoral Workforce Innovation Fund (SWIF), which will support projects that respond to pressing skilled labour shortages across Canada’s priority sectors. Projects funded through the SWIF could include faster training approaches, micro-credentials, skills assessments, targeted certification programs and other creative solutions. These projects will help Canadian workers prepare for in-demand occupations while helping employers address ongoing skilled labour shortages. Organizations interested are encouraged to visit Canada.ca for information on eligibility requirements and the application process. Employment and Social Development Canada

Health Canada is taking longer to assess generic drug applications from manufacturers, with the backlog of submissions doubling in the past year, new government data show. The delays mean Canadian patients, as well as public and private insurers, are waiting longer to access cheaper pharmaceuticals, although the department said the backlog is principally due to a sharp increase in the number of generic drug submissions. Health Canada met its target of assessing a generic drug submission within 180 days for 72 percent of reviews in the 2025-26 fiscal year, according to department figures. That was down from data The Globe and Mail reported on last summer, which showed the regulator was on time for 84 percent of reviews in 2024-25 – which was itself a decrease from a 100-percent success rate in multiple recent years. The backlog of submissions stood at 250 in June, up from 117 last September. Jim Keon, president of the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association, said the delays are making it difficult and more expensive for manufacturers to arrange their supply chains and plan for patient support programs, since the timing of when they can launch products is unclear. Generic manufacturers that want to sell their products in Canada must submit a dossier to Health Canada demonstrating that the products are bioequivalent, which means they work inside the body the same way as the branded drugs they mimic. The department said the backlog is because of an “unprecedented” increase in the volume and complexity of generic drug applications, and that it is taking steps to improve its processing time. Health Canada said recently it will launch a pilot project to prioritize generic drugs made in Canada. The Globe and Mail

The Government of Saskatchewan released its Data Centre Framework to help guide future investment opportunities, support economic growth and ensure Saskatchewan remains a competitive destination for private sector investment and development. Following feedback from business, labour, industry, Indigenous partners and the public, Saskatchewan's Data Centre Framework provides clear principles for any future projects, clarity for municipalities and the public, and ensures any new project delivers meaningful benefits to Saskatchewan residents and businesses. Six key principles will guide the assessment of future data centre projects. These principles focus on Canadian ownership, support for Canadian data and AI sovereignty, the creation of Saskatchewan jobs and partnerships, industry experience, self-supplied power generation, and a centralized provincial intake process. A key element of the framework is the requirement for any new proponents to supply their own power. Project developers will be responsible for determining whether their proposed development requires an environmental impact assessment and, where necessary, completing all applicable environmental review requirements. Govt. of Saskatchewan

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced a federal investment of nearly $19 million for StormFisher Environmental Ltd., a subsidiary of New York City-headquartered Generate Upcycle, to expand its facility in London, Ont. This facility, the London Digester, is the largest food waste anaerobic digestion facility in Canada that produces renewable natural gas (RNG) from municipal source-separated organics and industrial, commercial, institutional food and beverage waste. The investment will allow the facility to expand its RNG production capacity, increasing its ability to transform organic waste into low-carbon fuel and fertilizer which will be used on farms in southwestern Ontario. By turning waste into clean, renewable energy, RNG helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions, diverts waste from landfills, and helps Canada get the most from its resources. Once complete in 2027, the upgraded facility will have the capacity to produce an additional 450,000 gigajoules of RNG – enough to power approximately 4,500 homes annually – and 86,000 additional tonnes of nutrient-rich organic fertilizer each year. NRCan

The Federal Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced a non-repayable investment of nearly $15 million to support nine organizations in southern Ontario. As part of this announcement, Nobellum Enterprise, a not-for-profit, female-led social enterprise, is undertaking a $3.6-million project, with FedDev Ontario providing $1.2-million to deliver the CanBlack STEM Project. This project will provide Black STEM-focused businesses with commercialization support, mentorship, and market access opportunities – boosting growth, competitiveness and innovation outcomes. With funding through the Black Entrepreneurship Program Ecosystem Fund, these organizations will deliver targeted business supports that help Black entrepreneurs and business owners build skills, access mentorship and networking opportunities, adopt innovative practices and enhance their capacity to compete and succeed. FedDev Ontario

The Federal Economic Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced an investment of over $12.5 million to support the growth of nine Hamiliton-area businesses. As part of this announcement, Niko Apparel Systems, a Canadian-owned manufacturer specializing in high-quality technical apparel, is undertaking a $400,000-project, with FedDev Ontario providing $200,000 to modernize production infrastructure through equipment upgrades and enhanced workforce skills to deliver made-in-Canada high-performance apparel and protective gear. The investments, through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative, will help these businesses strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities, create growth opportunities, and reinforce regional supply chains. FedDev Ontario

The Government of Canada provided Glencore Canada Corporation up to $11 million, through Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Decarbonization Incentive Program, toward the company’s Craig Mine in Ontario. Glencore has completed the Onaping Depth Project shaft, providing first access to nickel ore and marking an important step toward first production from the Onaping Depth Zone later this year. Located within Craig Mine as part of Glencore's Sudbury Integrated Nickel Operations, the Onaping Depth Project is the first new mine to be developed in the Sudbury Basin in more than a decade, and will secure nickel production in the Sudbury Basin. The project extends Canada’s ability to produce nickel, a key input for stainless steel and batteries, beyond 2040. The federal investment will help enable  Onaping Depth to operate one of the most advanced battery-electric underground mining fleets in the world and eliminate diesel emissions from production. Natural Resources Canada

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced a combined repayable investment of over $6.6 million to support the growth of five Etobicoke-based businesses. As part of this announcement, SWTCH Energy is receiving a $4-million investment to improve its resilience and competitiveness by enhancing its service capabilities to support the deployment of its EV charging solutions, software platforms and operating models in new markets at home and abroad. The investments, through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative, will help these businesses strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities, create growth opportunities, mitigate trade disruptions and reinforce regional supply chains. FedDev Ontario

Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan) announced $6.6 million in federal funding to advance Indigenous-led energy development and strengthen aviation training in the Cold Lake region. A $6-million repayable investment will support Etthen Energy Corporation, a company wholly owned by Cold Lake First Nations, as it expands the development of heavy oil resources beneath reserve lands. The project will support well site and facility construction, along with the engineering and completion work needed to advance production. By supporting Etthen Energy’s expansion project, this investment will create economic opportunities for Cold Lake First Nation, strengthen Indigenous ownership and participation in the energy sector, and generate long-term revenues that can be reinvested in the community. A further $600,000-investment in the City of Cold Lake will support renovations and upgrades to an aircraft hangar at the Cold Lake Regional Airport, establishing a training facility for an Aircraft Maintenance Engineering – Structures program. The new training space and equipment will help prepare workers for careers in aviation maintenance and respond to growing demand for skilled workers in the region’s aerospace and defence sectors. PrairiesCan

The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) announced a federal investment of $1 million to advance NordSpace’s Atlantic Spaceport Complex (ASX) in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland and Labrador. ASX is expected to host Canada's first commercial space launch vehicles and help secure Canada's sovereign access to space. Ottawa’s investment builds on the $8.3 million in federal support announced for NordSpace earlier this year. The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador is contributing $4 million, while NordSpace is investing $5 million of its own capital, bringing the total investment to $10 million. Together, this investment will help ASX:

• generate high-skilled jobs in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.
• create new opportunities for Canadian businesses and grow space and advanced-manufacturing supply chains.
• advance Canada’s commercial space-launch capacity and ability to compete in the rapidly growing global space race. ACOA

RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Canadian universities struggle to commercialize their research, despite increased research spending

Canadian universities are still struggling to commercialize their research, even though research institutions filed more patents and launched more startups in 2025, according to a survey by the non-profit Association of University Technology Managers.

Research spending at universities and research institutions rose nearly six percent year-over-year to $8.4 billion in 2025. However, gross licensing income from intellectual property fell about four percent to $143.7 million.

That’s about $171,000 in income for every $10 million spent on research last year, down from about $233,000 per $10 million of research spending in 2021.

New patent applications rose more than 20 percent, and the number of startups created from academic research increased six percent, from 117 in 2024 to 124 last year.

More university-linked startups founded in Canada failed, with the number of companies that ceased operations jumping 65 percent last year. And the number of active licences declined eight percent.

Those results point to the “challenging environment for technology-based ventures, as companies faced greater difficulty securing financing, achieving commercial traction or advancing technologies toward commercial development,” Olivia Novac, chair of the AUTM Canada licensing survey, said in the report.

Jim Hinton, an intellectual property lawyer and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said the numbers suggest Canada is failing to improve its record of turning academic research into commercial value, despite recent measures from governments.

“I don’t see any meaningful change,” he said. “It’s business as usual.”

In 2018, Ottawa launched a national Intellectual Property Strategy, which included several government-backed programs meant to help businesses develop patent strategies, protect their intellectual property and access IP from institutions such as universities.

The AUTM report is a voluntary survey that tracks R&D spending, IP filings and startup creation at Canada’s universities, hospitals and other public research institutes.

The organization shared five years’ worth of data with The Logic, which showed little to no progress on key metrics, such as patent applications, licensing income and startup creation, even as research spending has grown.

Hinton said the report also misses what he considers the most important measure of success: whether university research ends up in the hands of Canadian companies that can commercialize it.

Hinton co-authored research in 2023 examining Canada’s 15 largest research universities that found more than half of the industry-directed IP they generated was assigned to foreign companies.

“Where is the IP getting into the hands of Canadian firms and then being commercialized?” he said. “That’s where it has the most impact, and that’s not even being measured.”

The University of Toronto generated $81.3 million in licensing income in 2025 – more than half of the $143.7 million reported by survey respondents. About $80 million of U of T’s total came from running royalties, or continuing payments on technologies that had already been licensed. The Logic

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The University of Waterloo Rocketry Team launched Polaris, a liquid bi-propellant rocket, at the 2026 Launch Canada Challenge in Timmins, Ont. in late August. The student team watched as the rocket soared to an altitude of 63,497 feet, breaking the previous world record of 56,590 feet. Polaris is 17 feet long and weighs 300 pounds fully fuelled. Liquid bi-propellant rockets are harder to build than solid and hybrid ones, but they are the aerospace industry standard which makes them well worth the challenge. In 2024, the Waterloo Rocketry team built and successfully launched Borealis, the first Canadian liquid bi-propellant rocket to take to the skies. In 2025, the team launched Aurora which flew to 38,000 feet, making it the second-highest amateur liquid bi-propellant rocket in the world at the time. Unfortunately, the team was unable to recover Aurora and most of its flight data, but they took that as a learning opportunity. Polaris descended beautifully under a drogue and main parachute – a first for the team – and was recovered safely. The team is already busy analyzing the data recorded from the suite of onboard sensors. Now in its 17^th year, Waterloo Rocketry has about 100 student members in first through fourth year who come from across campus, representing the faculties of Engineering, Math, Arts and Science. Recent graduates now work at SpaceX, the Canada Rocket Company and RocketLab. Charlotte Danby in Waterloo News

St. John’s, Nfld.-based Carrick Health Innovations tapped into the expertise of local students to develop an AI agent that’s fully linked to patient’s records. Equipping clinic phones with a built-in AI layer, the company’s technology seamlessly tracks and transcribes calls, follows up with patients, and handles many inquiries without having to involve staff members unless necessary. The AI phone platform is successfully being used by NL Health Services’ cancer pre-screening program, which coordinates thousands of patient appointments annually. Carrick’s phone system grew out of the company’s flagship patient texting platform already being used by hundreds of health care organizations across North America. To help advance the AI phone platform, Carrick turned to the expertise of postsecondary students at the College of North Atlantic (CNA) through an internship program by Mitacs, a national innovation organization that connects businesses with access to highly skilled talent, financial support and the partnerships needed to turn ideas into impactful innovations. “Because of their [Mitacs’] funding, we were able to attract really sharp students who come in with a fresh perspective and enthusiasm that has helped propel our R&D efforts forward,” said Josh Taylor, CEO of Carrick. One of the company’s Mitacs program participants, Scott Adams, a fourth-year student in CNA’s software developer program, has been offered a full-time position at Carrick once he graduates in the spring. Email from Gail Bergman PR

A group of Canadian startups, bolstered by $305 million from the federal government, are determined to push Canada into the space-launch business and ensure the country can launch the payloads it considers important for national development and defense. They include Toronto-based Canada Rocket Company, which is developing a medium launch vehicle powered by seven of its own rocket engines. There is also Markham, Ont.-based NordSpace, which is building both a rocket (Taiga) and the Atlantic Spaceport Complex in Newfoundland and Labrador. There’s also Longueuil, Que.-based Reaction Dynamics, which is developing a light-lift launch vehicle called Aurora. In May 2026, all three received the first round of funding ($8.3 million each) from Canada’s Launch the North program. Canada currently has two launch sites in development: NordSpace’s Atlantic Spaceport Launch Complex in Newfoundland and Labrador and Spaceport Nova Scotia, run by Maritime Launch Services. Launch opportunities are rooted in the surge in demand for low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites. The number of satellites in orbit now is around 18,000, but it’s expected to reach 100,000 in 2030, driven sharply by the growth of LEO networks for communications and other purposes. That growth, paired with SpaceX’s intention to stop booking Falcon 9 launches past 2028 due to capacity constraints and the company’s shift towards Starship, leaves an opening for other launch companies. IEEE Spectrum

The Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is using a decade and a half of data to understand what makes science-based startups succeed and fail. The Canadian non-profit is making the information, drawn from its network of accelerators, available to researchers around the world to study how founders, financing, mentorship and other factors impact firms’ prospects. Their findings could help startups make better choices, show investors what to look for, and influence the design of entrepreneurship policy and programs in Canada and abroad. CDL draws information on startups that apply to and go through its 26 programs focused on fields like AI, defence, minerals and quantum, run at 16 university-hosted sites in North America, Europe and Asia. Its data includes details of founders’ backgrounds, the technology they’re developing, their potential customers, the work they do during the process, and the financing they raise once they graduate. Researchers have so far published nearly a dozen academic journal papers based on the data, which covers some 15,000 startups that have applied to the accelerator, their 9,000 founders and 2,000 mentors who’ve worked with them. In one study, Purdue University management professor Amir Sariri, found that timely advice from experienced counsellors can improve how startups perform in the long term, partly by ensuring teams focus on the right things early on.  Another study based on 500 startup financings found that higher-quality firms prefer a type of deal that doesn’t immediately set their valuations, delaying it until future rounds when they’d expect to be worth more. The Logic

Burnaby, B.C.-based Kardium Inc., a private medical device company advancing the way the world treats atrial fibrillation (AF), announced that Health Canada has granted a Medical Device Licence for the firm’s Globe® Pulsed Field System. Building on the successful U.S. launch of the Globe System following U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2025, Health Canada approval marks the next major milestone in expanding access to Kardium’s integrated mapping and pulsed field ablation platform. Developed in Canada, the Globe System is the only integrated, high-density cardiac mapping and ablation system that enables both single-shot pulmonary vein isolation and customizable, targeted ablation using a single catheter. The system combines a 122-electrode spherical array, real-time thermal contact sensing, and advanced visualization tools to support personalized treatment strategies and efficient AF ablation workflows. Clinical data from the pivotal PULSAR study demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of the Globe System, showing 78 percent freedom from atrial arrhythmia at one year in patients with paroxysmal AF, with zero percent device-related primary safety events. Kardium

Calgary-based SuperQ Quantum Computing said it was the only Canadian technology company deployed in a live operational exercise at Texas A&M University’s Bush Combat Development Complex, simulating a contested extraction alongside U.S. military command, intelligence agencies and defence primes. The exercise tested whether SuperQ’s Super Edge platform can re-solve a battlefield plan and deliver a new course of action to troops on tactical devices within 60 seconds of a threat change. SuperQ’s participation was organized through the Canada Q-Branch Dual-Use Accelerator with support from Global Affairs Canada. The exercise included demonstrating unbroken post-quantum encrypted transport of movement plans across satellite infrastructure, verifying zero unencrypted code-line transmissions. SuperQ Quantum Computing

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, 1Password, Shopify and other tech and service firms called for “collective action” on cyber defence in response to AI-enabled cyberattacks. “We have a limited window to strengthen our cyber defenses,” the 116 signatories warned in an open letter. “The companies and public services our communities depend on – from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet – are at risk.” A global response is necessary, requiring new partnerships to raise security standards and find new solutions to emerging cyberthreats, they said. “Coordinate cyber defense at local, national, and international levels.” They urged companies to test defences against frontier cyber capabilities, strengthen existing tools with AI, and work with technology partners to close gaps now. “Make AI-powered defense accessible and deployable for critical-infrastructure operators, with hands-on help to deploy tools and verify fixes, and collaborate with critical infrastructure supply chain manufacturers and system integrators to patch and issue interim guidance.” Signatories didn’t commit any specific funding or resources to the action for which they’re calling. OpenAI

Andrew Bailey, chair of the international Financial Stability Board, sent a letter to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, urging them to make sure they can restore critical parts of the financial system from “bare metal” as AI makes disruptive cyberattacks easier and more likely. “The risk landscape has been further complicated by the emergence of frontier AI models, which are showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities,” he wrote. The global financial system is highly interconnected, and cyber disruption can spread across jurisdictions through common technology providers, shared infrastructure, and cross-border financial activity, he noted. Frontier AI may have the ability materially to alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, which could undermine market confidence system-wide, especially due to highly concentrated third-party service providers, Bailey said. “Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond.” Financial Stability Board letter

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, is warning that artificial intelligence poses a grave threat to jobs and human life, and that urgently addressing the risks should be “the world’s top priority.” In an hour-long interview with The New York Times, Gates said the tech industry was knowingly downplaying those threats because there was too much money on the line. “In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he said. But few tech executives, Gates said, are willing to publicly admit that. Gates published a nearly 6,000-word essay on his personal website laying out his concerns about AI and offering solutions, such as new taxes and bans. He said he was motivated to speak now because recent improvements in AI had far surpassed his expectations and because the industry had ignored technology milestones – like AI’s escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons – that the industry once said would warrant more caution. Gates said mass job losses, if not addressed, were inevitable because AI would spread across the economy and leave little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The New York Times

Patronscan, the Calgary-based company behind a multinational network used to verify ID documents, is once again facing questions over how it collects, stores, and handles private data. In August, the CBC reported that a Canadian woman was labelled a “public safety concern” by Patronscan’s platform, which uses proprietary technology to scan and verify IDs. According to the report, the woman had been asked to leave a bar after becoming ill. Unbeknownst to her, she was given the “safety concern” label, which was later shared with other Patronscan network members, resulting in her being barred from the Calgary Stampede. The report comes on the heels of reporting from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the U.S., where some had expressed concern over the use of Patronscan to track LGBTQ+ bargoers, prompting some establishments to stop using the service. Patronscan uses optical character recognition and barcode scanner technology to compare a piece of ID against a database and verify its authenticity. The platform collects data like names, dates of birth, photos, gender, postal codes and expiry dates, which are then stored by the platform for anywhere between 24 hours to up to 30 days depending on jurisdiction. Founded in 2005, Patronscan operates across 300 cities in four countries including Canada, the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. BetaKit

Toronto-based Kepler Communications Inc. announced that its next-generation optical data relay network is delivering commercial services to customers worldwide, expanding the company’s infrastructure for real-time space operations as the first tranche completes commissioning. Following the successful launch in January 2026, Kepler offers the first commercial space data relay service available, now supporting a diverse customer set across commercial and government markets. The company’s constellation is enabling real-time, on-demand space operations through resilient connectivity, onboard computing and hosted payloads. Designed around an IP-based architecture with optical inter-satellite links and distributed edge computing, Kepler’s next-generation constellation allows customers to move, process and access mission data with greater speed and flexibility. Kepler supports missions spanning Earth observation, space domain awareness, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, defence and other real-time use cases. Kepler

Montreal-based space intelligence and data analytics company NorthStar Earth & Space Inc. and Toronto-based satellite telecommunications provider Kepler Communications announced a collaboration that combines NorthStar’s leading space-based Space Domain Awareness (SDA) services and Kepler’s advanced optical data relay infrastructure to accelerate the deployment of orbital sensing capabilities and streamline delivery of critical space intelligence to customers worldwide. NorthStar’s optical SDA sensors will be hosted on Kepler’s satellite infrastructure delivering secure, low-latency, direct data transport from orbit to end users. This agreement establishes the foundation for a long-term relationship that supports NorthStar’s strategy to rapidly expand its sensor presence in orbit while delivering timely, actionable space intelligence to government and commercial customers. NorthStar Earth & Space

Toronto-based Thomson Reuters announced the launch of Thomson, the company's first proprietary large language model, developed in-house. Frontier labs have typically spent billions of dollars on compute and years of infrastructure investment to reach the frontier. Thomson Reuters took a different path: starting from a strong open-source foundation and investing $40 million to train Thomson into the right intelligence for the jobs that matter most, covering talent and compute. The result is a model Thomson Reuters fully controls, without the heavy inference costs of typical frontier models. Thomson Reuters built Thomson on decades of proprietary content, technology, “and domain expertise no other company can match,” the company said. Thomson Reuters began opening the model to a group of legal and AI academics for direct evaluation. The company also is also making a “small” version of Thomson available as an open-weight model on Hugging Face for academic and non-commercial use to further aid in this validation. Thomson Reuters

Businesses and IT leaders have a limited understanding of what sovereign AI means or what opportunities it may offer, according to a new study sponsored by Toronto-based AI developer Cohere. The study, performed by analyst firm IDC on behalf of Cohere, found that more than half of executive leaders believe sovereign AI is a priority, but there was little agreement on its definition. According to the report, one in three respondents had difficulty describing sovereign AI in their own words, and only 13 percent said it’s widely understood across their organizations. IDC defined sovereign AI as “the ability to have free choice and control over the design, development, deployment, accessibility, operation, maintenance and governance of AI systems and applications, as well as the underlying technology foundations they depend on.” The report found that Canadian organizations understand the concept of sovereign AI the least, with only 10 percent reporting a high awareness while 89 percent reported a low awareness. For the report, IDC surveyed 508 IT and business decision-makers behind their organization’s AI purchasing decisions. The respondents represented large enterprises with over US$1 billion in annual revenue across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. While Canadian organizations lagged in awareness, they still identified sovereign AI as a potential business benefit. Thirty-five percent of Canadian respondents said the competitive advantage was their primary driver for pursuing sovereign AI, leading all other countries, including the U.S. at 28 percent and Germany at 23 percent. Across every industry surveyed, enterprise leaders identified data leakage, privacy, compliance, and regulatory risk as the top concerns that sovereign AI initiatives can address. BetaKit, Cohere

GM Canada said it plans to invest a total of about $1.4 billion in Oshawa and St. Catharines in Ontario over the next three years, to further strengthen the company’s manufacturing footprint in Canada. Unifor, which represents more than 4,600 workers at General Motors plants in Ontario, said its members voted to ratify three-year contracts with the Detroit Three automaker that included the commitments. The investments include $144 million to bring production of the next-generation GMC Sierra Heavy-Duty truck to Oshawa. Another $215 million will make the St. Catharines propulsion plant the sole source of a next-generation transmission. GM

Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. announced an agreement with New York City-headquartered global investment firm KKR to form a new joint venture, in collaboration with New York City-based global alternative asset manager Apollo, to fund expansions of the Westcoast natural gas pipeline system. The expansions have regulatory approval and are commercially underpinned by long-term take-or-pay contracts. Under the agreement, KKR and Apollo will invest approximately $2.7 billion to fund the expansions, including $0.7 billion of cash to Enbridge at closing, in exchange for an indirect, cumulative 29-percent interest in the aggregate Westcoast system. Enbridge will retain majority ownership and operational control over the Westcoast system, including responsibility for executing the expansions. The total project cost is expected to reach about $4 billion. Enbridge

A ship is set to leave the Port of Churchill this week loaded with what would be the northern Manitoba town's first grain shipment in over half a decade. A ship loaded with about 30,000 tonnes of Canadian wheat will leave for Europe this week in what government officials say is a significant milestone years in the making. This week's grain shipment, bound for the Mediterranean, is one of three leaving the port this season in partnership with Saskatchewan-based pulse producer AGT Foods. Shipments out of Churchill – Canada's only railway-accessible deep-water arctic port – were halted after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the last grain shipment leaving Churchill in 2020. Port owner Arctic Gateway Group, which also owns the Hudson Bay Railway, announced in July that grain shipments would resume this summer. This week's surge in activity at the port comes amid some hope its four-month shipping season could be extended. A series of studies commissioned by Arctic Gateway released earlier this month suggested year-round shipping without the use of the most expensive icebreakers could be feasible as sea ice melts. CBC News

Saskatoon-headquartered Cameco Corp. took the first steps toward listing its American nuclear power subsidiary on the U.S. stock market in what some analysts expect could be a blockbuster offering. The uranium mining giant announced that it and its joint partner, Brookfield Corp., have filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a potential initial public offering for Westinghouse Electric Co. The American nuclear power company is on the cusp of deploying a fleet of its nuclear reactor technology, AP1000, across the U.S. after signing a US$80-billion deal with the U.S. government last year. In its filings, Cameco previewed the potential of its jointly owned business, disclosing that Westinghouse has 91 global reactor projects on the horizon. If the IPO filing is approved, Westinghouse could carve up slices of equity to investors keen to jump on a nuclear energy boom as countries embrace low-emission power. The StarPhoenix

Meta reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms. In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising. The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children. The states filed their agreement with Meta in that court, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is expected to approve it. Meta still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals, some of which are scheduled for trial in the coming months. The settlement could signal an inflection point for a social media industry that has largely escaped regulatory scrutiny over the harms its products have caused children. The settlement amount is one of the highest ever paid by a tech company to states. The New York Times

VC, PRIVATE INVESTMENT & ACQUISITIONS            

Investment in Canadian fintechs declines as investors focus on companies with scale, specialized AI capabilities and competitive advantages

Investors in Canadian fintech made 47 deals with a total value of just under US$1 billion in the first half of 2026, down from the US$1.7 billion invested across 82 Canadian fintech deals in the first half of 2025.

According to KPMG International’s H1’26 Pulse of Fintech report, investment in Canadian fintechs was broadly stable compared with the previous six months, with US$996.7 million invested across 47 deals versus US$1 billion invested across 56 deals in the second half of 2025, according to data compiled by PitchBook.

But on a year-over-year basis, the drop in investment was more pronounced, with H1’26 deal activity down more than 40 percent from the US$1.7 billion invested across 82 deals in the first half of 2025.

Dubie Cunningham, a partner in KPMG Canada’s banking and capital markets practice, said investors are not retreating from Canadian fintechs. Rather, they are placing fewer, more deliberate bets.

“Canadian fintech has entered a selective maturation phase, with investors going after fewer deals but applying more scrutiny to their investments,” she said. “They are being more discerning and going after fintechs that have scale, specialized AI capabilities and that are competitively positioned to take advantage of upcoming reforms to Canada’s financial services industry.”

Venture capital funding totalled $492.9 million across 33 deals in H1’26. Corporate venture capital investment totalled $25 million across eight deals.

Merger and acquisition activity totalled US$37 million across 12 deals. Private equity/growth investments totalled US$130.6 million across two deals.

Investment activity rose substantially in the second quarter to US$621.7 million from US$375 million in Q1, despite virtually unchanged volume.

“Canadian fintechs are attracting capital not simply because they are innovative, but because they provide technology, customers, licences or regulated platforms that can accelerate expansion,” Cunningham said.

“While previous waves of fintech investment rewarded digital access and growth, this current wave is rewarding specialized intelligence and demonstrable economics.”

AI and machine learning-oriented fintechs continued to attract significant investor interest, with 19 investments in the first half – more than any other vertical.

Cunningham noted that while AI has been the most active vertical over the past year – and will likely remain one of the most active sectors – fintech investment is moving from broad experimentation to more specialized AI applications.

“Fintech investors aren’t investing in AI for AI’s sake – they’re being strategic. Capital is flowing to fintechs that are using AI to solve a specific problem,” she said.
“The fintechs that are leveraging AI to make deposit-taking, lending and payment processing faster and more efficient are creating significant value; those are the types of fintechs where we see investment dollars going over the next year to 18 months,” she added.

Investors continued to deploy capital into digital asset-based fintechs, the second most active vertical in the first half of the year.

Robinhood Markets Inc.’s US$168.4-million acquisition of Toronto-based WonderFi Technologies was the second-largest fintech deal in Canada in H1. The deal marked Robinhood’s entry into Canada through WonderFi’s regulated crypto asset platforms Bitbuy and Coinsquare.

Andrew Mathias, a partner in KPMG’s deal advisory practice, said regulated platforms with scale will continue to draw foreign and domestic capital, as Canada’s financial services sector enters a new era of financial innovation through the Consumer-Driven Banking Act and implementation of the Real-Time Rail.

Consumer-driven banking will allow consumers to securely share their financial information with accredited fintechs, while the Real-Time Rail will modernize Canada's payments system by enabling real-time money movement and improved payment data. Together, these reforms are expected to accelerate competition across Canada's financial services sector. KPMG

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Blue Owl led a deal to lend Australian AI compute provider IREN Limited US$2.4 billion to buy equipment to expand IREN’s Mackenzie data centre campus in British Columbia. Pacific Investment Management Company also backed the deal, which covers about 90 per cent of the funding it needs to build out the infrastructure at the site. IREN

Toronto-based Cyclic Materials raised US$75 million to build the company’s rare earth recycling campus in South Carolina and expand its hub-and-spoke infrastructure across the U.S. T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. led the all-equity round, with California electronics recycler ERI participating. Cyclic Materials recovers rare earth metals from electric motors in cars, wind turbines and MRI machines to reuse across the AI, semiconductor, robotics, defense, automotive, medical and other advanced manufacturing sectors. The company’s Arizona magnet separation and critical mineral recycling plant is expected to start operations in Q3 2026. Business Wire

Toronto-based Intact Private Capital is among the backers of California-based autonomous trucking firm Gatik’s US$200-million Series D funding round, led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, with participation from Millennium Management, ARK Invest and others. Gatik, which runs Loblaw’s self-driving delivery truck fleet, has built one of the most commercially advanced businesses in autonomous freight, with more than $600 million in contracted revenue, 85,000 fully driverless orders completed, and 99 percent on-time delivery across its operations. Gatik said the latest financing round will help the company expand a model built around one of the most commercially compelling applications of autonomy: high-frequency regional routes that connect distribution centers and stores. Gatik

Toronto-based Radical Ventures backed Emerald AI in a US$150-million Series A funding round, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC. Washington, D.C.-based Emerald AI makes software to manage how data centres draw power from the grid for AI compute. Emerald AI's technology is now deployed commercially, dynamically flexing power consumption at multi-megawatt, full data centre scale. The company said it will use the new capital to scale commercial deployments worldwide with its customers, which include leading AI firms, data center operators and electric power utilities. Emerald AI

Aurora, Ont.-headquartered Magna International led a $35-million Series A funding round for India-based Yuma Energy. Yuma Energy, which operates battery-swapping stations as alternatives to electric vehicle charging hubs, said the funding will help it achieve positive pre-tax earnings growth in fiscal 2027 as it expands across India. Yuma is a joint venture between the Ontario-based auto parts maker and Yulu, a Bangalore-based electric bike-share company. Yuma didn’t disclose any other investors in the round. Yuma Energy on LinkedIn

Montreal-founded and Colorado-based agricultural fintech SweetAg – rebranded from Landjourney – raised US$7.4 million in a seed round led by Montreal’s Diagram, Builders VC and Cooperative. SweetAg sells a customizable white-label platform built to handle the operating, collateral and financial data unique to agriculture. It plans to use the capital to grow its client base and to expand its AI-powered software for agricultural lenders. dealroom.co

Sudbury, Ont.-headquartered LoopX, a physical AI company building all-condition intelligence for mining, raised $4.05 million in a seed funding round led by BDC Seed Venture Fund and Orion Industrial Ventures, with participation from Hatch. LoopX’s platform, which combines thermal vision AI, edge computing and proprietary models trained on real-world mining data, helps equipment perceive and respond reliably in harsh, unpredictable environments – making mining operations safer, smarter and more productive. LoopX’s systems are deployed across eight active mine sites with major operators and contractors, including Vale Base Metals and Cementation Americas. The Accelerator Centre

Toronto-based deep technology startup Meissner announced $3.6 million in pre-seed financing to build what the company describes as “the discovery engine” for superconductors, using a combination of machine learning, computation and experimental validation. The funding round was anchored by BDC Capital’s Thrive Venture Fund. Other investors include Dominion Dynamics CEO Eliot Pence, General Fusion CEO Greg Twinney, former Shopify executive Daniel Debow, and former BlueCat co-founders Michael and Richard Hyatt. Meissner CEO Olivia Leng started the firm a year ago while studying chemistry at the University of Toronto. Meissner uses AI to help identify metallic alloys that could become superconductors, and quantum-based simulations to filter down the possibilities. The new capital will help the firm move the materials into the physical world, producing and experimenting on them at the University of Waterloo’s nano fabrication centre. BetaKit

Waterloo, Ont.-headquartered logistics technology company Descartes acquired California-based freight software firm Tai for US$100 million in cash. Shippers and the carriers that move their goods use Descartes’ tools to communicate, run their fleets and manage customs paperwork. It is Descartes’ third acquisition this year. All three acquired firms have introduced AI into their products, including agents that handle key logistics tasks for customers. Tai provides an AI-powered transportation management platform that serves as the system of action for freight brokers. In its fourth acquisition this year, Descartes this week acquired California-based Extensiv for US$120 million, as it expands its warehouse and inventory management business. Extensiv provides warehouse management and fulfilment systems for third-party logistics providers. Descartes

Toronto-headquartered entertainment firm WildBrain is spending an initial US$11 million in cash plus one million shares to acquire Los Angeles-based conversational AI startup Personality AI. WildBrain will also pay US$2 million on the anniversary of closing, and earn-outs of up to US$56 million based on the revenue the unit earns through 2029. WildBrain owns, produces and licenses out some blockbuster youth entertainment properties, including Teletubbies, Inspector Gadget and Canada’s very own Degrassi. WildBrain is buying Personality AI for its generative AI technology, which powers apps like a Peppa Pig avatar with whom kids can talk as they play games on Amazon’s Fire Kids tablets. WildBrain, which is adding 11 Personality AI staff as part of the deal, plans to develop similar interactive products based on its intellectual property. WildBrain

Ottawa-headquartered public opinion and market research firm Abacus Data acquired Winnipeg-based Probe Research, which will serve as Abacus Data’s public opinion outfit in the Prairies. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Probe Research’s full team will join Abacus Data, and its principals, former journalists Curtis Brown and Mary Agnes Welch, become shareholders of Abacus Data. Brown becomes vice-president and managing director of Abacus Data’s Western Canadian business. Agnes Welch becomes vice-president, qualitative & chief of talent & culture. Abacus Data

Vancouver wildfire-detection startup SenseNet acquired the wildfire technology business of Maryland-based N5 Sensors, adding its sensors, customers and entire wildfire team as SenseNet expands in the U.S. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. A graduate of TiE Vancouver’s Incubation Lab, SenseNet was founded in 2019, initially offering a sensor network to quickly and effectively detect the start and spread of wildfires. Since then, the company has grown into more of a comprehensive platform, with predictive analytics about how fires might behave, long-range AI-powered cameras to capture activity, satellite and drone connections, and recommendations to help manage fire spread. BetaKit

Montreal-based software development agency Osedea acquired Ventriloc, a Sherbrooke, Que.-based data analytic consultancy. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Osedea, whose expertise includes AI, robotics, software development and design, employs a workforce that is almost exclusively based in Quebec, with teams in Montreal, Quebec City, and Sherbrooke. The acquisition adds 25 employees to Osedea, bringing the firm’s headcount to more than 100 people. This includes the addition of Ventriloc founders Jean-François Laberge and Paul-Alexandre Viger, who are now partners at Osedea. The company said it intends to continue creating stimulating, quality jobs in Quebec, and in doing so, attract large-scale mandates, from local and international markets. Osedea

REPORTS & POLICIES

Commercialization of “AI scribes” and other AI tools in health care is likely to remain fragmented across 13 separate provincial and territorial procurement processes

Artificial intelligence scribes have demonstrated strong clinician demand and measurable benefits, but Canada’s fragmented procurement and regulatory systems could prevent the country from safely translating early adoption into a competitive health care AI sector, according to a communique from the C.D. Howe Institute.

The C.D. Howe Institute’s Health Sector Economic Growth and Resilience Working Group  (composed of experts from the public sector, business, and academia) examined AI-generated clinical documentation, or “AI scribes” – alongside the broader international policy environment that will determine whether this solution matures into a durable Canadian AI commercialization pathway. 

Participants broadly agreed that AI scribes have moved from pilot to meaningful scale faster, and with a more positive clinician reception than most had expected.

However, more than half of AI scribes used in Ontario included incorrect medical information (including misidentified medications), according to findings from a recent audit of AI use across the Ontario Public Service (OPS), undertaken following the Ontario government’s 2024 AI strategy.

Shelley Spence, auditor general of Ontario, presented the findings to the working group. The audit covered AI governance and oversight, the responsible and secure use of AI tools, and the procurement and evaluation of vendor-of-record AI systems.

At an OPS-wide level, the audit found that staff could access unsanctioned and unsecured AI tools from government-issued devices: approved AI tools were used at a rate of roughly six percent, against a 94 percent usage rate for non-approved generative AI websites, and only about three percent of staff had completed AI training as of August 2025.

In the case of AI scribes, Supply Ontario procured the tools through a vendor-of-record model and made them available to physicians, nurse practitioners, therapists and other clinicians.

The audit found that security, accuracy and bias-related criteria carried limited weight in vendor evaluation and that the process relied heavily on vendors’ own claims rather than independent verification, with no requirement for live product demonstrations.

Subsequent testing by clinical and technical staff from Ontario Health and the provincial Ministry of Health found that all 20 evaluated vendors exhibited at least one identified issue. More than half included incorrect medical information (including misidentified medications), 45 percent exhibited instances of “hallucinations” (fabricated content), and 30 percent had incomplete documentation or omissions.

While these results are concerning, participants noted that AI tools and their underlying algorithms are evolving rapidly and that the findings apply to tools available and in use through summer 2025. This rapid evolution also means that data security, output accuracy and potential biases can change over time, requiring regular evaluation to ensure appropriate public sector use.

Krista Balenko, vice-president, enablement and operations at Canada Health Infoway described a national initiative intended to provide up to 10,000 primary care clinicians with a 12-month funded AI scribe licence drawn from a list of pre-qualified vendors, targeting reach to roughly 20 percent of the primary care market.

The program was built collaboratively at a national level, drawing on Ontario’s early vendor-of-record work as well as parallel efforts already underway in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

A national external advisory group set core clinical, business, privacy and security requirements and participated in vendor testing and live demonstrations, an approach designed to avoid duplicating the same procurement and evaluation work in every jurisdiction.

Registration was straightforward, directing all clinicians to a common landing page where they could select their region. All regions were supported by common adoption resources such as readiness checklists, privacy guidance and templates.

Demand exceeded expectations. More than 6,000 providers registered within two days of launch and more than 10,000 within two weeks, prompting several jurisdictions to close registration once notional allocations were reached.

Balenko said the program has since supported more than 11.5 million patient encounters, at an average of roughly 1.2 million encounters per month – a volume that a large comparable U.S. health system reportedly took some 15 months to reach with a similar enrolled user base.

An independent evaluation found strongly positive results across most direct measures: roughly 90 percent of clinicians rated the tool as valuable to their practice; about 80 percent reported a significant reduction in cognitive load; close to 70 percent reported reduced administrative burden; and about 80 percent reported feeling more engaged with patients.

Roughly three-quarters of clinicians reported time savings. Of that group, about half redirected the time to completing other administrative or clinical tasks and roughly a fifth used it to see and/or take on more patients.

Balenko cautioned that benefits are not uniform: the specific value delivered depends on the clinician, the appointment type and the patient context.

Looking ahead, Balenko noted that clinicians increasingly view AI scribes as an entry point into a broader ecosystem of AI-enabled tools, including pre- and post-visit summaries, automated form completion and billing support, and clinical co-pilot functionality, several of which vendors are already layering onto existing products.

In her assessment, the main policy question is how quickly AI scribes can be scaled responsibly – and under what governance and data-access arrangements.

Gavin Tong, Canadian health industry data and AI lead at Accenture, focused on the international economic policy environment shaping AI use cases in health care, particularly “front office” applications such as those involving personal health information and directly touching patient care, as distinct from valuable but less contentious “back office” applications.

He described a broadly common two-part policy challenge facing every jurisdiction. The first is regulatory friction, including medical device certification, AI-specific regulatory regimes, and data privacy requirements.

The second challenge is creating commercialization pathways that convert regulatory approval into a viable, reimbursable route to market – historically a long and uncertain process for novel health technologies.

Tong described three distinct approaches that have been deployed across different jurisdictions.

England has established a regulatory sandbox called the “AI Airlock,” allowing regulators and companies to jointly iterate on safe deployment controls for continuously learning AI medical-device products.

Qualifying products move into a provisional clinical use and real-world monitoring phase before entering a national AI procurement framework, with current use cases concentrated in areas such as imaging triage, cardiac diagnostics and dermatology.

Germany and France, by contrast, have focused on giving developers a clear route from regulatory approval to a “digital therapeutic” pathway that can be prescribed, with automatic access to national insurance coverage, applied particularly to mental health applications and combined patient-facing device and app products.

Singapore offers a highly integrated model. It has placed AI at the centre of national economic policy since 2023, using a live national clinical dataset and sustained biotech investment to position itself as a launch pad from which private companies can scale innovations across the wider Asia-Pacific market.

Against this backdrop, Tong argued that Canada holds many of the underlying ingredients for success: strong AI research, rich longitudinal health data, a receptive and well-educated workforce, and an early proof point in AI scribes.

Canada’s challenge is that it lacks the commercialization architecture to leverage these foundational assets into rapid commercialization, adoption and scale.

Even if Canada achieves a more unified national approach to regulation, Tong suggested that commercialization is likely to remain fragmented across 13 separate provincial and territorial procurement processes.

Health care also has historically had a risk-averse purchasing culture and a reluctance to be a first customer for novel technology, meaning many companies launch their products and capture value abroad before entering the Canadian market.

The presentation also raised concerns about AI-driven workforce displacement across both blue- and white-collar occupations and the well-documented health consequences of concentrated unemployment, particularly among younger workers, as a longer-term risk that merits attention alongside the immediate commercialization of AI tools.

Future adoption patterns and applications of new AI tools remain uncertain. Given workforce and access challenges in health care, improving the efficiency of health care delivery will become increasingly important, alongside monitoring AI’s broader and evolving economic and health impacts.

During the group’s discussion, several participants argued that Canada should embed AI directly in its own regulatory processes, rather than only regulating AI as a product, pointing to international examples where AI-assisted application review has replaced slower, correspondence-based bureaucratic processes to shorten approval timelines without weakening oversight.

This was linked to a recurring and largely undisputed observation: participants repeatedly identified the fragmentation of health care procurement and regulatory authority across 13 provincial and territorial jurisdictions as the primary structural obstacle to scaling AI commercialization in Canada, in contrast to the single national markets of peer jurisdictions such as Germany and France.

On the regulatory classification of clinical AI tools, one participant noted that AI scribes generally sit outside Health Canada’s medical device framework, unlike more clinically substantive diagnostic or decision-support AI applications, though guidance specific to generative and higher-risk AI tools continues to develop.

The central challenge, in this view, is calibrating oversight to a tool’s genuine clinical risk and value so that governance does not simply add to clinician burden. The participant also suggested exploring national procurement principles that could sit alongside continued provincial responsibility for funding and administration, rather than requiring a full redesign of health system financing.

There was clear consensus that AI scribes have demonstrated clinician demand and delivered measurable value in clinical practice.

Participants generally viewed the risk of under-investing in health care AI, given capacity and access challenges, as greater than the risks of broader adoption, provided accuracy, bias and security safeguards keep pace with deployment.

There was some debate about Canada’s ideal adoption and regulatory strategy. Some participants favoured a deliberate “fast follower” posture, learning from international leaders such as England, Germany, France, and Singapore.

Others argued that this posture risks entrenching the very lag participants identified as Canada’s central weakness and favoured a more assertive domestic approach combining a Canadian regulatory sandbox with coordinated national procurement. C.D. Howe Institute

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Ottawa is ignoring the beating heart of the life sciences sector

OPINION

By E. Richard Gold

Richard Gold is a Distinguished James McGill Professor at McGill University and chief policy and partnerships officer at Conscience. This op-ed first appeared here in The Globe and Mail.

In March, Ottawa created the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force to “identify made-in-Canada solutions” in the life sciences sector. Four months later, the task force’s co-chairs issued a final report with 39 recommendations encapsulating longstanding global pharma asks. These included reduced regulation, easing of protections over pharmaceutical pricing, and collecting data to better justify those prices.

None focused, however, on creating the pipeline of ideas needed to generate a made-in-Canada pharmaceutical industry. That pipeline runs through a Canadian strength that the task force ignored: open-science partnerships designed to leverage Canadian research through rapid and unrestricted sharing with Canadian firms.

Given the brief timeline and membership, the task force’s recommendations are unsurprising. At least 19 of the task force’s 27 members run Canadian subsidiaries of multinationals or their trade associations. There were no generic companies represented, nor any universities or research hospitals. The report’s recommendations benefit this membership: strict deadlines to ease regulations and soften price protection for multinationals while only asking Ottawa to “consider” progress that supports smaller, domestic firms.

Without a strong idea-generation apparatus and a way to feed those ideas into domestic firms, Canada will remain dependent on foreign actors. Building Canadian strength in innovation starts from the ground up.

The task force described the situation: Foreign buyers acquired 21 Canadian life sciences companies over the past 15 years while pharmaceutical imports have risen from 74 per cent to 93 per cent of domestic drug expenditure in a decade. A recent Globe and Mail article notes that, while larger Canadian firms are doing well, there is an “absence of Canadian capital to back Canadian medical developers.”

While the task force acknowledges that Canada “performs well in early-stage discovery, clinical research and company creation,” it largely assumes that generating these discoveries requires no further assistance. This misses the mark.

The economics of the pharmaceutical industry underscore a division of labour: Universities conduct research, small firms turn that research into innovations and large firms commercialize them. Innovators at universities and small biotechs accounted for approximately half of the scientifically innovative drugs approved between 1998 and 2007 while large firms focused on the last stage of commercialization, particularly when they had strong links with outside organizations.

Unlike competitor countries, Canada is unusually dependent on public institutions. A 2025 study by the Council of Canadian Academies concluded that higher education performs 35 percent of Canadian research and development compared with an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 16 percent. University research output has been steady at about 1.5 times the OECD average as a share of GDP while business R&D intensity fell from 77 percent of the OECD average in 2000 to 57 per cent in 2023.

According to the report, Canada’s overall R&D intensity fell from 1.9 percent of GDP to 1.8 percent during that period while it increased in every other G7 country.

We cannot build a stronger domestic pharmaceutical industry without moving discoveries from public institutions into companies capable of developing them. In the U.S., all 210 drugs approved from 2010-2016 depended, in part, on U.S. federal funding and each additional $10-million in public funding generated roughly 2.3 additional private-sector patents. With its weaker innovation system, this would be even more true in Canada.

Canada has developed a world-leading model that bridges the gap between universities, small- and medium-sized enterprises, and large firms: open-science partnerships. These bring universities, hospitals and firms together to quickly share knowledge that accelerates drug development, which the firms can protect and advance through to the clinic. With our limited resources and firms, open-science partnerships provide a mechanism for Canada to do more with less. And we have done exactly that.

The Structural Genomics Consortium, and its laboratory at the University of Toronto, created an open-science partnership to advance drug discovery in 2003. McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute joined the movement in 2016, with an $84-million investment by the federal government and a $20-million gift from Larry Tanenbaum.

The Canadian government later invested $49-million in Conscience to support open-science drug discovery by Canadian SMEs and research laboratories, and $24-million in TRIDENT, an open-science drug discovery platform. These investments are now paying off, with firms such as M4K Pharma entering into clinical trials.

Current government investments in open-science partnerships have a shelf life, and, if not renewed, the country will weaken its chances of translating university and hospital research into the next generation of health innovations. Canada must not only invest in the companies at the end of the pipeline but in the Canadian institutions that feed it. The Globe and Mail

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The economy Canada has – and the one it needs

 By Robert Asselin

Robert Asselin is CEO of U15 Canada. This article first appeared here on his substack.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in economics offered a timely reminder of what ultimately drives sustained improvements in living standards.

Joel Mokyr was recognized for identifying the conditions that allow technological progress to become self-sustaining. Philippe Aghion and Canadian economist Peter Howitt – who spent 24 years at Western University, where much of his Nobel-recognized research took shape – were recognized for formalizing Joseph Schumpeter’s insight that growth occurs through creative destruction: new technologies, firms and methods of production continually displace older ones. Their common proposition is that long-term growth depends on the continuous development and diffusion of useful knowledge.

That proposition does not, by itself, establish the case for industrial policy. It does not tell governments which sectors to support, which firms will succeed or whether targeted intervention will outperform broader reforms to taxation, regulation and competition.

But it does direct attention to the technological composition of an economy.

An economy with a substantial concentration of firms operating in R&D-intensive sectors – where commercial success depends on scientific discovery, engineering, intellectual property and continuous technological improvement – will generate different patterns of investment, innovation and productivity growth from one in which relatively few firms face those demands.

R&D is not the only source of productivity growth. Technology adoption, capital investment, effective management and the reallocation of resources toward more productive firms are also essential. But an economy with relatively few firms developing proprietary technologies will struggle to generate the intellectual property, high-value production and technological leadership that increasingly shape economic power.

This provides a useful test for industrial policy: does public intervention principally preserve existing economic activity, or does it also increase an economy’s capacity to develop, commercialize and apply new technologies?

That distinction is becoming increasingly important for Canada.

Canada’s industrial policy is being reshaped largely in response to a more difficult external environment. The trade relationship with the United States has become much less predictable. Technological competition is reshaping economic power. Governments are intervening more directly to secure strategic industries, supply chains and intellectual property. Canada, meanwhile, is embarking on a generational increase in defence investment.

The federal government has responded with a more active approach to trade diversification, economic security, major projects and defence industrial capacity. These are important shifts. They recognize that national-security requirements, technological spillovers and the scale of strategic investments can require forms of public coordination that ordinary market incentives do not always provide.

The next step is to ensure that measures designed to strengthen Canada’s economic defences also contribute to a deeper transformation of its productive economy.

Governments are under understandable pressure to protect employment, help firms absorb tariffs, replace lost markets and preserve domestic production. Sudden trade disruption can threaten otherwise viable companies, strategically important capacity and entire communities.

But measures designed to absorb an external shock will not necessarily, on their own, produce the innovation and productivity growth required for a sound long-term economic strategy.

A useful distinction is therefore between defensive industrial policy and offensive industrial policy.

Defensive industrial policy helps the economy withstand disruption. It protects firms and productive capacity, provides liquidity and temporary assistance, and helps industries develop new markets while they adjust.

If done well, offensive industrial policy expands the number of firms capable of creating technologies, investing at scale and competing internationally. It connects research, private investment, sophisticated demand and access to global markets. It increases the share of the economy in which growth depends on R&D, engineering, advanced production, intellectual property and continuous technological investment.

Adjustment assistance can help viable firms survive a period of trade disruption. Where possible, it can also encourage investment, technology adoption, new products and market diversification. Measures taken to preserve capacity in the short term can become bridges toward a more productive and technologically sophisticated industrial structure.

This is not an argument for replacing markets with government direction, nor for subsidizing any industry that can plausibly be described as strategic.

The principal objective of an offensive industrial policy is to create the conditions in which more Canadian firms invest their own capital, develop valuable technologies and ultimately succeed in international markets.

The distinction is therefore not simply between supporting existing industries and inventing entirely new ones. Preserving a critical aerospace supplier, shipyard, steel facility or advanced-materials producer may protect knowledge and productive capacity that would be difficult to reconstruct. Conversely, supporting a fashionable technology with no viable customers or credible pathway to scale may leave behind little of enduring value.

What matters is what the intervention leaves behind.

Norway did not abandon its natural-resource advantage when it developed world-leading capabilities in subsea engineering, offshore equipment and marine technologies. It used the difficult operating conditions of the North Sea, demanding customers, research institutions and specialized suppliers to turn resource production into a platform for technological development and international exports.

The Netherlands similarly combined agricultural production with advanced research, specialized education and close collaboration among government, universities and industry. It did not choose between agriculture and technology. It made agriculture increasingly dependent on technology.

These cases demonstrate a more limited point: countries can use existing strengths and sustained investment to accumulate new technological and productive capabilities over time.

The structure of the economy matters

Canada’s productivity debate usually concentrates on the general conditions facing firms: taxation, regulation, competition, infrastructure, skills, capital formation and internal trade. All matter.

But the structure of the economy matters too.

Different firms operate under very different technological conditions. Some face rapid product cycles, difficult engineering problems and customers that continually demand better performance. They must invest in research, software, equipment, specialized talent and organizational capacity simply to remain competitive.

In such firms, innovation is not an activity encouraged periodically by a government program. It is embedded in the business model.

Other firms can remain profitable without making comparable investments. This does not make their activities unimportant. It does mean that an economy’s aggregate propensity to innovate is influenced by the kinds of companies it contains and the markets in which they operate.

This is one underappreciated part of Canada’s innovation problem.

Canada provides substantial public support for business research. The Scientific Research and Experimental Development program alone delivers approximately $4.2 billion annually. Yet Canada’s total R&D expenditure was only about 1.8 percent of GDP in 2023, compared with an OECD average of 2.7 percent and 3.3 percent in the United States. Canada’s R&D intensity has stagnated since 2010, and its share of business-funded research is particularly low.

A tax credit can support a firm that already has technological ambitions, specialized employees, customers and a strategy for growth. It cannot, by itself, create those conditions. Nor can it overcome every other source of weak innovation performance, including limited firm scale, foreign ownership of intellectual property, weak commercialization and insufficient investment in technology adoption.

Canada’s persistent weakness despite substantial incentives suggests that the problem lies not only in the price of R&D. It also lies in the scale, ownership, market opportunities and industrial composition of the firms expected to perform it.

Canada’s innovation weakness has several causes. But one deserves more attention: too little of the business economy is concentrated in R&D-intensive firms and sectors where technological development and adoption is central to commercial success.

The objective should therefore be to increase the share of the economy made up of R&D-intensive firms and sectors, while also raising the technological intensity of Canada’s established industries.

That means building new capabilities at the technological frontier. It also means spreading advanced technologies throughout the existing economy.

Mining, energy, agriculture, forestry and manufacturing are not inherently old-economy activities. Many are already technologically sophisticated. Their future competitiveness will depend increasingly on automation, artificial intelligence, advanced materials, biotechnology, clean production and specialized engineering.

Canada’s natural resources can create demand for environmental technologies, advanced extraction methods, specialized equipment and new materials. Its energy systems can support innovation in nuclear technologies, electricity management, carbon capture and industrial processes. Its agricultural base can generate opportunities in biotechnology, precision farming and advanced food production.

But greater technology adoption within established industries is not a substitute for developing more sectors whose principal economic activity is the creation and commercialization of technology. Canada needs both.

The distinction is not between traditional and modern sectors. It is between an economy in which relatively few firms develop proprietary technologies and one in which a much larger share of production, investment and employment is organized around research, engineering and continuous innovation.

Beyond market diversification

This distinction also matters for Canada’s trade-diversification strategy.

Developing new markets beyond the United States is essential. The federal government is right to make it a central economic priority.

Selling more energy, minerals or agricultural products to new customers can increase exports, incomes and investment. It can create demand for infrastructure, equipment and new technologies. It can also support highly productive and technologically sophisticated domestic industries.

But changing the destination of a product does not necessarily increase the share of the economy devoted to developing proprietary technologies or building R&D-intensive firms.

The next stage of trade diversification should therefore operate along both dimensions.

Canada should find new markets for its existing strengths while using research, technology and investment to deepen those strengths and develop new ones. Market diversification and productive diversification should become mutually reinforcing parts of the same strategy.

The objective is not to produce everything domestically. Canada is a medium-sized economy integrated into continental and global supply chains. A credible strategy must be based on specialization and access to allied markets.

Canada does not need to be self-sufficient in every advanced technology. It needs to become indispensable in more of the technologies and production systems that will shape its prosperity and security.

The defence opportunity

The new Defence Industrial Strategy creates an unusual opportunity to put this approach into practice.

Defence procurement must, of course, begin with the operational needs of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Sovereign capabilities operate near some of the most R&D-intensive and technologically demanding parts of the economy. They draw on aerospace, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum science, space systems, robotics, communications and advanced materials.

They can also provide something Canada’s innovation system has often lacked: sophisticated customers with substantial, predictable and long-term demand.

This matters because firms do not invest simply because research has become less expensive. They invest when they see a credible market, a demanding customer and a pathway from invention to production.

The Defence Industrial Strategy recognizes much of this. It aims to build leading Canadian firms in key sovereign-capability areas, increase government investment in defence-related R&D by 85 percent and accelerate the procurement of successful Canadian innovations.

These commitments contain many of the foundations of an offensive industrial policy.

The opportunity now is to connect them as effectively as possible: linking research to technological development, development to procurement, procurement to production, and domestic production to allied and commercial markets.

Properly understood, procurement can be more than a purchasing exercise. It can create difficult technological problems, support experimentation, provide environments in which new systems can be tested and give firms an initial customer from which to pursue broader markets.

The measure of success will not simply be how many procurement dollars are nominally spent in Canada. It will be whether those expenditures leave behind stronger R&D-performing firms, valuable intellectual property, experienced scientific and engineering teams, advanced suppliers and technologies that can compete in allied markets.

From economic defence to industrial offence

Public policy – and politics – naturally gives priority to the industries, workers and communities facing immediate disruption.

Existing firms are visible. Their employees, facilities and supply chains already exist. The costs of losing them are immediate and concentrated. The benefits of building new capabilities are less certain, more dispersed and take longer to emerge.

Canada needs both economy-wide technology adoption and stronger capabilities at the technological frontier. The first will determine how quickly productivity improves across existing industries. The second will determine whether Canada develops and exports more of the technologies on which its future prosperity and security will depend. Robert Asselin’s substack

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Sage roundtable: The costs are local. The benefits are national. Can Canada build the data centres it needs?

Participants in this roundtable discussion included:

• Christopher Waddell, professor emeritus, former director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.
• Peter Nicholson, chair of the board of the Canadian Climate Institute. His public service career included positions as deputy chief of staff, policy in the prime minister’s office and as special advisor to the secretary-general of the OECD in Paris. He retired in 2010 as founding president of the Council of Canadian Academies.
• Chris Ragan, a policy-interested macroeconomist, a long-time McGill University professor and the founding director of McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.
• David Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada, deputy minister of Finance and deputy minister of Health. He recently retired as senior advisor at law firm Bennett Jones LLP.
• Miville Tremblay, a Fellow invité at CIRANO, a regular op-ed contributor to La Presse and a director on the board of Québec’s Autorité des marchés financiers.
• Dale Eisler, whose multi-faceted career has spanned journalism, government and academia. He served with the federal government as an assistant deputy minister, assistant secretary to cabinet and counsel general in the U.S. He’s currently a senior policy fellow at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.

Chris Waddell: Data centres have become an increasingly interesting topic in Canada. What’s going to happen to them?

In the U.S. there is so much concern about these giant installations that 18 states have either banned them altogether or put moratoriums on new ones. Another 16 states are discussing various issues about the centres.

Here in Canada, the city council in Hamilton, Ontario talked about putting a moratorium on them, but last month the vote to do that was defeated 10-6. Mississauga is talking about it. On August 2 there was a demonstration in north Edmonton, where Meta plans to put a large data centre.

When I proposed this topic for our Roundtable I asked a few questions. I found that people are concerned about water and electricity use by data centres, and what that might mean for the cost and availability of electricity. This is so particularly in smaller communities, because some data centres are being located outside major cities, since these installations need a lot of space.

Some people may even be concerned about the fact that most data centres seem to be built with borrowed money, so if we get into any sort of debt crisis, will we have partially-finished or empty data centres around in various locations, as a blight on smaller communities?

So I want to ask this: what policy should we have, if any, on data centres, and what is the impact if we decide we don’t build them in Canada?

Peter Nicholson sent a very interesting note with a bunch of thoughts about the topic, and he concluded that the backlash is far more about artificial intelligence than it actually is about data centres. I’d like him to talk about that. His conclusion may well be correct, but at the same time I’ll ask: does that answer the question of what we should do about these places, as a public policy issue? Peter, go ahead.

Peter Nicholson: No, it obviously doesn’t answer that question. Look, data centres are not new. We’ve got thousands of them around the world. Your internet – in fact, this internet Roundtable conversation – would not be taking place were it not for a data centre; in fact, all kinds of data centres. We have them all over the country and all over the world, and they have not generated anything like the kind of backlash that we’re seeing now. Obviously, if you’re living right next door to one, the noise could be a problem. There’s no question that they consume land. Perhaps there was a time when the cooling water wasn’t recycled the way it routinely is now. There may have been a time when people worried about the electricity consumption, but I don’t think that’s going to be an issue today because most of the new data centres are bringing their own electricity with them.

Where I would be concerned about electricity is not with respect to grid rates, but that they do generate, if they’re gas-powered, a pretty humongous amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂). To put a number on it, a one-gigawatt gas-powered data centre, such as the Meta one under construction in Alberta, generates about four megatons of CO₂ per year. To put that in perspective, the oil sands in their entirety are generating about 80 or 90 megatons. So even one large data centre is a not-insignificant generator of greenhouse gases.

But oddly enough, that hasn’t been primarily the debate. The reason I say it’s about AI is because the arguments that are being made are almost manifestly countered in an objective way. Certainly with respect to water, these things are really clean. Land is a problem, but Canada’s got lots of it. So if you leave aside the greenhouse gases from gas-powered centres – and I’m not suggesting we should leave that aside – let’s just realize that otherwise they actually are a pretty benign industrial facility. So the opposition has got to come from some deeper source, which people are either not quite aware of or, for some reason, don’t like to articulate.

There’s one other relevant point, that the scale and speed of the buildout, and the size of the investment in these data facilities, are really humongous. In that sense, they aren’t entirely analogous to the point I started with, which is that we’ve had data centres for a long, long time. Somebody once said that quantity eventually becomes quality if you’ve got enough of it, and I think that’s, to some extent, the issue, not yet in Canada, but in the United States.

Chris Waddell: In Toronto, there was – I think it’s still there, but I’m not sure – a Royal Bank data centre on Front Street, almost beside what was the SkyDome, and is now the Rogers Centre. Of course, nobody put any identification on the building at that point because they didn’t want it being a potential attractor for someone who might want to disrupt the bank or something like that. So data centres have been around, but they tended to be fairly small, I think.

Peter Nicholson: When you drive into Montreal from the airport, you pass this building in Dorval, a Bell data centre, but dating from the telephone era. In other words, it’s a telecom switching centre. For years it didn’t have any insignia on it at all.

Chris Ragan: This discussion emerging now, about the costs and benefits, puzzles me because we seem to be talking about data centres as if they are somehow very different from a steel mill, a pig farm, an Amazon fulfillment centre, or any other big structure.

Peter’s probably right that opposition to AI data centres is more deeply about opposition to AI. In terms of their water or electricity usage, I would hope that if we are pricing those things appropriately, then we wouldn’t worry too much about it, right? If they are actually paying the marginal cost of electricity or the marginal cost of water, then I don’t think we should worry about them any more than we would worry about anything else.

If they have negative externalities associated with them, we should worry about that. So when Peter mentions the carbon emissions, if they’re unpriced – and they may not be these days – we should worry about that. But I’m equally puzzled by the people who seem to think that there are huge benefits from AI centres. So here, my ignorance of AI will be revealed, but it just seems to me that if you want to make a pitch that Canada has to be using AI and we can’t afford to get behind the curve on AI, I think that may be right. But I don’t think using AI requires that you have AI data centres in Canada. Maybe it does, but it just seems to me that if you’re using AI, can’t those servers be located in some other place? They could be in Timbuktu, Qatar, South Africa, or wherever. So are there some other benefits from having an AI data centre down the road, or in the middle of a field 100 miles away? Are there some benefits to the supply chain, for example, that we really care about? Maybe there’s a whole bunch of engineering or planning positions, or high-tech IT positions. So maybe it’s the supply chain of an AI data centre that we really like. I don’t know. I’d like somebody to explain to me what the super benefit is of having an AI data centre in our own backyard, because I just don’t get it.

David Dodge: One of the things that one worries about is that our data – your data and my data – is residing on a server somewhere outside the country, and that whoever owns that centre, or the government of the country in which it is located, can then say “A, we’re going to steal your data, and B, we’re going to deny you access to it in the future.” So I think there is a real reason to be concerned about having our own data centres just as much as we are about having our own steel mills or anything else, because it gives you a degree of insulation from the actions of others outside the country. That is not totally unreasonable; it would be useful to have them.

Secondly, consider that there is the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, in Edmonton, that is one of the places on the frontier of building new AI models. So if we are to have some of the part of the AI industry where we’re building new AI models, then maybe it is advantageous to have the data centre close at hand. So I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to think about having data centres nationally. And if you’re in Alberta, if you want to expand out from what you have a lot of, which is natural gas, and help build something that isn’t just shipping natural gas out to other people, but rather burning it yourself, with perhaps an economic spinoff benefit in a totally different domain, that seems to be a pretty reasonable thing to look at.

Chris Ragan: So, if the argument, or part of the argument, is data security, which sounds reasonable, is that a big enough argument that we should say not only should we like the centres domestically, but that maybe we should be subsidizing them in some way, domestically, if we’re getting some sort of national-security or data-security benefit? If that’s something the market’s not going to do all on its own, how do you feel about that?

David Dodge: I don’t think you have to subsidize it. They will build their own. Bell built its own data centres, and for a long time we thought it was a really pretty good idea to have Bell switches under control in the local community, and not elsewhere. I just don’t know how much value, subjectively, to put on the security. I think there is value. I just don’t know how much to put on it.

Chris Waddell: Some of what David’s talking about is an extension of what happened after the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001, I think. We did get concerned about our data being kept on servers in the U.S. and U.S. officials being able to use it, whether it’s data on your health, data on people’s travel, or whatever it might be.

The other issue that the U.S. is the source of most, if not all, of the primary AI software being used in these sorts of ventures. And some people raise as a concern the fear that if you don’t have your own centres, the United States could decide to cut you off, and then you’d be left on your own. We saw a little bit of that with what they tried to do with Anthropic at one point.

I don’t know how realistic that is, but it’s an argument that some people make: that you need your own to be competitive in the world in the future, with so much depending on AI. Again, these are all debatable points, I guess. If you don’t have your own standard, you’re the victim. You’re potentially at the will of whoever actually does, which is largely the United States.

Miville Tremblay: I want to add to the personal-information concerns. I’m not so sure what people would do with my medical file personally, but there are other, more strategic assets. For example Polytechnique Montréal, the engineering university in Montreal, has decided to store all its research data in Canada, not in the U.S. any more, because it feared spying by the Americans. So that’s a concern. But I think the big misunderstood point is the effect of the U.S. CLOUD Act of 2018, which says that wherever in the world a data centre owned or operated by a U.S. corporation is located, the U.S. government can ask Microsoft, Google, Amazon or others to retrieve a file it wants on someone.

That doesn’t mean the U.S. government couldn’t do that by itself. If it really wanted to spy on you, I guess it could break through all kinds of firewalls. But I think the fact that this law exists is an issue of concern.

Dale Eisler: I get the data-sovereignty argument and the importance of that, but if we could just set that aside, my purpose is to understand the economic implications. If we were not to move on these data centres – not to build as big as the demand might be for them right at this moment – if we said, no, we’re not going to have them in Canada, at least not to this scale, that means we would be dependent on other data centres elsewhere in the world. Would that somehow limit our access as a nation to AI, setting aside the sovereignty issue? If we concede that we don’t have control of that, would it inhibit our access to AI in Canada because we don’t have these domestic data centres? That’s what I don’t understand. Aside from that data-security thing, what are the economic implications of not doing this?

Chris Waddell: Yes, that’s the argument some people make, at least. I’ve heard it. I don’t know if anyone listens to Rory Stewart on the British podcast The Rest Is Politics, but he certainly makes the argument that you have to have your own, or you’re going to be cut out of the use of some of the AI tools that you want to use otherwise.

Peter Nicholson: If you do have your own data centre, you can at least have a resident foundation model on it with the ability to actually respond to local queries. And that will be perfectly adequate for a lot of purposes. It is still vulnerable, of course, to being cut off in the sense that you don’t get the updates of the model and you could be cut off from the global network. That global network, I think, is going to become more and more important in the application areas as AIs become more and more systems of agents that are gathering information from data sources, other data centres and other AI systems all over the world.

So it is important, for resilience purposes, to be sure that we have, in the event of an emergency, enough data-centre capacity with the existing models already loaded so that you can continue to function for most purposes. That’s the first point.

Second, I definitely think that the government – let’s say the military and the security services—probably needs to have its own dedicated system. So in that sense, Chris, that would be a subsidy, in the sense that the government is buying the service directly.

With respect to sheer geography, there are certain applications that depend on low latency, and so having a data centre over in the UAE or Australia is not practical for some applications. It is for many others. For certain applications there is a geographic-distance factor, but I wouldn’t put that high on the list because generally you can get close enough to a U.S. data centre.

With respect to data sovereignty – and this I don’t know, but it would be really interesting to know – you may have data stored on a U.S. server physically resident there, but if you have the encryption key, there’s no way that the American source, even with a government order, can decode that. So an issue here is to what extent effective encryption, and the legal structures surrounding it, obviate this argument about data residency.

I would say, Dale, in answer to your question, that increasingly Canada and every other country is going to have to have some resident capacity for resilience and national security, probably for individual critical businesses and critical infrastructure – the Bank of Canada, the banking system, utilities, etc. You just cannot afford, whether for political reasons or because of some kind of kinetic interruption, to be rendered blind in a world that’s going to become more and more AI-dependent.

Chris Waddell: Picking up on that, what should our politicians and political system do in response? It seems to be, for some people, less about whether we actually do these or build these or don’t build these. Some people have suggested that data centres should have to rely only on renewable energy, as that might make a little bit of difference in terms of the electricity they use. Are there things anyone thinks we should be regulating, or debating whether we should regulate, that would address people’s concerns?

Miville Tremblay: We said at the beginning, and I guess we should go back to this, that the real issue is AI itself. It’s not really the centres, although there is a minimum of regulation to build something big anywhere. So that’s not where my concern is. The backlash that is fairly strong in the U.S. and rising in Canada leaves me with contrary feelings. On one hand, I understand that this is a major technological development and that we can’t do without it. I use it more and more in my work. So I think there are benefits, even if they are further down the road.

But so far, there is a terrible lack of governance of that industry, and I truly mistrust the bunch of people who run it in Silicon Valley. I don’t know if you’ve heard the outlandish interview with Elon Musk by The Economist last month. Well, do you trust this guy to run something this important? He’ll be hidden away on Mars.

So I think the Americans are paying the price for their unwillingness to consider serious governance. My hope is that the objections will stall them enough and make them lose enough money that they switch. But then again, it’s not just a question of regulating or not regulating. I think it’s tied up, like everything else in the U.S., with the highly polarized environment of extremely right-wing discourse and views, and increasingly also hard-left views – relatively speaking, for the U.S., of course. I think it runs deeper, and part of it is clearly a backlash against the “tech bros” in the U.S., the fact that they are making amazing fortunes while other people have difficulties going through their own lives, feel that the cost of living is too high, and fear for their jobs. So I think it’s deeply political. The issue is not technology; the data centres are just a pretext.

Chris Waddell: Remember, when social media started out, we didn’t realize what could potentially happen with it. We didn’t regulate it, for instance. We didn’t apply the same standards to social media that we apply to existing news organizations when you’re doing news or spreading news. And now you can’t regulate it; we’re seeing people run into problems when they try to do that. And we’re now seeing some of the less positive things about social media. Could it be that on this issue some people, at least, are thinking we shouldn’t get fooled again, because we don’t know what’s going to come out of AI? And as Miville says the people involved have not turned out to be necessarily the most trustworthy people around.

Dale Eisler: Somebody mentioned how rapidly this is all happening in terms of these data centres. We’ve had them in the past, but they had a very low profile, and suddenly these big, massive centres are just popping up all over. There’s a local example here in Saskatchewan, where Bell is building, I think, a 300-megawatt data centre. It’s in a rural municipality right on the edge of the city, and the first broad public notice of this was when the municipal council approved the development. Right around the same time, three councillors plus the reeve resigned with no explanation. This centre is a huge development, supposed to generate $12 billion for the economy, and there was no public process leading up to this decision point that I was aware of, or it certainly wasn’t very visible if there was. Have any of you seen the same kind of rapidity in terms of how quickly these projects get announced without any due diligence leading up to the decision point?

Peter Nicholson: That’s a great point, Dale. And the answer is yes. It’s been rampant in the U.S., where approvals have been given, let’s say in Texas, in a matter of a week. And many of these deals are subject to non-disclosure agreements between the data-centre sponsors and the municipal governments. Miville, you mentioned to me the fantastic Ezra Klein podcast episode with Jasmine Sun. I recommend that to everybody. This woman spent the last several months touring around Michigan and Wisconsin, talking to everybody across the whole spectrum. She gives a fabulous account of both the Silicon Valley view and the Main Street view of this problem.

These non-disclosure agreements were a real flashpoint, until now the companies themselves have realized this was stupid on their part, and at least in the U.S. I don’t think they’re a feature anymore. But one other thing – Chris, this is to echo what you said – I think the experience with social media has certainly, if not soured people, raised a cautionary note for so many people, particularly in North America and probably Western Europe. It seems to be less so in Asia.

The other factor that really plays against the data centres – and AI more generally – is that the benefits are still very abstract to most people. Yes, they can play with their chatbot, but they don’t see the really big benefit that would justify almost any cost at all.

So in cost-benefit terms, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself rationally that this should be opposed. It’s quite different than if you’re building, let’s say, an electricity-generating plant, telephone transmission lines, or even a solar farm. In those cases you can see the benefit pretty immediately, both in space and time. But we’re not going to see the kind of benefits from AI that are driving this humongous amount of investment, for quite some time yet. So that represents a very abstract notion, and it’s treated more like a toy, I think, and even a potentially dangerous toy, sort of like Chucky in the horror movies. Under those circumstances the politics really become difficult. How can you bring forward the benefit in time to justify whatever disruption there is in putting in place the infrastructure that will enable that benefit to be realized eventually? That’s the political-economy problem, it seems to me.

Chris Waddell: It reminds me a little bit of the free-trade debate in the late 1980s, when it was easy to point to all the problems and all the people who would lose their jobs, but it was much more difficult to point to what jobs would be created and what opportunities might be developed. We’ve got a little bit of that again.

David Dodge: Yes, and even if people generally can see the benefit, it’s very hard to see the benefit to your own local community. It’s not like any other one of these other things. So people in Port Hope really don’t want to see another nuclear plant sitting in Port Hope, although we can all see the benefit of having more electricity in the province. So there’s a question of whether there’s something local that you can really put your finger on, as opposed to something more abstract.

Miville Tremblay: The benefits that are already here are diffuse and are in daily use in services that have marginally improved. But the big promise, of a cure for cancer for example, is way down the road, if it’s there at all, because normally you’ve got to find new molecules. Maybe this is now faster, but you still have to test them the old-fashioned way with rats, and then humans, and do all kinds of studies that take years and years. So the benefits are long-term, and the worries are short-term.

There’s also a qualitative issue, at least if you try to follow that industry as I try to, in that it moves so fast that about every two weeks you get a new generation of models and new consequences that you hadn’t thought of before. It runs far faster than anyone can follow it, and so it creates all kinds of natural insecurity.

I’m coming back to the boys in Silicon Valley who run this. They are in a rat race, presumably with China, although I’m not so sure that this is real. China is trying to move fast. They were a few months behind. They are probably a few weeks behind. Would it make a big difference to be three months behind or ahead? I’ve got doubts about this. China will get there anyhow, and there may be a period of time when they are better than the Americans, and then the other way around. So I’m not so sure whether it is that material.

I think what the proponents are saying is about the famous “singularity,” which has many meanings depending on whom you listen to or read. But one of those is the capacity for the models to improve themselves on their own, which could bring them onto an exponential curve where you can lose control, or where it’s harder to catch up.

Chris Waddell: Miville’s comment opens the door to something that Ed Greenspon did. Ed asked ChatGPT to compare what the United States is doing with data centres and what China is doing with them, and ChatGPT said, that first of all, China has been forced to do more with less computing power because the U.S. has prevented China from getting the most recent chips, China has been forced to focus on drastically reducing the amount of computing power needed to produce an answer, and Chinese companies, ChatGPT says, are very good at optimization. If you’ve got the best chips, you can solve your problem by throwing more computing power at it. But China has had to try to optimize what its less effective chips can actually do.

And China has a major electricity advantage. It has enormous generating capacity through traditional generation and renewables. It can build large centres where power availability is not a problem. The U.S. problem is that centres are being built faster than grids and generation capacity can be expanded. Chinese models appear to be more efficient relative to U.S. models, but that might not mean they use less electricity because, if they’re more efficient, it may encourage more activity.

ChatGPT says the U.S. has better chips, enormous data centres, a huge electricity supply, and increasingly large models, whereas China has less powerful chips, cleverer algorithms, greater efficiency and comparable capabilities at a lower cost. So ChatGPT says the battle between China and the U.S. is a race between semiconductors and electricity. How much electricity do DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Gemini use per query, and what does that mean for the U.S. power grid versus China’s?

I wonder, though, if part of the problem in Canada picks up a little bit on the U.S. issue about our grids and generation capacity being able to adapt to these large centres, if they’re built in Canada, and how quickly that can happen. That, I think, may be the concern some people have about electricity.

Peter Nicholson: It shouldn’t matter, if the data centre brings its own power, which is what the Meta one is doing. That’s increasingly what’s happening in the U.S. If we’ve got surplus capacity in the grid, great, use it. But we don’t, because we haven’t expanded generating capacity and grid capacity much in Canada in the last 40 or 50 years. So I don’t think electricity is going to be the gating problem in that regard. But the point that you just made, I think, has a really interesting counterpoint to what Miville just said, which is that the U.S. strategy here, at least among the major model companies – the so-called hyperscalers – is to maximize the leading edge of capability. That follows from a belief, whether it’s right or wrong, that there really is a sort of winner-take-all dynamic here: that if you achieve what’s called “recursive self-improvement” (RSI), where a system can begin to improve itself, or even artificial general intelligence, two or three months ahead of the Chinese or your commercial competitor, then they will never catch up. There will be an exponential explosion.

I’m not convinced by that argument by any means, but I think it is what they believe. The Chinese philosophy is basically to deliver the capacity as cheaply as possible and to focus on the more rapid diffusion of use to individuals, businesses, etc., throughout the economy. I think, with respect to a technology like AI, the more users you get, the better your systems are going to get, because they are going to learn from that process.

So the Chinese, it seems to me, are locked into the right recursive loop here. And yes, the U.S. may conceivably achieve RSI. But if the U.S. does not get there, I think the Chinese strategy is going to be the winning one. That has to do with the very particular characteristics of AI as a technology.

Miville Tremblay: One thing we haven’t mentioned, which I think is relevant, is this: currently, it seems that the biggest use is to train the new models, and these could be far away because speed is not as important as proximity and latency. Whereas inference – the actual daily use – requires much less. Clearly, Canada is not involved in developing the leading, cutting-edge models, but is focused more, in a Chinese way, on practical use for businesses. That’s what I hear and see.

Chris Waddell: Let me ask one last question. This is an issue that does seem to be catching on among the general public. So what should our political classes do at the federal, provincial, or municipal level? What would you recommend as their best strategy in response to what seems to be a public – even if it’s not a particularly well-informed public – demand for a response, action, for something to happen?

David Dodge: We talked about the issue that you can’t be covert about what you’re doing. So, to me, the municipality opens up the debate. There are pros and cons, just like there are pros and cons for the municipality of an Amazon distribution centre, a generating plant, or whatever. So it seems to me that the issue is local in that regard, and I think you have to allow the local municipality to argue it out. As long as it’s open and disclosed, it seems to me that that’s all you can really ask.

Chris Waddell: But also, David, with a generating centre or even an Amazon centre, it’s possible to calculate more directly what the cost to the community might be, whether it’s the number of trucks that are running in and out or that sort of thing. But for a data centre, it’s a little more nebulous, which may actually make it a little more difficult.

Chris Ragan: But you also want to make those arguments. The local arguments, my guess is, will mostly be in opposition, and the benefits are going to be at the national, aggregate level, especially if they’re security-type benefits, right? So there is going to be an onus on the proponents of these data centres to make those local opponents feel that there is a bigger picture here. There’s a national goal here, and we need these data centres for the following reasons, and they’ve got to go someplace. And so you can be part of this national project, exactly like nuclear-waste storage.

Chris Waddell: I was going to make that comparison myself, although nuclear-waste storage hasn’t had many winning sales pitches so far.

Chris Ragan: No, but in fact one actually did go through with a bunch of local support, in northwestern Ontario in 2024, once they realized that, okay, this has to happen someplace. Yes, there are pros and cons, but as David said, you can’t be covert about it. You’ve got to be clear about what you think the benefits are and why this is in the national interest, if indeed it is, because otherwise local NIMBYism is going to sink everything.

Peter Nicholson: First of all, if you’ve got strong local opposition, I think you’re just beating your head against a wall trying to convince people that it’s good for them. Fortunately, there will be lots of places in Canada that are more than happy to host a data centre, and the benefit for the municipal unit is often a hell of a lot of tax revenue, or even an upfront bribe, if you want to call it that. So I think you let it play out in those communities that already see a positive value proposition.

What I think you really shouldn’t do is impose any national or provincial hard stop. You simply impose whatever ordinary environmental and due-process rules of the game you would impose on any other industrial activity. But for heaven’s sake, don’t single out data centres for special adverse treatment. That would be my policy advice.

Dale Eisler: Yes, but we can’t forget – and I think this point was made at the outset – that this is less about data centres and more about AI and the threat of AI, right? So people are using data centres as the mechanism to block AI. They have their environmental concerns, yes, indeed, but underlying that is the threat of artificial intelligence. People are hearing about massive job losses and a threat to humanity in some regards, and that’s what’s driving the sentiment on this. That’s going to be the big challenge, to my mind. I think these other issues can be managed and dealt with, but when it’s driven by this much larger fear of what this is going to do to us, you’ve got a huge challenge for governments and politicians in how they manage it.

Peter Nicholson: And it’s a hell of a lot bigger challenge for the Americans than it is now for us. Look, my thesis depends, Dale, on there being communities in Canada willing, for their own economic interests, to say, “Yes, this is fine,” and municipal councils that are quite prepared, depending on where they are, to put their political future on the line. I think you’ll find, over the next few years, more than enough opportunities. And once you see that at least the usual arguments against data centres are frankly not availing, then we are back to this more existential argument about AI itself. Maybe by that time some of the benefits will start to be more apparent.

Dale Eisler: Yeah, maybe we’ll be into the “world of abundance” as Musk talks about.

(Laughter)

Chris Waddell: The one issue I’d add to Peter’s point is, of course, that those communities have to be in the right geographic proximity to where the industry wants to be in order to have access, which may limit the number of people who are interested. I don’t know. We’ll have to see.

Peter Nicholson: There’s not too much of a latency problem. There would be between St. John’s and Victoria, right? But in most places, we’re talking a couple of milliseconds.

Chris Waddell: Thanks, everybody, for an interesting discussion, as always. SAGE

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Your high school friends may shape whether you become an entrepreneur decades later

By Seok-Woo Kwon and Xiaoying Wang

Seok-Woo Kwon is Robson Professor in Entrepreneurship at the University of Calgary. Xiaoying Wang is Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at Wilfrid Laurier University. This article first appeared here in The Conversation.

ith more young Canadians considering self-employment amid a high youth unemployment rate, entrepreneurship programs are facing growing demand. Applications to Futurpreneur, the national organization that finances young Canadian entrepreneurs, rose 50 percent last quarter, compared with 15 percent growth a year earlier.

Yet most entrepreneurship supportive programs, including Futurpreneur’s core startup program, begin at age 18 and expect applicants to arrive with a business idea already in hand. That may be too late.

Both requirements reflect a common assumption: that the entrepreneurial impulse arrives in adulthood. Much research has made a similar assumption, looking for the social and professional influences that shape people after they enter university or the workforce.

We know, for example, that co-workers who have previously run a business can make people notice opportunities they might otherwise miss. MBA classmates can influence one another’s judgments about which ideas are viable and university peers who start businesses can make entrepreneurship seem less risky.

But these influences may begin earlier than researchers and policymakers have assumed. In a recent study, lead author Seok-Woo Kwon and colleagues found that the friends people make in high school may be associated with whether they become entrepreneurs decades later.

The friends who make a difference

To investigate this, the researchers followed two American cohorts born roughly four decades apart. One was a nationally representative group surveyed in the mid-1990s and followed into participants’ late 30s. The other was a Wisconsin cohort followed from 1957 through age 65.

Across both groups, having a teenage friend who later became self-employed was associated with a person’s own business ownership decades later.

But not every entrepreneurial friend counted. Adolescent friends who later build formal, incorporated companies – registered businesses with a legal identity separate from their owners –  predicted a person’s entry into both incorporated and unincorporated self-employment.

By contrast, friends who simply worked for themselves informally, as solo contractors or freelancers, predicted nothing at all – not even entry into the same kind of informal work they were doing.

This distinction is important, because formal and informal self-employment are essentially different populations, running different kinds of ventures with different ambitions and earnings. In particular, our previous research has found that formal, growth-oriented entrepreneurship tends to produce greater economic returns.

The relationship also extended beyond whether someone started a business at all. People whose teenage friends later built incorporated companies earned more from their own ventures in midlife than people whose teenage friends did not, even after accounting for whether they themselves had incorporated their businesses.

The difference persisted among people running the same type of business. In other words, two people with similar ventures could have different earnings depending on what their teenage friends had gone on to build.

This suggests that adolescent friendships are associated not only with whether people eventually enter entrepreneurship, but also with the scale or economic performance of the ventures they pursue.

How can a friendship at 16 matter at 40?

The findings raise an obvious question: how can a friendship formed at 16 still matter at 40? There are several possible explanations.

One is that adolescence establishes a social channel through which entrepreneurial examples can continue to travel. When a former classmate registers a company, hires staff or raises capital, that achievement may reach old friends through a reunion, a mutual acquaintance or a social media post.

Research suggests that people are more responsive to information from those with whom they have meaningful social connections than to information from strangers. An entrepreneurial success story may therefore carry particular weight when it comes from someone you knew as a teenager.

This could also help explain why informal self-employment did not show the same relationship. Freelance work tends to remain small and relatively invisible, so it may provide little evidence of what entrepreneurship can become.

But one finding complicates a straightforward social-influence explanation: friendships that persisted into adulthood and those that faded were similarly predictive. If ongoing influence were the whole explanation, enduring ties should have mattered more, since they are the ones carrying advice, encouragement and opportunities.

There is another possibility. Teenagers do not choose friends at random; similarity tends to foster social connection, and adolescents who share an appetite for risk, independence or autonomy may be more likely to become friends.

The data cannot fully distinguish between these explanations, but both point to adolescence as an important period in the development of entrepreneurial pathways. Whether friends shape entrepreneurial inclinations or simply reveal inclinations already forming, something important is happening long before the first business begins.

The window opens earlier than we think

The findings fit a broader body of research showing that entrepreneurial trajectories can take shape long before adulthood.

For instance, children of business owners are far more likely to become business owners themselves. And evidence from adoptees suggests that environment may matter roughly twice as much as genetic inheritance in explaining who becomes an entrepreneur.

The new study adds another social pathway to this picture. The influence is not only parental; it also appears to run through adolescent peers. That has implications for how policymakers and educators think about entrepreneurship support.

Rather than waiting until young people reach adulthood, schools could instead create places where students interested in building things can find one another: through school ventures, maker spaces or small cohorts.

The size of those groups may matter, too. The association in the study was strongest among teenagers with relatively few close friends, suggesting that a single entrepreneurial peer may be particularly visible when there are fewer competing social influences.

The findings also change how we might evaluate entrepreneurship programs. The recent federal evaluation of youth entrepreneurship support in Canada counts loans issued and businesses launched. If entrepreneurial pathways begin taking shape in adolescence, they capture only the end of a process that may have been developing for years.

Entrepreneurship policy should pay more attention to the social environments where entrepreneurial ambitions first take shape. For some, that process may have started long before they had a business idea or even thought of themselves as entrepreneurs: around the lunch table, back in high school. The Conversation

THE GRAPEVINE – News about people, institutions and communities

The University of Ottawa is hosting seven new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada, in the areas of health and biotechnology; Arctic resilience and climate change; and manufacturing and advanced materials. The seven are:

Kevin Hall – currently Senior Director and Clinical Scientist at AstraZeneca, following a 21-year research career at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has been selected for the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Nutrition and Metabolic Health at uOttawa. His proposed research program would generate evidence to improve the prevention and treatment of obesity and cardiometabolic disease, conditions that affect millions of people across Canada. The research aims to inform clinical care and public policy and contribute to a more sustainable health-care system.

Ryan McNeil – recruited from Yale University to serve as Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Equity-Oriented Responses to the Drug Toxicity and Housing Crises. He’ll advance solutions to some of Canada’s most pressing public health and social challenges. By informing policies and programs that reduce harms from substance use and housing instability, his work will support healthier, safer and more equitable communities.

Olga Smirnova – comes to uOttawa from the Max Born Institute in Germany to become the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Ultrafast Chirality for Health, Environment and Quantum Technologies. She’ll advance Canadian leadership in quantum and photonic technologies, and develop tools with applications in health care, pharmaceutical development and environmental monitoring. Her work will make Canada more competitive in strategic technology sectors and help drive future innovation.

Cassian Yee – A leading researcher from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the U.S., Yee will be the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Next-Generation Translational T-Cell Immunotherapies. This chair will put Canada at the forefront of cancer immunotherapy by accelerating the development of innovative, made-in-Canada cell therapies. His research will strengthen the country’s biomanufacturing and life sciences capacity and improve treatment options for patients facing some of the hardest cancers to treat.

Gabriel Bowen – Bowen joins uOttawa from the University of Utah as Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Applied Isotope Science. The chair aims to strengthen Canada’s capacity to address climate change, protect water resources and support evidence-based decisions. His work will also enhance tools for Arctic monitoring and secure supply chains, helping to tackle priorities around environmental stewardship, resource security and economic resilience.

Jennifer Spence – Spence is arriving from Harvard University to be the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Arctic Governance and Community Resilience. The chair will help strengthen Canada’s role in the Arctic at a time of growing environmental, geopolitical and security challenges. Working with partners, she’ll promote Indigenous and northern leadership, community resilience and international collaboration, and advance Canadian interests in the North.

Federico Rosei – Drawn to uOttawa from the University of Trieste in Italy, Rosei will serve as Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Emerging Sustainable Materials for the Energy Transition. He’ll help accelerate Canada’s transition to a low-carbon economy by developing advanced materials for next-generation clean-energy technologies. His research will strengthen Canada’s innovation ecosystem, support clean economic growth and help develop the highly qualified workforce needed for the energy transition. University of Ottawa

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Dr. Kevin Hall, PhD, the new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Nutrition and Metabolic Health at the University of Ottawa, worked as a senior investigator in the Integrative Physiology section of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases – part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). There he conducted groundbreaking work exploring the relationship between environment and dietary behaviors, more recently focusing on ultra-processed foods and health, including conducting the first randomized, controlled human study demonstrating that a diet high in ultra-processed foods causes weight gain. In April 2025, Hall abruptly, and unhappily, retired from the federal agency. Under the Trump administration, he said he had been denied an opportunity to speak freely to the media about his work; forbidden to sign his name to a study that, the administration argued, went against President Donald Trump’s executive order on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and made to fear that any future research that didn’t comport with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s often bizarre and detrimental views on public health could be hobbled. Hall writes about the experience in an article in Men’sHealth. “This administration just isn’t interested in science that complicates their narrative. The narrative is all that matters,” he wrote. “It’s chilling to think about how politicized science and science funding have become.” Men’sHealth

Nine world-leading researchers will join the University of British Columbia (UBC) as part of the inaugural cohort of the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program. UBC will welcome eight of the new chairs at UBC Vancouver and one at UBC Okanagan. Two of the UBC chairs are Canadians who will be returning home, and one is a UBC alumnus. Other chairs come from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Carnegie Mellon University; University of California, Merced; University of Washington; Harvard University; and University of Michigan. They will take up their appointments over the next year, with the first two starting in September. A second intake of chairs will be announced later this fall. The UBC chairs’ research programs will address some of today’s most pressing challenges: developing more precise ways to diagnose and treat disease; designing lighter, more efficient and sustainable products and systems; protecting freshwater ecosystems; understanding how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are reshaping democratic societies; and strengthening wildfire preparedness. UBC

Six researchers at the forefront of advances in human health, technology, the natural world and the next frontier are joining the University of Toronto (U of T) as new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada. The new chairs – four of whom are Canadian – come from the U.S. National Institutes of Health; Ohio State University; Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; University of California, San Francisco; Boston University; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. U of T launched a $24-million initiative last fall to fund 100 new postdoctoral fellowships and grants for emerging scholars and has taken steps to support researchers who were affected by last year’s U.S. funding cuts. U of T

The University of Calgary is welcoming three new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada, in the areas of intelligence and security; maternal and child health policy; and scalable quantum network infrastructure. One of the chairs is returning home to Canada from Europe, one is coming from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and one is coming from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. University of Calgary

The University of Manitoba is welcoming five new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada, in the areas of public health care system transformation; Arctic navigation and defence; sustainable mining for economic development; advanced technologies and materials; energy and food security; environmental law; and biodiversity conservation. The five new chairs come from The University of Alaska Fairbanks; University of Arizona; Birla Institute of Technology and Science Hyderabad Campus in India; Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru; and the University of Tasmania in Australia. University of Manitoba

McGill University attracted six leading researchers as new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada, in the areas of RNA biology, engineering, digital public policy, sustainable chemistry, and climate resilience. The chairs join McGill from Cornell University; University of Birmingham; Rutgers University; Tufts University; University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School; and University of Massachusetts Amherst. McGill University

McMaster University recruited five top scholars from American universities as new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada, in the areas of radiopharmaceuticals; advanced materials and technologies; musculoskeletal health; and social innovation. The chairs come from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (two of the new chairs); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of California, Davis; and University of Michigan. McMaster University

Université de Montréal will welcome two renowned scientists through the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada program. Epidemiologist Sheryl Magzamen and physical chemist Patrick Charbonneau will strengthen research at UdeM in fields ranging from environmental health to artificial intelligence and complex materials. Magzamen comes from Colorado State University and Charbonneau from Duke University. Université de Montréal

Queen's University announced that Gabriel Walton will join the university as an inaugural Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Slope Geohazard Management for Infrastructure and Mining in a Changing Climate. Walton comes from the Colorado School of Mines. Queen’s University

The University of Waterloo welcomed two new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada – Talia Bettcher and James Wolffsohn. Their work will advance gender-based violence prevention and transgender community resilience, as well as innovations in equitable eye care and vision-loss prevention. Bettcher arrives from California State University, Los Angeles, and Wolffsohn from Aston University in Birmingham, England. University of Waterloo

Simon Fraser University (SFU) is strengthening its leadership in artificial intelligence and climate innovation with the recruitment of internationally renowned applied mathematician Yingda Cheng. As the new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Advanced Digital Technologies for Fusion Energy, Cheng will develop novel scientific computing tools to help unlock one of the world's most promising sources of clean energy. Cheng will join SFU from Viginia Tech in January 2027. SFU

The University of Victoria is welcoming two new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada, in the areas of marine sustainability and preventative health research. Elliott Hazen joins UVic from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Centre, and David Almeida comes from Pennsylvania State University. University of Victoria

Prime Minister Mark Carney named Dominic Barton, chair of global mining giant Rio Tinto and private equity firm LeapFrog Investments – and a former ambassador to China – as chair of Invest in Canada on a part-time basis. Carney also appointed private equity investor Gurinder Grewal as CEO of the federal investment agency. Grewal has spent his career putting capital to work in the energy, industrials, infrastructure and technology sectors. He is the founder and managing partner of MEM Growth Partners and previously spent more than a decade at Advent International, where he was a partner and co-head of industrials, infrastructure, and energy. Barton replaces Karl Tabbakh, who will remain on the board. Grewal replaces former Ontario cabinet minister Laurel Broten, whose resignation was announced more than a year before her term was set to expire. Carney’s statement said that Invest in Canada, which the government recently put under the oversight of Internal Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, will now work more closely with the Major Projects Office to connect large foreign investors with opportunities in Canada and help move projects toward development. Carney also said Invest in Canada will take on a “more prominent role” in the government’s push to catalyze $1 trillion in total investment over five years, with a focus on energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and infrastructure. Prime Minister of Canada

Doug Guzman, chief executive of the Defence Investment Agency (DIA), is set to step down after just a year as the first chief executive of the DIA, The Globe and Mail reported. Sources told The Globe and Mail that Guzman is frustrated by the slow pace of government bureaucracy in getting defence procurement projects moving and approved. The former RBC banker might go head the new international Defence, Security and Resilience Bank instead. The Globe and Mail

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