CONTENTS:

 Government Funding & News

• Build a new and stronger Canada with the industries of AI, quantum and digital assets after collapse of trade talks with the U.S., say innovation experts
• Canada Foundation for Innovation invests more than $118 million to support 357 research projects at 68 postsecondary institutions

 Research, Technology & Innovation

• Eight Canadian cities make list of Top 50 North American tech employment markets

 VC, Private Investment & Acquisitions

• Sanja Fidler, former head of Nvidia’s Toronto AI lab, launches a new startup and raises US$90 million to tackle how robots interact with the physical world through AI

 Reports & Policies

• Canada can’t subsidize its way to AI adoption
• AI appears to be making it harder for some Canadians to find work in occupations most exposed to AI: Bank of Canada
• Canada needs to prioritize six critical minerals to build new markets and supply chains with the European Union
• Canada’s productivity problem is a superstar-firm problem – and AI is our chance to fix it
• Higher personal and corporate taxes hurt innovation and shift its location: U.S. researchers
• Crucial to make the general public a part of research and policy to gain support and trust for science and science advice
• Scientists become less likely to produce disruptive work as they age

 The Grapevine – News about people, institutions and communities

• McGill University researchers develop more energy-efficient method of building AI systems to measure their own uncertainty

GOVERNMENT FUNDING & NEWS

 Build a new and stronger Canada with the industries of AI, quantum and digital assets after failed trade talks with the U.S., say innovation experts

The Trump administration's latest round of tariffs against billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian goods took effect just after midnight last Saturday, after Canada and the U.S. failed to seal a last-minute trade deal that satisfied both sides.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Ottawa would retaliate "dollar for dollar" after the White House delivered on its threat to impose crushing 50-percent tariffs on a wide range of products.

The two governments' trade representatives said they had come close to finalizing an agreement in recent days, but Carney said Ottawa ultimately couldn't accept the terms on the table.

"I have decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S. and have directed Canada's negotiators to return to Ottawa," the prime minister said in a statement.

Carney said that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal."

In his own statement, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said talks crumbled because Canada didn't accept the agreement the administration had offered.

"This will be a body blow to North American competitiveness in this self-defeating trade saga," the Canadian Chamber of Commerce said of the new American levies. "A whopping, non-absorbable tariff is not sustainable or viable for business."

Goods that are compliant with the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), have also previously been exempt, but that is no longer the case for many of those products as of last Saturday.

Claudio Rojas, CEO of the National Angel Capital Organization, noted that in 1866, the U.S. let the Reciprocity Treaty lapse, after Canada had spent 12 years selling into an open American market that then closed.

Canada responded by building a national railway and infrastructure “on an extraordinary scale,” he said in a LinkedIn post, “building Canada’s capacity to determine its own economic future. Because a country that cannot choose its own economic direction is not fully sovereign.”

The industries that will shape the next half-century are being built right now in the country, by people who could build them anywhere, Rojas said.

What Canada builds in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and frontier technologies carries a different kind of freedom compared with traditional industries, he said.

“As we defend our established companies and industries, we must boldly advance the nascent firms and industries that will define the next century of Canadian prosperity, resilience and sovereignty,” Rojas said.

Benjamin Bergen, CEO of the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, said Canada needs to build a trading system built around what is best for the country.

“This is not less America. This is Canada PLUS,” he said in a LinkedIn post.

“Canada PLUS starts from us,” he said. Canadian firms selling into Europe, the Gulf, Asia and Australia. Global capital invested in Canadian companies, because capital brings networks, customers and market access with it. “Canadians at the centre of international relationships, not introduced to them by someone else.”

“The goal is not to find a new market to depend on. It is to become the country others need in the room,” Bergen said.

Jim Balsillie, chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators and former chairman and co-CEO of BlackBerry (now Research in Motion), told CTV that Canada’s relative economic vulnerability amid a potential trade war with the U.S. is “an issue of our own making.”

“We’re in a vulnerability,” Balsillie said in an interview with CTV Question Period. “No other nation state allowed themselves to become this vulnerable in so many critical aspects of their prosperity and security, and so these are self-inflicted wounds.”

The nature of the global economy is no longer a trading economy, Balsillie said, adding that “the key is to build resilience in value chains and security as a nation, because there isn’t the same kind of economic allies of the post-World War Two trading system,”

“So the game changed 30 years ago. All other successful countries changed their strategies, and Canada doubled down on old strategies and put us in this place,” he said.

Balsillie said the signs were there, pointing to signals during Trump’s first term in office in which the president’s former adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner lauded the “sunset provision” in the trilateral trade agreement – the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement – which allows the deal to be reviewed every six years. The agreement also has a 16-year lifecycle.

In a 2020 op-ed, Kushner wrote that it was “imperative” the U.S. “retain leverage in any of (its) trading relationships to prevent unfair trade practices and market distortions.”

Balsillie said Canada should have heeded that signal.

“Very simply, for 30 years, Canada has been using outdated thinking in its economic and security strategies, and this is what’s caused the erosion of our prosperity and security,” Balsillie said. “What Donald Trump has done is laid bare the inattention by our economic policy community in that time.” CBC News, CTV News

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Canada Foundation for Innovation invests more than $118 million to support 357 research projects at 68 postsecondary institutions

The Government of Canada announced that the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) is investing more than $118 million to support 357 research infrastructure projects at 68 postsecondary institutions across Canada.  

The investments are made through the CFI’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF) and College Fund. JELF enables universities to attract and retain world-class research talent by providing the state-of-the-art infrastructure researchers need to succeed. The College Fund supports applied research and technology development with Canadian industries and communities to strengthen Canada’s economy and improve our quality of life. 

Projects being funded through the JELF include: 

• Controlling infectious disease (Quebec): McGill University will use CFI funding to establish a unique facility with biocontainment and gene analysis capabilities to advance infectious disease monitoring. The Microbiology Integrated Citizen Science Research Laboratory for One Health (MICRO-ONE) will engage Canadians in collecting samples for large-scale disease surveillance projects.
• Sustainable fertilizer from seaweed (Newfoundland and Labrador): With CFI-funded gas analyzers, ovens, a spectrophotometer and related microbiology equipment, Memorial University researchers will investigate how farmed kelp can improve soil health and increase crop yields. By comparing seaweed-based and synthetic fertilizers, the team aims to develop sustainable, cost-effective farming practices that reduce dependence on synthetic fertilizer imports, strengthen coastal economies and emerging industries and support Canada’s climate goals.  

• Long-term Arctic climate monitoring (British Columbia, Yukon, Northwest Territories): Using CFI-funded field vehicles, drones, cameras and computing equipment, a research project led by the University of British Columbia with Yukon University, the Aurora Research Institute and Indigenous community partners will capture permafrost degradation, landscape change and plant responses to climate change in the North. The long-term data generated will improve understanding of how heat waves and a warming climate are reshaping tundra ecosystems, helping to support sustainable food systems, wildlife and the well-being of Northern communities. 

• Molecular reactions imaging (Ontario): With CFI funding, researchers at Trent University will acquire a titanium-sapphire laser to create a globally unique laboratory that can image chemical reactions as they happen at the molecular level. Research at the Spectroscopy and Optics Lab at Trent Lightsource (SPOTLIGHT) will open the door to advances in greenhouse gas storage, manufacturing and drug development. 

Projects being funded through the College Fund include: 

• Cleaner oil and critical mineral extraction (Alberta): The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology Innovation Centre will use CFI funding to retrofit its innovation centre to create the Tailings, Ore, Water Laboratory. As global demand for energy and the critical minerals needed for the energy transition continues to grow, researchers will work with industry partners to develop technologies that support more sustainable resource extraction. The laboratory will explore ways to reduce the environmental impact of rock sample analysis, oil and ore extraction and tailings management.  

• Net-zero data centres (Saskatchewan): To address the growing energy demands of AI, Saskatchewan Polytechnic will use CFI funding to build a scalable AI data centre powered by renewable energy. The facility will act as a pilot project to determine how to harness waste heat and use it to heat nearby laboratories. Using AI developed at the Polytechnic, researchers will optimize the integration of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems to improve energy efficiency and reduce overall energy consumption. Canada Foundation for Innovation

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Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the largest shipbuilding contract in Quebec’s history. The Government of Canada will invest more than $11 billion to build six new program icebreakers for the Canadian Coast Guard in partnership with Chantier Davie Canada Inc. All six icebreakers will be built in Canada at the Davie Shipyard in Lévis, Quebec, creating nearly 5,000 jobs in the construction phase alone and contributing nearly $650 million annually to Canada’s GDP. Under the government’s Buy Canadian Policy, these vessels will be built with Canadian steel and other domestic materials, while maximizing opportunities for Canadian manufacturers, suppliers and small and medium-sized businesses. The program icebreakers will replace the Coast Guard’s aging heavy and medium icebreakers – the ships that work Atlantic Canada and the St. Lawrence through the depth of winter, and the Arctic through the summer season. They cut open Canada’s most vital sea lanes, answer the call of ships in distress, and come to the aid of vessels trapped in the ice. This investment secures Canada’s position as the home of NATO’s largest icebreaking fleet, bolsters national security in the North, and protects Canadian interests. Construction will begin in 2027, this first ship will be ready five years later, and the full fleet will be in service by 2038. Prime Minister of Canada

Prime Minister Mark Carney, alongside Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette and Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham, announced a package including up to $10 billion in federal financial support and investments to expand clean electricity generation and transmission in Labrador through upgrades to Churchill Falls, development of the Gull Island hydroelectric project, and enabling infrastructure needed to support critical minerals development in the Labrador Trough. As part of this agreement, the federal government will guarantee the financing to develop the massive and long-discussed Gull Island power project. Enabled by a Definitive Cooperation and Implementation Agreement signed between Hydro-Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, these combined construction projects – valued at nearly $70 billion – represent the largest clean energy investment in North American history, Ottawa said. Envisioned as a key component of Canada’s forthcoming National Electricity Strategy, these energy projects will help the country meet growing energy demand and support the goal of doubling the capacity of the national electricity grid by 2050. The federal government also announced the referral of the “Labrador Trough Clean Power, Critical Minerals and Infrastructure Corridor” to the Major Projects Office for coordinated federal review. The Labrador Trough is a massive geological belt and mining region, stretching approximately 1,100 kilometres across Labrador and Quebec. Having produced more than 2 billion tonnes of iron ore over the past half-century, the region remains one of Canada's most significant sources of high-purity iron ore and a strategic asset for low-carbon steel supply chains. Ottawa is also making a federal investment of nearly $20 million to support feasibility work for mining-enabling infrastructure through the First and Last Mile Fund. Together, these measures will help meet Canadian industry’s growing energy needs, accelerate responsible resource development and unlock new opportunities for workers, communities and Indigenous partners across Labrador and the country, the government said. Natural Resources Canada

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) launched the Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Alliance, alongside Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (a federally supported global innovation cluster), the Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium and the Canadian Skills Training and Employment Coalition. Manufacturing is a key pillar of Canada’s economy, driving growth and innovation across sectors such as automotive, steel, aerospace and clean technology. Today, the manufacturing sector is increasingly shaped by automation, robotics and artificial intelligence-enabled systems. The Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Alliance will help the sector build the skilled workforce it needs to improve productivity, adopt new technologies and remain competitive globally. This alliance brings together manufacturers, unions, education and training institutions, industry associations, Indigenous partners and underrepresented groups. These partners will work together to identify workforce gaps and support practical training solutions. The Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Alliance is the second of six sector‑focused Workforce Alliances to be established. The first was the Mining and Minerals Workforce Alliance, launched on June 4, 2026. All six Workforce Alliances will focus on priority areas essential to Canada’s economic growth, working to address labour market challenges and coordinate public and private investments in skills development. ESDC

In an era of trade wars and rising protectionism, advanced economies, including Canada, have ramped up the number of direct equity investments they’ve made in private companies. The surge in government ownership in the private sector puts a new spin on Western industrial policy that’s more associated with China’s central planning economy than free-market capitalism. During the first seven months of the year, advanced economies such as the U.S., European Union, Canada and Britain have announced four times as many equity stakes as China and India combined. This is a reversal from the same period in past years, according to an analysis by Global Trade Alert, an independent trade-monitoring organization based in Switzerland. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, government ownership stakes in companies have become increasingly commonplace, starting with Washington’s golden share in U.S. Steel Corp.  that gave it veto control over corporate decisions, and its 10-per-cent stake in chip giant Intel Corp. Since then, the Trump administration has taken ownership positions in as many as 30 companies. The Canadian government also has pursued stakes in numerous private businesses. Most recently, the government said it will invest up to $400 million in Teck Resources Ltd.’s Trail smelter to boost germanium, gallium and antimony capacity through the federal Canada Growth Fund. Earlier this year, the fund invested millions in Exiro Minerals Corp. and Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc. as part of Ottawa’s critical minerals strategy, bringing the number of equity stakes Canada has taken so far this year to 13, according to Global Trade Alert. The Globe and Mail

The Government of Canada, Government of Manitoba and the Arctic Gateway Group said new research confirms the feasibility of year-round shipping from the Port of Churchill using existing ice-class vessels, while changing sea-ice conditions are expected to make marine access increasingly favourable over the coming decades. Two studies completed by researchers at the University of Manitoba and Fednav Limited, as well as preliminary findings from the feasibility study by the Arctic Research Foundation (ARF), show that existing marine technology and Arctic operating experience make year-round navigation through the broader Churchill shipping corridor possible now using modern ice-capable vessels. The research also shows that declining sea ice is extending the navigable season in Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait, with further gains projected throughout this century. The ARF study’s preliminary findings identified significant opportunities for northern supply chains, resource exports, community resupply, Indigenous economic participation and Canadian Arctic sovereignty. The University of Manitoba study found that the shipping season serving the Port of Churchill has expanded significantly over the past several decades and is projected to continue lengthening throughout this century. Fednav’s analysis combined a 10-year review of Canadian ice charts, satellite imagery and regulatory requirements to show that existing ice-class vessel designs can support year-round shipping without icebreaker support. Government of Manitoba

The Government of Canada and Government of British Columbia announced the British Columbia Fisheries Fund (BCFF), with a joint Canada-B.C. investment of $106.5 million over five years. The BCFF builds on the success of the British Columbia Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund (BCSRIF), and will continue to support the conservation and recovery of wild Pacific salmon. Projects funded through BCFF will build on BCSRIF’s work to restore and enhance salmon habitat to support British Columbia’s fish and seafood sector. Market development and diversification for the commercial fishing sector is a new pillar in this Fish Fund renewal, and responds directly to what the sector is saying: reaching new markets is essential to competitive and resilient fisheries. The BCFF will support the sustainable, long-term growth of British Columbia’s fish and seafood sector by increasing the value of products and strengthening their recognition in the marketplace. With the new market development and diversification pillar, the BCFF will boost commercial fisheries and seafood markets, all while continuing to prioritizing coastal marine stewardship, watershed restoration, and healthy aquatic and coastal ecosystems. The Fund is built on four pillars. To be eligible, projects must align with at least one of the following areas: 

1. Innovation – develop new products, processes, technologies or equipment that improve productivity, competitiveness, sustainability or market access in the sector.
2. Infrastructure – adopt, adapt or install new processes, technologies or equipment that improve productivity, competitiveness, sustainability or market access in the sector.
3. Scientific partnerships – improve knowledge or adaptive capacity in response to ecosystem changes and their impacts on commercial fisheries.
4. Market development and diversification – contribute to expanding market access and diversification, both within Canada and internationally, by reducing the impact of trade barriers while supporting growth in the value of B.C. seafood products. Fisheries and Oceans Canada

With the Government of Alberta’s dual-practice health care model set to roll out in September, Canada’s health minister is speaking out about why the policy troubles her. Alberta's Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025 (No. 2), also known as Bill 11, allows some physicians in the province to provide care in both the private and public health care fields. In a recent interview with the Toronto Star, federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel said she had concerns about how the legislation allowing for a dual-practice model could co-exist with the Canada Health Act. Alexandre Bergeron, Michel’s press secretary, confirmed to CBC News that a letter was sent by the federal minister to the Alberta government on July 24, asking the province to protect its public health system. “As the guardian of the Canada Health Act, our focus is to protect the integrity of the public health-care system and ensure that all Canadians, including every Albertan, can receive health care based on medical need, not on their ability to pay for it,” he said in a statement. Bergeron said Michel will continue to work closely with the Alberta government about its concerns with the new model. In a statement provided to CBC News, Alberta Hospital and Surgical Health Services Minister Adriana LaGrange said the delivery of health care in the province is outside federal jurisdiction. “Dual practice does not violate the Canada Health Act,” LaGrange said. “The act does not prohibit private practice outside the publicly insured system.” CBC News

The Government of Canada has published proposed regulations in the Canada Gazette to formally repeal the electric vehicle sales mandate, which would have required EVs to account for at least 20 percent of new auto sales this year, rising to 100 percent by 2035. However, the more stringent tailpipe emission standards Prime Minister Mark Carney promised as a replacement are far from ready – consultations are only set to begin this fall, and a senior government official said Ottawa is aiming to have draft regulations in place by early 2027. Carney announced in February that the new standard would cap emissions at 74 grams of carbon dioxide per mile, down from the current standard of 172 grams, which remains in effect. The government's own analysis forecasts that ending the mandate will slow EV adoption to 75 percent of new sales by 2035 instead of 100 percent. The repeal adds to a growing list of Justin Trudeau-era climate policies the Carney government is dismantling, including the consumer carbon price and the emissions cap on oil and gas production. The Canadian Press

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced more than $7 million through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative to support two Lindsay, Ont.-based businesses. Mariposa Dairy Ltd. is receiving a repayable contribution of over $6.5 million towards a $19.5-million project to expand its facility and adopt new advanced automated processing, packaging and shipping technologies. Armada Toolworks Ltd. is receiving over $650,000 toward a more than $1.3-million project to modernize its operations. By integrating new technologies and manufacturing processes, the company will enhance efficiency, strengthen its capabilities and diversify into new markets. FedDev Ontario

Indigenous Services Canada announced $5.4 million in new funding for the Virtual Health Hub (VHH) in Whitecap Dakota Nation near Saskatoon. The investment will support the VHH’s 2026-2027 operating budget and is in addition to the over $28.2 million Indigenous Services Canada has already invested toward the construction of the future facility, expected to open in early 2027. The VHH is creating a new way to deliver health care to northern and remote communities. From a state-of-the-art command centre in Whitecap Dakota Nation, health professionals will use telehealth, artificial intelligence, robotics and other emerging technologies to connect patients with high-quality care without requiring long-distance travel. The model is designed to help overcome some of the barriers that have made accessing health care difficult for people living in northern and remote communities. It will connect patients with health professionals in real time and bring more services directly into communities. Once fully operational, the VHH will support 80 jobs and have the capacity to serve 30 communities. By 2029, its reach is expected to expand to as many as 90 northern and remote communities. The VHH will also help build health care capacity for the future. Through partnerships with the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies and the University of Saskatchewan, it will support training opportunities for Indigenous students and health professionals, helping more people develop the skills to deliver care in their own communities. Indigenous Services Canada

Federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel announced a $2.4-million investment through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to establish a new Network Environments for Indigenous Health Research (NEIHR) centre in Yukon. This centre will strengthen Yukon First Nations-led research capacity in the territory and expand the national network of Indigenous health research centres to now include all provinces and territories. The Yukon NEIHR will support community-driven research priorities while strengthening research capacity, partnerships and opportunities for training and mentorship. Led by Dr. Norma Ann Shorty, the centre will provide long-term support for research that is grounded in Yukon First Nations governance, knowledge systems, culture and approaches to health and wellness. Guided by the Southern Tutchone teaching of Dashäw ("Our Ancestors' Wisdom"), the centre will foster collaborative research that is accountable to communities, advances culturally grounded approaches to health, and strengthens the next generation of Indigenous health researchers in Yukon. The Yukon NEIHR expands the national NEIHR program, which supports Indigenous-led health research and research capacity development across Canada. CIHR

 RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Eight Canadian cities make list of Top 50 North American tech employment markets

Eight Canadian cities ranked among the Top 50 North American tech employment markets –s ix of them in the Top 15 – in CBRE Group Inc.’s latest Scoring Tech Talent report.

Toronto held onto the No. 3 spot in this year’s ranking, followed by Vancouver (No. 9), Waterloo Region (No. 10), Montreal (No. 11), Ottawa (No. 14) and Calgary (No. 15). Quebec City (No. 37) and Edmonton (No. 42) also made the list.

In a separate ranking of North America’s Next 25 emerging tech markets, Halifax was listed at No. 2, along with London, Ont. (No. 5) and Winnipeg (No. 11).

CBRE’s 13^th annual report analyzes 75 markets in the U.S. and Canada, ranking the top 50 markets and 25 emerging markets to watch, and outlining tech labour market trends.

This year’s report shows that the ranks of U.S. and Canadian tech talent skilled in artificial intelligence grew by 45 percent in the past year alone.

The report highlights the clustering of AI jobs; 37 percent of AI jobs in the U.S. are found in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

In Canada, the concentration of AI jobs is even greater, with 60 percent of AI jobs based in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

AI companies across Canada occupy about 5 million square feet of office space, 3 million of which is in Toronto. Montreal is the second-largest AI market with nearly 1 million sq. ft. “Canadian cities are at the forefront of AI adoption. Having six markets in the Top 15 and eight cities in the Top 50 is impressive for a country our size,” said Marc Meehan, CBRE’s Canada research managing director.

“Canada has been the dominant growth story for tech talent over the past five years, with many U.S. and Canadian tech firms tapping into the high quality and comparatively affordable talent on offer here. Tech employment growth is resurgent and Canadian markets are leading the way forward,” he said.

CBRE defines tech talent as highly skilled workers across more than 20 technology-oriented occupations in all industries, including computer and information systems managers, software developers and hardware engineers.

CBRE ranks North American tech talent markets through a weighted analysis of 13 metrics such as tech talent concentration, tech talent pipeline and research and development investment. CBRE

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The Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN) is awarding $746,627 to eight foodtech projects through its Innovation Booster Program. Industry partners will match these funds, resulting in a total investment of $968,627. The recipients are: 

• Bliq Photonics (Quebec) 

• CBS Bio Platforms (Alberta) 

• FabriSight Solutions (British Columbia) 

• Jitto (Ontario) 

• Kitchen Hub (Ontario) 

• mode40 (Manitoba) 

• Soralink (Quebec) 

• Tracktile (Prince Edward Island) 

This round emphasizes applied AI solutions on the plant floor and across the food supply chain. Jitto, mode40, FabriSight, Tracktile, and Soralink are each tackling a different operational pain point using AI tools designed for the realities of food processing and distribution. Other funding recipients are advancing the physical side of food processing. Bliq Photonique is bringing real-time optical sensing to chocolate production lines, CBS Bio Platforms is turning canola meal into food-grade protein using a new enzyme-based process, and Kitchen Hub rounds out the cohort with a multi-vendor operating system built for shared foodservice environments. CFIN

Victoria, B.C.-based Shift Browser named PhyCo, a Vancouver-based marine biotechnology company, as the recipient of its second annual US$25,000 Impact Grant. PhyCo is developing compostable, seaweed-based alternatives to the plastic mulch film used in agricultural production – a category that accounts for an estimated 70 percent of plastic in the food system but rarely surfaces in consumer conversations about plastic waste. PhyCo was co-founded in 2022 by marine biologist Ranah Chavoshi and biotechnologist Dr. Stacey Goldberg. The company sources seaweed from small-scale farmers in Indigenous and other coastal communities across Canada. It recently completed the first phase of a production-scale pilot in Portugal, where the team improved yields and reduced production costs. The Shift Impact Grant provides unrestricted funding to startups, nonprofits and entrepreneurs in Canada and the U.S. working on environmental or social challenges. Shift Technologies Inc.

Dalhousie University launched the Atlantic AI Institute (A2I2), a new initiative designed to bring together researchers, students, partners and communities to advance responsible AI research, education and innovation. A Senate-approved research institute in support of Dalhousie’s strategic research cluster in AI and Digital Innovation, A2I2 seeks to create connections – on campus and beyond – where people across disciplines, sectors and communities can work together to understand AI’s benefits, risks and real-world consequences, while ensuring regional voices are part of those conversations from the beginning. A2I2 builds on work first initiated at Dalhousie in 2013 with the Institute for Big Data Analytics. Led by Dr. Stan Matwin, that institute brought together fundamental and applied research, advanced training and industry partnerships. A212 launches with approximately 50 core members, representation from 10 faculties and units, and more than 100 students and postdoctoral researchers connected to its members. A governing council will provide strategic direction and accountability, while an advisory council will bring external perspectives to help ensure the institute’s work remains relevant to Atlantic Canada, the country, and the broader AI ecosystem. Dalhousie University

The University of Calgary launched Ready for Entrepreneurial Thinking, a free micro-credential open to all students – the first program of its kind in Canada. The new program is about much more than business creation and startups. The 12-hour course takes students through identifying problems, finding innovative solutions, managing uncertainty and identifying ways to bring an idea to life. Ready for Entrepreneurial Thinking features examples of innovative ideas from across the campus community, from innovations in health care to student-created tech startups. The emphasis is on giving students human-centred skills to succeed in an everchanging world, no matter where the future takes them. After a successful pilot in winter 2026, the course is now open for registration to all university students. University of Calgary

A Canadian startup is trying to prevent financial losses to bad actors over the phone in real time. Montreal- and Atlanta-based OnGuardAI launched a scam-protection app in the U.S. to coincide with National Financial Awareness Day. The startup said it’s looking to flag and stop fraudulent calls while they’re happening through its app, which monitors calls in real time and sends an instant text to the user and a family member if “fraud patterns” are detected. The app is mainly designed for seniors, who are disproportionately targeted by phone fraudsters in Canada and the U.S. It’s a growing problem across age ranges, too: according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Canadians lost $643 million to fraud in 2024, up nearly 300 percent since 2020. Common scams include a caller impersonating a government official to try to obtain information like social insurance numbers, or fake family emergencies that ask for banking credentials. OnGuardAI said its tech analyzes speech in real time for “known social engineering tactics,” such as emotional pressure and manipulation. Though other services exist that already do this and flag worrisome calls, OnGuardAI takes it further by sending an immediate text to an associated family member with a list of red flags and suggested actions. BetaKit

The Government of Alberta’s technology minister Nate Glubish was jeered, badgered and booed by a room packed with hundreds of people over the province's plans for an artificial intelligence data centre. Glubish was in the central town of Lacombe for the first in a series of town halls touting the windfall the mega-facilities could bring. Dozens of people lined up to ask questions, but none who made it to the microphone before the event ended offered an endorsement. There was also little trust in the Alberta government to regulate an industry poised to invest billions of dollars in the province to feed a growing global computing demand. Some who spoke at the event also aired concerns about the potential abuse of personal data and global surveillance. Glubish, in response, pointed out that an application to build a natural gas facility to power the proposed massive data centre complex in Olds in southern Alberta was denied due to its proximity to a residential area. He also said data centre sites need to be far from residential areas, and that Premier Danielle Smith's government is looking at setback provisions. In a second town hall in Redwater, norther of Edmonton, in Sturgeon County, Glubish was peppered with profanity from angry audience members. Last month, tech giant Meta announced plans to build a $13-billion AI data centre project in the region. The Canadian Press

The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) denied an application to build a natural gas plant that would have powered a massive data centre complex in the small agricultural town of Olds in southern Alberta. Synapse Real Estate Corp. had proposed a 10-building campus with 1.4 gigawatts of power generation – about enough to power the city of Edmonton. The plan also included 1.8 gigawatts of emergency and backup diesel generation. But the AUC’s decision said the site won't work. "The project is too close to the surrounding community, and Synapse failed to demonstrate any compelling justification for selecting that location," the AUC said. "The site is simply not suitable for the proposed development." Many residents in Olds, a town of 10,000, voiced fervent opposition to the project within town limits. They are concerned about noise, pollution, home values, safety and strain on local health care and emergency services. CBC News

Rural Albertans, like working people everywhere, are asking why their communities should become “sacrifice zones for multinational corporations hell-bent on constructing ugly windowless boxes to house computing power that will toss many out of work while sucking up capital, fossil fuel and water,” journalist Andrew Nikiforuk wrote in The Tyee. “The reviews are in on [Premier Danielle Smith’s] embrace of Meta’s $13-billion facility, along with [her] government’s ‘concierge service’ for some 39 different data projects needing some 20,000 megawatts of electricity — twice the provincial demand. People are pissed,” Nikiforuk said. He called Smith’s recent video informing Albertans about data centes “as genuine as AI slop and as deceptive as a chatbot.” Nikiforuk noted that the Alberta government is still working on developing “consistent provincewide siting standards, and asked: “Well, why didn’t you do that a year ago?” He also disputed Smith’s claim that data centres won’t cause higher electricity prices. “Yes, it can, and almost certainly will.” The sheer scale of these developments will double demand for natural gas for power generation in the province, Nikiforuk said. “That means higher methane prices, which, let’s face it, is the whole point behind your AI scheme: to put more money in the pockets of the natural gas industry.” Higher gas prices “means every Albertan will be paying more for electricity and heating thanks to your policy of machines and fossil fuels first. Albertans already pay some of the highest electricity prices in the country,” Nikiforuk said. The Tyee

New job postings suggest San Francisco-based Anthropic is looking to significantly increase its data centre footprint in Canada, with a particular focus on Alberta. The AI giant created multiple job postings for new Canadian roles that will be in charge of getting more data centres built in the country. One posting is for a Canadian compute country lead to manage the company’s data centre build-out strategy in the country, while another posting is looking for a data centre community engagement manager based in Alberta. Anthropic confirmed the job postings to BetaKit, but did not elaborate on its Canadian data centre strategy or why it’s specifically targeting Alberta. The compute country lead “will be ultimately responsible for bringing gigawatts of compute online in Canada,” according to the job posting. The position is responsible for selecting, leasing and financing data centre sites, as well as other logistical and government relations work. The community engagement manager will “coordinate charitable giving, community investment and economic development commitments” in their data centre markets. BetaKit

Artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li warned that growing public skepticism towards AI in the United States could undermine the country’s technological leadership and have repercussions for the global development of the technology. Li told Bloomberg that U.S. technologists had a responsibility to do more to demonstrate the economic and social benefits of AI, arguing that America’s approach would influence how other countries view and adopt the technology. She said the U.S. should act as a “role model” by demonstrating the “incredible economic value” that AI can create. Li has been one of the key figures in the development of modern AI. She was part of the team behind ImageNet, a landmark database containing millions of images that helped drive major advances in computer vision and machine learning. Her comments come as communities across the U.S. increasingly push back against the construction of data centres powering AI services, with concerns centred on their heavy consumption of electricity and water. Public attitudes towards AI have also become more cautious, with about half of Americans saying they are more concerned than excited about the growing use of AI in their daily lives, according to a Pew Research Center survey. News’nav

Big Tech’s data centre building boom could create a huge new source of carbon emissions as the surging demand for electricity sparks a wave of fossil-fuel power plants, despite companies’ climate commitments. A Financial Times (FT) analysis of 60 of the largest planned data centres being built in the U.S. by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta found that they could together produce 101.5 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions a year once fully operational, based on the most recent snapshot of U.S. power generation. That would be equivalent to about seven percent of U.S. power-sector emissions in 2025 – the annual emissions of 27 coal plants or 24 million gasoline-powered cars. Three-quarters of the utilities serving the 60 projects are planning or building new natural gas-fired capacity, according to the FT’s analysis, based on utility filings, S&P data and analytics firm DC Byte. One-third of those that operate coal plants are also delaying retirements. The FT estimates underscore how the AI infrastructure boom threatens to undermine years of progress in cutting emissions from U.S. electricity generation, even as Big Tech companies pledge billions of dollars for clean energy. Amazon’s latest sustainability report said its emissions increased 16 percent from 2024 to 2025, driven by data centre construction and fuel used for deliveries. Microsoft said its total emissions increased by 25 percent in the same period, driven primarily by the expansion of its data centre infrastructure. Alphabet also reported its “ambition-based” emissions – the company’s adjusted metric – increased 18 percent, fuelled by increases in supply-chain activities that supported the “rapid expansion” of its business. Financial Times

The US$14-billion Sopaipilla campus that Meta and BlackRock are building in El Paso, Texas is only partially insured, according to Financial Times reporting. Bondholders funding most of the project sit behind Meta's contractual guarantees rather than a full property policy. The venture is an 80/20 split, with BlackRock-managed funds holding the majority stake and Meta keeping 20 percent. Meta is the sole tenant of the 960-megawatt, 4-million-square-foot campus. BlackRock contributed about $4.9 billion of cash and Meta contributed roughly $2.3 billion in land and construction-in-progress. A $12.5-billion senior secured bond issued through Sopaipilla Investor LLC carries the rest. The main protection built into the deal is not conventional catastrophe cover but a residual value guarantee from Meta with an aggregate threshold of about $13 billion, stepping down over time, covering shortfalls within the first 16 years of the lease. Under the triple-net lease structure, Meta itself bears property taxes, utilities, insurance, routine maintenance and structural replacements, meaning bondholder exposure runs through Meta's balance sheet rather than a reinsurer's. Rating agencies have already flagged the underlying tension. "Rapid advancements in AI, semiconductor technology and cooling systems could render infrastructure outdated before full monetization," Moody's analysts wrote on the AI data-centre boom. Financial Times

Women are significantly underrepresented in the AI boom, holding just 27 percent of AI roles at AI companies and 13 percent of AI executive positions, according to a LinkedIn analysis of about 15,000 companies in 27 countries. “There are broken rungs in the ladder to senior leadership for women, for AI firms and non-AI firms and for AI roles and non-AI roles,” the analysis said. Women are about 10 percentage points less represented in AI jobs than in non-AI jobs. Women make up 39 percent of leadership roles globally, but only 31 percent of AI leadership roles. While women make up 19.1 percent of CEOs at traditional companies, that figure drops significantly to 13.9 precent at AI firms. Women make up just 20 percent of Head of AI hires, 26 percent of Director of AI hires, and 18 percent of Member of Technical Staff hires. Head of AI and Member of Technical Staff roles are among the highest-paid AI jobs, and women make up less than one-quarter of hires in both categories. “The gender divide in AI isn’t just about who gets into AI. It's who gets access to the highest-paying opportunities once they're there,” the analysis said. LinkedIn

OpenAI launched ‌a version of ChatGPT tailored for minors, with parental controls and enhanced security features, as online platforms face scrutiny over the risks of AI chatbots. The new "ChatGPT for Teens" mode will limit conversations about high-risk topics such as self-harm, ​violence and eating disorders, while offering educational tools that help students learn instead of sharing ​the answer, OpenAI said in a blog post. The chatbot will automatically engage when a user ⁠is estimated to be under 18, or self-identifies their age as between 13 and 17, and ​will allow parents to set "Quiet Hours," manage certain settings and receive notifications when teens discuss sensitive topics. The new mode has educational tools such as ​a study mode for guided learning, homework reminders, quizzes and visualizations. The ​move aligns the ChatGPT creator with tech giants such as Meta that have bolstered protections for teens on their platforms amid mounting legal threats and evidence of harm to their mental health. Reuters

Montreal-founded Aylo, which owns Pornhub and other adult sites, will pay US$120 million to women and men whose sexually explicit videos, filmed when they were minors, were uploaded to the popular adult website. The agreement aims to end two class action lawsuits launched in 2021 in Alabama and California against Mindgeek, now renamed Aylo, whose headquarters are located in Montreal. Aylo would pay an initial US$25 million into a fund, then instalments of US$15.8 million for six years, to children that appeared on Mindgeek websites between early 2011 through late 2024, according to a redacted version of the filed settlement. Anyone whose content of them as a minor appeared on Mindgeek platforms between 2011 and 2024 can receive a share of the $120 million. The court's agreement is still needed to approve the settlement between the two parties. The proposed settlement, which must still be finalized in sealed court proceedings, would also require Aylo to implement new content moderation rules and have them audited to ensure the company is hiring well-qualified moderators and verifying the identities of account holders and individuals depicted on its sites. Le Journal de Montréal

Toronto-based intellectual property software startup NLPatent is rebranding to Clerq as it looks to better serve legal teams contending with a surge in complex patent applications. The company announced its new identity, in addition to an agentic AI overhaul of its platform that introduces more tools that can take action on a user’s behalf. Clerq said its new platform builds time-saving features on top of its proprietary research engine, which was originally developed to help patent professionals search and analyze patents using plain-text descriptions. Co-founded by patent lawyer Stephanie Curcio in 2021, Clerq originally developed a machine learning research platform for patent-related work. But as more people use generative AI tools to take on work, the floodgates have opened for patent applications. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, more than 56,000 new patent families (groups of related applications) related to generative AI were published in 2024 and 2025 alone – more than the output of the entire previous decade. This trend has also coincided with a global surge in general patent volume, according to Curcio, as patent offices at large corporations and law firms face a backlog of applications. BetaKit

New Jersey-headquartered Merck and Massachusetts-based Moderna reported promising results in a clinical trail for mRNA-based melanoma vaccine. The drug companies used a personalized mRNA vaccine combined with Keytruda, an immunotherapy drug developed by Merck, to treat people who have had surgery to remove melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. The late-stage Phase trial found the experimental treatment reduced skin cancer recurrence and spread more than Keytruda alone. The trials for the treatment are ongoing, and a peer-reviewed report on the findings haven’t been published, nor have the companies released the full data. However, the results so far mark the first positive late-stage results for an mRNA cancer vaccine and this kind of personalized therapy, validating research into cancer treatments tailored to an individual’s tumor mutation. Moderna

Calgary-based Lithium Chile Inc. is challenging the federal government’s decision to review a planned US$175-million sale of an Argentinian project to a Chinese company, a move the mining company says creates uncertainty in Canadian capital markets. Lithium Chile revealed that the Industry Ministry Mélanie Joly had served notice the government would review the proposed sale of an Argentina-based subsidiary, Argentum Lithium SA, to China Union Holdings Ltd., based in Shenzhen. The two companies announced the transaction eight months ago. Ottawa has the power to block the deal. The federal government launched the review over national security concerns, Lithium Chile president and CEO Steve Cochrane said in a statement. He said the decision’s “consequences extend beyond Lithium Chile, creating uncertainty for shareholders and transaction counterparties and undermining confidence in the predictability of Canada’s capital markets.” A spokesperson for Joly said while the government welcomes foreign direct investment that benefits the Canadian economy, any transaction raising security issues is subject to scrutiny. The Globe and Mail

Brisbane, Australia-headquartered Elevra Lithium Ltd. secured a price-floor structure in a deal to supply a planned new processing facility in Canada, as western countries seek to bolster their critical mineral supply chains. The Sydney-listed company will supply spodumene concentrate from its project in Quebec to Mangrove Lithium’s planned 20,000-ton-per-year conversion plant, according to a statement. The project is still subject to final investment decision. The agreement provides a price floor set above the expected cost of production, but no ceiling, the company said, without disclosing the sum. Countries around the world have been stepping up their efforts in recent years to develop lithium-refining capacity in a bid to reduce their reliance on production in China. The critical minerals industry, including lithium miners, has been calling for mechanisms such as floor prices to ensure the long-term viability of their mines. Financial Post

Canadian defence companies are eyeing idle automotive plants and laid-off workers for their expansion plans as vehicle makers grapple with trade friction and uncertainty about the future of the industry in Canada. Among the interested parties are Ottawa-based defence tech company Dominion Dynamics and Brampton, Ont.-based armoured vehicle maker Roshel. Both companies are working on bids to occupy unused manufacturing space in the Canadian automotive sector to bolster the production of defence goods, in hopes of fostering industrial hubs supported by an injection of federal funds. The Canadian auto industry has been struggling with tariffs enacted by U.S. President Donald Trump starting early last year. Some plants have ceased operations or moved production, and thousands of workers have lost their jobs or been left without certainty on when they could be restored. Last week, the union that represents workers at a Stellantis assembly plant in Brampton said the multinational automaker had informed the union about its plans to potentially close and sell the facility. The Globe and Mail

Domtar announced the indefinite idling of its affiliates’ operations at both the Howe Sound mill and Bayview Fibre chipping facility in Port Mellon, B.C. The decision will remove approximately 380,000 tonnes of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp from the market annually. The announcement will affect approximately 400 employees. “Despite capital investment of nearly CAD$500 million since the mill was purchased in 2010, and the construction of the Bayview Fibre facility, the business cannot overcome reduced demand from Asia, unprecedented and sustained poor pricing for pulp globally, and a decline in affordable domestic fiber,” said Luc Thériault, Domtar’s president, Canada and CEO, pulp and wood products. Domtar

Aurora Innovation, led by Canadian CEO Chris Urmson, and Kodiak AI, two California-based companies developing self-driving trucks, received permits from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to test their autonomous vehicle technology on public roads. Kodiak AI said it is starting with a handful of test trucks in California, primarily around its Mountain View office. The DMV’s updated rules, approved April 28, lifted a ban on driverless vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds from testing on public roads and provided a regulatory path for companies to test, and eventually deploy, autonomous heavy-duty vehicles. Kodiak and Aurora met the DMV’s permitting criteria, including safety, insurance, vehicle registration, safety driver qualification and other requirements. The testing permits require a human safety operator to be behind the wheel and prohibit companies from operating on roads where the posted speed limit is 25 miles per hour or less, unless they are on a “direct route” between destinations. Teamsters California sued the state’s DMV, alleging that the agency circumvented laws requiring it to study and publicly disclose the possible economic impacts of allowing self-driving trucks on public roads. TechCrunch

U.S. private equity firms Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman are deploying a 160-person AI engineering team from Anthropic-backed venture Ode into their portfolio companies to build new products and boost revenue. Ode is a standalone company that combines Anthropic's frontier AI models, a team of experienced AI engineers and operators, and the backing of a consortium of leading investors. Ode is built on the foundation of Fractional AI, the applied AI services firm acquired in May 2026, whose team, alongside engineers from Anthropic, forms its operational core. The team behind Ode brings years of experience helping organizations across financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, software, and other industries put AI to work. Business Wire

California-based Nvidia agreed to pay US$6 billion to license AI models from San Francisco-based Poolside AI, the software development-focused startup that barely existed two years ago. Nvidia also is putting another $1 billion in equity into the company. Montreal-based Inovia Capital could be in line for a payout from the deal. Inovia first backed Poolside during its reported US$126-million seed round in June 2023, then again at the startup’s US$500-million Series B round the following October. The $6-billion licensing deal is non-exclusive, meaning Poolside can still sell its technology to other buyers. What Nvidia gets is access to Poolside’s “Model Factory,” the startup’s platform for producing generative AI models tailored to software development. Poolside has been building out its Laguna family of models throughout 2026, including variants called Laguna XS.2 and M.1. These models are designed to write, debug and optimize code. Beyond the dollars, 109 former Poolside employees received job offers from Nvidia as part of the deal. Crypto Briefing

Short sellers have reaped more than US$2B in profits by shorting three small modular nuclear (SMR) reactor companies – NuScale Power, Nano Nuclear Energy, and Oklo – over the past year, as the collapse of the one-time high-flying stocks wiped more than $30 billion off their combined market value, the Financial Times (FT) reported, citing data provider S3 Partners. "The stocks were overinflated in price, based on speculation" after the sector went through a "textbook hype cycle" last year, Breakthrough Institute director of nuclear energy innovations Adam Stein told FT. Some 18 percent of NuScale's and Oklo's outstanding shares remain out on loan – a proxy for short selling – while nearly 30 percent of Nano's are on loan, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. A key test of investor appetite towards the nuclear sector is expected in the coming weeks, when Holtec International and Westinghouse, two U.S.-based companies with SMR operations, are expected to list. Big Tech is increasingly turning to the emergent SMR technology to meet its future power needs, and the Trump administration has vocally backed the nuclear sector, pledging to cut red tape and invest tens of billions of dollars to build new reactors and reopen old ones. But timelines for delivery of the unproven reactors remain uncertain, and some analysts have expressed concerns over shortages of high-assay low-enriched uranium, a special type of nuclear fuel needed for SMRs. Financial Times

Australia passed legislation that will force tech giants to pay millions of dollars in levies if they fail ​to strike commercial deals with local media outlets for news ‌on their platforms. The News Bargaining Incentive taxes the companies 2.5 percent on their advertising revenues unless they strike agreements. Proceeds from the scheme would be directed to local ​Australian news outlets, whose content helps drive user engagement and ​advertising revenue on the tech firms' platforms. The levy applies to Meta, ⁠Alphabet's Google, TikTok and Microsoft's LinkedIn, covering companies with a "significant" ​social media or search service in Australia, and local advertising revenue exceeding ​A$250 million (US$178 million). Platforms can avoid the charge by reaching agreements with at least eight different publishers by the end of their reporting period. The value of those deals ​would be offset against their levy liability. The deals must support ​the production of news content or relate to news content produced by the publishers ‌being ⁠made available online by the platform, the legislation said. Reuters

VC, PRIVATE INVESTMENT & ACQUISITIONS

Radical Ventures and ArcTern Ventures – both headquartered in Toronto – invested in California-based Muon Space’s US$250 million Series C funding round, which will fund expanded satellite production, AI compute and connectivity capabilities. The round was led by Eclipse Capital, and participation also included Galvanize, Google, Salesforce Ventures, Wellington Management, I Squared Capital, and Woven Capital. Existing investors Congruent Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Activate Capital, ACME Capital, and Overlap Holdings also participated. Muon Space said the new capital will accelerate production of large-scale constellations, expand the company’s dual-use spacecraft platforms, and support growing demand from commercial, government and international sovereign customers. The company is also investing in differentiated mission capabilities, including advanced payloads, on-orbit AI compute, and real-time, ultra-high bandwidth satellite connectivity in partnership with SpaceX Starlink. Muon Space

Toronto-based Clearco, which provides non-dilutive funding for ecommerce brands, announced a new $100-million asset-backed financing facility from Macquarie Group. The facility expands Clearco's ability to provide qualified brands with up to $10 million in funding and estimated terms of four to 12 months. It is expected to support approximately $900 million in funding to ecommerce brands over the next two years. The financing facility is structured to support ecommerce brands as they grow across direct-to-consumer, wholesale, retail, marketplaces and social commerce. Clearco

Sanja Fidler, the former head of Nvidia’s Toronto AI lab, launched a new startup and raised US$90 million to tackle how robots interact with the physical world through AI. Fidler announced she’s launching physical AI startup Veeda AI alongside longtime Nvidia colleagues Zan Gojcic, who will serve as chief technology officer, and Huan Ling, who will be chief scientist. The startup will focus on world models, which are AI models that create an internal simulation of the real world based on things like physical, spatial and movement data. Veeda AI, which was officially incorporated in June under the name Veeda Innovation, is backed by Toronto’s Radical Ventures and Silicon Valley firm Khosla Ventures. Fidler was Nvidia’s first hire at its Canadian research lab, now the Spatial Intelligence Lab, and helmed it for eight years. The lab focused on research projects into world modelling simulations of physical systems, as well as algorithms for understanding three-dimensional data. The University of Toronto associate professor announced her departure from the AI chip giant earlier this month, writing online that world models are “where the next breakthrough lies.” BetaKit

Calgary-based payments processor Helcim raised $53 million in a Series C funding round led by BDC Capital’s Growth Venture Fund, with participation from Curql Collective, Gold House Ventures and continued support from existing investors. Helcim is one of the last Canadian-owned merchant payments processors, a distinction it has been using to market itself to patriotic customers in the country. The company  plans to use the money to improve customer support and develop products. One of the products Helcim plans to expand is an extension that lets customers substitute the default payments processor embedded in booking, invoicing or other software with its own. Helcim

Calgary-based clean energy firm EnerPure Inc. raised US$35 million, with the federally backed Canada Growth Fund investing US$20 million and U.S. investment firm Rice Investment Group contributing  US$15 million. EnerPure, founded in Manitoba in 2009, has developed a recycling process that converts used motor oil into low-sulphur fuels that can be used in marine vessels. The funding will go toward EnerPure’s first commercial oil-recycling facility in Alberta. The Alberta facility will be the first test of whether the company’s technology can work at commercial scale. It’s expected to begin operating in late 2027, processing 32.6 million litres of used motor oil a year. EnerPure

Montreal-headquartered Inovia Capital and Deloitte’s Canadian venture arm led a US$8.7-million seed round investment in Toronto-based Peripheral, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Entrepreneurs First. Peripheral’s technology takes video feeds from different angles at sports games, and turns them into more 3D environments that users can move around to track particular players or see the action from their point of view. The company is pitching the system to leagues and stadiums, as an engagement tool that’s cheaper and requires fewer cameras than other options. Peripheral said it will use the new money to expand its engineering team and accelerate deployments with sports leagues and stadiums. Business Wire

Toronto-based campus safety software startup Legio raised US$5 million from Klass Capital to expand its AI-powered platform and grow partnerships with postsecondary institutions. Legio helps campus security teams manage their dispatch, incident response, casework and patrols, while making it easier to keep up with reports and other compliance requirements. The AI-native platform helps officers file the right reports for the right incidents, automatically populates relevant information, and notifies any relevant department, if needed. Legio’s seed round will fund its product development and new engineering hires. The company is also trying to grow its design partner program, which brings in postsecondary institutions to use and provide feedback on its platform. Sophic Capital

Magic Potion Games announced it has secured a Series A round, just as its child-friendly game Imagine Island exited its beta-testing phase. The amount of funding wasn’t disclosed. Magic Potion was founded by veteran Canadian game developers Stephen MacDonald, Karin Johnson and Sascha Williams, who all met while working on Club Penguin. Imagine Island is meant to be a safe online experience for Gen Alpha children to do quests, decorate digital homes and socialize, much like Club Penguin was for older generations. Magic Potion said it’s preparing a significant expansion of Imagine Island later this year that will include several “major entertainment partnerships,” new gameplay experiences, and a membership monetization model. BetaKit

Toronto- and San Francisco-based startup Space raised US$2.4 million for its cloud storage system that allows files to live on your device without taking up space. The pre-seed funding was led by San Francisco accelerator a16z speedrun. Other investors included Canadian venture capital firms Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures, as well as a dozen angel investors hailing from companies such as Parsec, Superwhisper, and Modem. Space’s system allows documents to live within a computer’s operating system, while the actual data itself is stored in the cloud. This means users can access files in their “space” as if it were their computer’s documents folder, even drag and modify the file in programs like Premiere, all without having to physically download the file onto their device. At the moment, Space is in private beta-testing, with roughly 100 users and teams onboarded. The company said it plans to eventually expand into more data-intensive areas like media, AI training infrastructure, computer vision, and enterprise data systems. BetaKit

Toronto-based AI startup Blueprint raised US$1 million in pre-seed funding from a16z speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz’s Silicon Valley accelerator, to expand Blueprint’s AI platform, which turns text prompts into buildable hardware designs. Founders Inc. and undisclosed angel investors also participated. Blueprint’s clients have used the company’s “language-to-hardware” software to produce more than 200,000 plans for everything from augmented reality glasses to desktop companions, drones, go-karts, grappling-hook guns, MP3 players, RC cars, robotic arms, solar watering systems, wireless chargers, and more. Startup Researcher

Toronto-based Kodeon, an AI-powered life-improvement-focused app publisher, acquired Montreal-headquartered Breethe, a meditation and wellness app. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, although Kodeon said the transaction is its largest acquisition to date and a defining step in the company's strategy: assembling a portfolio of category-leading apps that help people improve their lives, unified and supercharged by Kodeon's AI-native publishing platform. Since its launch in February 2015, Breethe has more than 18 million downloads and over US$50 million in lifetime revenue. The app holds a 4.7 out of 5.0 star rating across more than 115,000 global ratings and has built a community of over 300,000 social followers. The sellers requested to take a portion of their consideration in Kodeon equity. Kodeon

REPORTS & POLICIES

Canada can’t subsidize its way to AI adoption

 OPINION

By James Wang

James Wang is Google Public Policy Fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), working on issues at the intersection of U.S.-China technology competition, AI governance and semiconductor export controls.

This summer, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched AI for All, Canada’s new national AI strategy, and set a hard target to lift the share of Canadian businesses using AI from about 12 percent today to 60 percent by 2034. The goal is right, but the plan to reach it focuses on the wrong problem.

AI for All treats adoption as a cost problem. Its main instruments lower the price of going digital, including LIFT (Lead with Innovation and Focus on Technology), a $500-million financing program through the Business Development Bank of Canada; a separate $500-million Regional AI Initiative run through the development agencies; and public funding for computing infrastructure and scale-up capital for AI companies.

But cost is not what holds most firms back from adopting AI. By Statistics Canada’s own count, more than three-quarters of businesses that do not plan to adopt AI say it is simply not relevant to what they make or do. The problem is not that they are waiting for a cheaper tool; it is that many do not understand what AI could do for them.

Canada has misdiagnosed the adoption problem: The primary barrier is not cost but firms’ difficulty identifying valuable use cases. Policy should focus less on subsidizing purchases and more on reducing information and implementation barriers.

The countries that have adopted AI fastest have worked directly on the demand side. Singapore is the clearest case. It pairs a grant that covers up to half the cost of pre-approved AI tools with something even more important: The government publishes tailored digital roadmaps for 22 industries, outlining which tools firms should adopt at each stage of growth, and offers free advice through SME centres, where business owners can consult with advisers who match their firms with specific, vetted products.

The state did the unglamorous work of turning “AI exists” into “here is the tool for your sector, checked and half-paid.” Among SMEs, AI adoption tripled in just a year, from 4.2 percent to 14.5 percent.

By comparison, the United Kingdom offered almost the same subsidy through Help to Grow: Digital – half off approved software – but skipped industry-specific roadmaps, practical demonstrations and outreach. Firms got a flat catalogue and were left to work out the rest themselves. The scheme spent barely seven percent of its nearly £300 million budget before it was scrapped.

South Korea shows what correcting course looks like. After years of pouring money into frontier capacity, it launched an AI voucher program in 2020 that matches small firms with vetted suppliers and helps fund project implementation, an effort to reach the businesses its earlier spending had passed over.

Canada is making similar bets on sovereign compute today, and it should not wait as long to build the bridge to ordinary firms. If the barrier is that firms cannot envision an AI use case, the most direct fix is to show it to them.

Germany funds one of the most developed networks of demonstration centres in the world. At these centres, a company can watch AI run on real equipment and test it on its own data at no cost, with engineers on hand. The EU has built its Digital Innovation Hubs around the same “test before invest” idea.

It is no cure-all: Despite Germany’s network, its 2025 AI adoption rate among enterprises was still 26 percent, well below the Nordic leaders. This serves as a reminder that demonstration is necessary but slow to produce results and worth little without the skills, data and regulatory environment firms need to act on it.

The highest-performing countries in the EU illustrate another point: Part of what lifts them cannot be quickly replicated. Denmark, the EU’s 2025 AI adoption leader at 42 percent, more than double the EU average, benefits from two decades of shared public digital infrastructure, a near-universal national digital ID, and high trust in government. Together, these factors help make adoption a default rather than a decision.

Finland, at 37.8-percent adoption, has emphasized literacy. Its free Elements of AI course reached one percent of the population and is now available across the EU in more than 20 languages.

Canada could emulate Finland’s educational approach relatively quickly, and its standing on AI literacy – 44^th  out of 47 countries according to one global study – suggests it should. However, Canada cannot create a national digital ID or fix its low level of trust in AI systems (it ranks 42^nd  out of 47 in the same study) overnight.

The lesson is not that Canada should spend more on AI, but rather that it should focus on policies that promote adoption.

Three changes would do most of the work.

1. Don’t repeat the $4-billion Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP).

Canada has already tried subsidizing digital adoption by paying consultants to produce standardized digital plans. But writing a plan is not the same as implementing one. Of the more than 15,000 businesses that received planning grants, only about 5,000 went on to obtain the follow-on loans needed to carry out their projects. This is the public-sector version of token maxxing: measuring AI commitment by the volume of plans and paperwork instead of real-world deployment and productivity gains.

The federal government abruptly cancelled key elements of CDAP two years early, after spending less than one-fifth of its budget. Yet once again, LIFT and the Regional AI Initiative place considerable weight on lowering financial barriers to drive adoption.

If firms still struggle to identify worthwhile applications and implement them effectively, additional funding will just make an unfamiliar technology cheaper. The test for both programs should be how many firms actually put AI to use, not how much money moves.

2. Make the planned AI readiness tool more than a self-assessment.

AI for All promises an online AI Literacy and Adoption Assessment tool to help small and medium-sized businesses gauge their AI readiness, identify practical use cases and connect with government programs. But a questionnaire that tells a firm it is “not ready” changes nothing.

Instead, every assessment should end with a tailored set of recommended AI tools for that firm’s industry and size, along with information about vetted vendors and available financial support. The government should also open the program to the smallest firms. That is the key lesson from Singapore: Do not just diagnose the problem; connect firms directly to solutions.

3. Shift funding toward demonstration and literacy.

Two of the strategy’s most essential priorities, demonstration and literacy, remain underfunded. Businesses are far more likely to adopt AI after seeing it work in a company like their own, so use funding from the Regional AI Initiative to help regional development agencies and colleges create vendor-neutral demonstration sites.

Likewise, the government should invest in AI literacy by scaling proven training programs rather than building a new one. And because Canada’s innovation system is fragmented across jurisdictions, federal-provincial coordination should be part of the strategy itself, not something policymakers simply hope will happen.

AI for All gets the diagnosis half right: Canada is behind on AI adoption, not invention. But adoption is not something governments buy into existence. They build it by helping firms identify valuable use cases, reducing implementation uncertainty, and spreading practical knowledge across the economy.

Until policy shifts from subsidizing purchases to solving those problems, Canada is unlikely to reach its 60 percent target. Ottawa should make that shift now by using the readiness tools to direct firms to appropriate tools and vendors, funding vendor-neutral demonstration sites, and scaling proven AI literacy training. ITIF

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AI appears to be making it harder for some Canadians to find work in occupations most exposed to AI: Bank of Canada analysis

Artificial intelligence appears to be making it harder for some Canadians to find work in occupations that are most exposed to AI, according to an analysis by the Bank of Canada.

Researchers at the central bank fund that about one-third of jobs “may undergo substantial changes” from AI exposure, given what the technology is currently capable of.

Jobs with lots of routine and codifiable tasks, such as data-entry clerks, receptionists and accountants, are most exposed, the bank found.

Those that rely heavily on judgment, physical interactions or highly specialized skills, such as nurses, teachers, professional athletes and carpenters, are less exposed.

“AI is unlikely to cause most jobs to disappear entirely. Instead, it’s more likely to reshape how workers perform their jobs, automating some tasks and simplifying others while still leaving a portion of tasks largely unaffected,” the researchers said.

The amount of change may hinge on a job’s exposure to AI, which is based on the tasks typically performed in each role.

Their analysis determined the rate at which workers in AI-exposed occupations are finding jobs has deteriorated relative to those in less-exposed occupations, with the estimated gap between workers at the highest and lowest levels of exposure widening to 13.9 percentage points in 2025 from 2.2 percentage points between 2015 and 2019.

The analysis of how AI is affecting jobs suggests that AI has not yet led to broad changes in the overall structure of the labour market, the researchers said. But it is affecting specific tasks within some occupations, and this may be influencing hiring needs.

The analysis shows that job seekers may be finding it more difficult than it was in 2019 to secure employment in occupations that are now the most exposed to AI.

The results of the analysis reveal that the average AI‑exposure score in Canada in 2025 was 0.29. This suggests that close to one‑third of jobs may undergo substantial changes due to AI integration, given today’s AI capabilities, the researchers said.

Workers in jobs with high AI exposure already faced elevated unemployment risk in 2015-2019. Since 2015-2019, workers in more‑exposed occupations have become increasingly more likely to be unemployed relative to those in less‑exposed occupations, the analysis found.

The reason appears to be a decline over time in job finding rates among highly exposed workers relative to those with low AI exposure, the researchers said.

This decline reveals that unemployed workers have had more difficulty finding employment in highly exposed jobs.

In contrast, the rates at which workers have lost or left a job – the job separation rate – have remained relatively equal between more‑ and less‑exposed occupations.

“Together, these results suggest that the post‑2019 rise in the unemployment risk for highly exposed occupations shows up mainly in hiring difficulties rather than more‑frequent layoffs or resignations.”

Several occupations that employ many young workers have moderate to high AI exposure, including customer service and sales support. “Overall, this suggests that young workers may face higher AI‑related labour market risks than older workers.”

The researchers cautioned that their results overall should be seen only as early signals. “They do not show that AI alone has led to differences in employment outcomes across occupations since 2019.”

Many factors affected the labour market over this period, including the COVID‑19 pandemic, a surge in immigration and a reconfiguration of global trade.

“What our results do show are patterns about how the labour market may be adjusting to structural changes triggered by AI. These patterns suggest that any adjustments may show up first through slower hiring (a lower job finding rate) rather than more people leaving jobs (a higher job separation rate).” Bank of Canada

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Canada needs to prioritize six critical minerals to build new markets and supply chains with the European Union

Canada should prioritize producing six critical minerals that are essential to the European Union’s clean energy sector and the global energy transition and build supply chain resilience across Canada and the EU, according to a report by Clean Energy Canada.

The six critical minerals are cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, nickel and rare earth elements.

In 2023, these six key critical minerals contributed $6.9 billion to Canada’s GDP, more than double forestry and logging, the report noted.

Developing these six minerals would bring an estimated $80 billion in capital investment and contribute over $500 billion in GDP over the lifetime of the mines while generating 95,000 full-time equivalent jobs and some $97 billion in tax revenues, according to the report.

With the energy transition driving huge increases in demand for metals and minerals (a typical EV requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional vehicle, for example), “critical minerals are becoming the new oil,” the report said.

Canada is home to reserves of many of the minerals required to power the energy transition. Canada’s lithium reserves, for instance, could supply around half of cumulative global demand from 2030 to 2050, with 95 percent of the demand generated by the clean energy transition –electric vehicle batteries in particular.

“With a widely touted vision of becoming a clean energy superpower, critical minerals are essential to realizing Canada’s global clean economic ambitions,” the report said.

When it comes to the energy transition, the EU is arguably Canada’s most forward-thinking ally, with some of the world’s leading clean energy and climate policies, the report noted.

Trade with the U.S. is becoming increasingly challenging, and the Trump administration cut funding for clean energy projects and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

As the EU rolls out clean technologies – like EVs and renewables – in huge quantities, its demand for critical minerals is set to skyrocket. EU lithium demand from EVs and energy storage is projected to increase nine- to 12-fold by 2030, for example.

However, the EU does not have sufficient domestic resources to meet this demand without partnerships. The recent European Critical Raw Materials Act sets ambitious targets to diversify its supply chains and seek partners.

Notably, it is only aiming to supply 10 percent of its extraction needs domestically and so will require global partners that meet its high environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards to help reduce reliance from single third-party countries.

With Canada’s clean grid, growing opportunities for Indigenous-led mining projects, and existing trade agreements, the country is well-placed to be a key supplier. In fact, only Norway ranked higher than Canada in Clean Energy Canada’s analysis of how well the EU’s current suppliers meet its trade and ESG criteria.

Canada’s clean electricity grid, free trade agreement and defence partnerships all give it advantages that could be recognized under the EU’s current policy approach.

But despite ticking all the right boxes, Canada’s exports of the six critical minerals to the EU have barely changed in recent years, with the exception of nickel, the report pointed out.

Critical minerals have featured in many new strategic partnerships over the last year. Canada has new formal mechanisms for critical mineral cooperation with Germany, Australia, and Saudi Arabia, and it is continuing to implement existing frameworks with the U.K., the EU, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Chile, and Argentina.

Canada needs to continue converting more of the existing MOUs with European partners into binding offtake agreements, according to the report.

The European Investment Bank framework should be operationalized so more EU financing can flow into specific Canadian mining and processing projects, the report recommended.

Also, Canada and the EU need to build a “strategic projects pipeline” aligned with the EU’s Critical Materials Act.

Such projects could include low-carbon cobalt from the Baptiste mine in B.C. and the Crawford mine in Ontario.

Canada also could export recycled copper or recycling technology to meet EU’s ambitious targets to use recycled copper.

Canada needs to develop purpose built “mineral corridors” marketed specifically to European industrial partners, with a Quebec-centred “low-carbon battery minerals corridor” as a top priority, the report said.

Canada should focus on the higher purity nickel needed for batteries, and work on integrating its nickel trade with the EU’s battery and automotive supply chains.

Canada also should prioritize turning its globally significant reserves of rare earth elements into a commercially viable industry.

Renewables are the fastest-growing source of energy globally, supplying all new growth in the world’s electricity demand in 2025, according to the report. Meanwhile, EVs are poised to make up close to 30 percent of new car sales worldwide this year.

“As the global economy electrifies, Canada has an opportunity to leverage our critical mineral resources to secure our long-term economic competitiveness and position Canada as the type of energy superpower that will last.” Clean Energy Canada

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Canada’s productivity problem is a superstar-firm problem – and AI is our chance to fix it

OPINION

By Joel Blit

Joel Blit is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and the Co-Founder of the Canadian AI Adoption Initiative. This commentary first appeared here on the C.D. Howe website.

Canada’s ongoing productivity crisis is usually explained through a familiar set of factors: The industrial mix, small average firm size, weak business investment, lack of competition and a risk-averse culture. 

While all are contributors, the fundamental problem is simpler: Canada lacks hyper-productive superstar firms. The reason for this, is that we are failing to create and keep the startups that reimagine entire business models and industries around disruptive technologies. 

Over the last half century, Canada has had the lowest growth in labour productivity of any G7 country. Canadians now produce, on average, 75 percent of the value that Americans do in an hour of work, measured at purchasing power parity. 

However, averages hide a more complicated story. Canada’s productivity problem is not a generalized lack of productivity, but rather a gap at the very top. Data from the Luxembourg Income Study are suggestive: While the mean equivalized Canadian household income was 84 percent that of the United States, the median was 98 percent.

A recent Bank of Canada paper provides more direct evidence: the top 10 percent of the income distribution accounts for three-quarters of the difference in GDP per adult between Canada and the United States, and up to two-thirds of the measured labour productivity gap.  

Much of the difference between U.S. and Canadian average productivity can be attributed to Canada’s relative lack of superstar firms with hyper-productive employees.

For example, consider the thought experiment of Google parent, Alphabet, moving its global operations to Canada. Adding its value added and employees to Canada’s GDP and population, respectively, would increase Canada’s GDP per capita by nine percent and narrow the gap with the United States by 15 percent. This is only a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it illustrates the economic impact of a single superstar firm. 

How, then, can Canada build its own hyper-productive firms; companies built around scalable, technology-enabled business models that employ highly skilled workers, leverage intangible assets and serve global markets? 

Understanding the origins of the largest and most successful U.S. firms provides a clue. Setting aside Nvidia, whose chips are powering the AI revolution, the next five largest firms by market capitalization – Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta – rose to dominance by reimagining an industry around a past disruptive technology.

Microsoft and Apple reimagined personal computing. Apple also later reimagined connectivity by turning phones into mobile pocket computers and entertainment devices. Amazon, Meta, and Google used the internet to reimagine retail, social connection, search and advertising. 

The good news is that Canada has another chance. A new technological revolution is underway, and with it the opportunity to build the next generation of globally dominant firms. Artificial intelligence will likely prove even more consequential than the personal computer or the internet, because it radically lowers the cost of using data to make decisions and take actions. 

The danger is that Canada treats AI as an efficiency tool rather than a reimagining catalyst. Most firms will begin by using it to replace or augment tasks: drafting e-mails, summarizing documents, writing code, answering customer-service questions. That is useful. But the largest gains will come when firms ask a more ambitious question: If intelligence is cheap, abundant and can be embedded everywhere, what should their business become? 

For the first time in its new AI strategy, Ottawa recognizes AI as a general-purpose technology that can transform every sector. Its national AI literacy initiative has the potential to not only empower Canadians, but also to create the conditions for a groundswell of AI-native entrepreneurship. If history is any guide, it is startups and not incumbents that will effectively reimagine most industries.  

Tomorrow’s new economic champions will be companies with business models built around AI. They may be founded by the nurse who reimagines health care, the teacher who reimagines education, or the farmer who reimagines agriculture, all around AI.

Canada’s new AI strategy proposes to support such startups with commercialization programs, strategic procurement to make government an anchor customer, and a $500-million Canadian Tech Growth Fund to provide scale-up capital and help keep young companies in Canada. All are important investments if Canada is to generate a new generation of globally ambitious AI-native firms. 

To be sure, we could do more. As Canadians learn about AI, they should also learn about entrepreneurship, with the two being explicitly linked. We must develop AI-specific founder and venture development programs that will mould the next generations of entrepreneurs and raise the ambition of future ventures.

We must build a culture that sees AI not just as a threat to existing businesses and jobs, but as an opportunity to build new and better ones.  

Canada’s productivity problem is, at root, a missing-superstar-firms problem. AI gives us a rare opportunity to build the hyper-productive firms we have long lacked: firms that reimagine industries, achieve global scale, and keep our best talent here.

The internet created the last generation of superstar firms. AI will create the next. The question is whether any of them will be Canadian. C.D. Howe Institute

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Higher personal and corporate taxes hurt innovation and shift its location: U.S. researchers

Higher personal and corporate taxes negatively affect the quantity and quality of inventive activity and shift its location, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research in the U.S.

“We find that both personal and corporate taxes matter for innovation. The quantity, quality and the location of innovation are all affected by the tax system and the effects are quantitatively important,” said the researchers, who looked at the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the U.S. over the 20^th century.

Higher personal and corporate shift inventive activity’s location at the macro level [states over time] and micro level [individual inventors and firms], they said.

At macro level, cross-state spillovers or business-stealing from one state to another are important, but do not account for all of the effect, according to their working paper.

Agglomeration effects from local innovation clusters tend to weaken responsiveness to taxation, the study found. Corporate inventors respond more strongly to taxes than their non-corporate counterparts.

The study’s authors are:

• Ufuk Akcigit at the University of Chicago.
• John Grigsby in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.
• Tom Nicolas at Harvard Business School.
• Stephanie Stantcheva in the Department of Economics at Harvard University.

The research team used three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since1920; a dataset of the employment, location and patents of firms active in R&D since1921; and an historical state-level corporate tax database since 1900, which we link to an existing database on state-level personal income taxes.

Their analysis focused on the impact of taxes on individual inventors and firms (the micro level) and on states over time (the macro level).

“We find that personal and corporate income taxes have significant effects at the state level on patents, citations (which are a well-established marker of the quality of patents), inventors in the state, and the share of patents produced by firms as opposed to individuals,” the study said.

“We show that these effects cannot be fully accounted for by inventors moving across state lines and therefore do not merely reflect ‘zero-sum’ business-stealing of one state from other states.”

As for the micro-level, “Again, we find that taxes have significant negative effects on the quantity and quality (as measured by citations) of patents produced by inventors, including on the likelihood of producing a highly successful patent (which gathers many citations).”

Furthermore, “we show that individual inventors are negatively affected by the corporate tax rate, but less so than by personal income taxes.”

Corporate inventors are much more “elastic” to personal and corporate income taxes than non-corporate inventors (individual “garage” inventors operating outside the boundaries of firms), and are especially strongly elastic to the corporate tax rate, the study noted.

“We also show that an inventor is less sensitive to taxes when there is more agglomeration – i.e., more inventors in the same technological field in the state.”

“At the individual firm-level, we find that corporate taxes – and to a lesser extent, personal income taxes – have significant negative effects on the level of patents, citations, and research workers employed in corporate R&D laboratories”

The study found that inventors are “significantly less likely” to locate in states with higher taxes.

“Taxes affect the amount of innovation, the quality of innovation, and the location of inventive activity,” according to the study.

The effects are economically large especially at the macro state-level, where cross-state spillovers and extensive margin location and entry decisions compound the micro, individual-level elasticities, the study said.

Not all the effects of taxes at the macro-level are accounted for by cross-state business stealing or spillovers. Corporate inventors are most sensitive to taxation; and positive agglomeration effects play an important role, perhaps in offering a type of compensating differential for taxation.

“While our analysis focuses on the relationship between taxation and innovation, our data and approach have much broader implications,” the researchers said. “We find that taxes have important effects on intensive and extensive margin decisions, on the mobility of people and where inventors and firms choose to locate.”

[Editor’s note: Although the study looked at the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the U.S., its findings that higher corporate and personal taxes have negative impacts on innovation have implications for Canada, where personal income taxes are generally higher than in the U.S.

Canada's top combined federal and provincial income tax rates reach about 53.5 percent, whereas the top U.S. federal income tax rate is 37 percent (plus up to about 13.3 percent at the state level in high-tax states like California, bringing top combined U.S. rates to around 50 percent.

As for corporate taxes, the U.S. federal corporate tax rate is a flat 21 percent. Canada's federal corporate rate is 15 percent, but it is combined with provincial corporate taxes.

Canada's combined average general corporate tax rate sits around 26.2 percent (varying by province, from roughly 23 percent to 31 percent total), which is slightly higher than the combined U.S. federal-state average of roughly 25.8 percent.

Policy analysts and critics in Canada, who point to an entrepreneurial exodus and high top-bracket tax rates, have called for comprehensive tax reform, including cutting corporate and personal income taxes and eliminating the capital gains tax]. Harvard University

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Crucial to make the general public a part of research and policy to gain support and trust for science and science advice

It is crucial to make the general public a part of research and policy, at a time when trust in governments is falling across many democracies and populists are casting scientists and academic institutions as untrustworthy “elites,” according to a commentary by international researchers in the journal Nature.

“This would foster trust and make academic research and government policies seem more legitimate. People are more likely to support – and champion – science advice that they helped to generate, said the commentary, whose lead author is Chris Tyler, associate professor at University College London in the U.K.

Mechanisms for public input into science policy exist in some nations, but remain the exception rather than the rule, the researchers said. Communication runs mainly between policymakers and academics.

Inside academia, the picture is similar. Ways to involve citizens in policy-relevant research are well studied, but under-resourced and under-practised. And the methods that turn research into forms of evidence that are useful for policymaking – including systematic reviews and analyses – rarely involve the public.

“Democratizing research and science-policy processes will mean rethinking how scientists, citizens and policymakers interact,” the researchers said. They highlighted six steps that governments and academic institutions can take to “put the public at the heart of their work:”

• Involve the public in research:

Research produced jointly with the community is more likely to be aligned with real-world policy priorities, increasing its salience. For instance, between 2015 and 2018, the European Union invited citizens across 30 countries to co-create research priorities for its Horizon 2020 funding-program agenda.

Whereas 16 expert-led foresight reports recommended prioritizing technological advances, citizens placed higher value on strong communities, health and well-being, education and local economies.

Public involvement can also make technical evidence more readily interpretable and thus potentially more trustworthy. In 2016, for instance, U.K. researchers and the London-based charity Sense About Science worked with parents to co-design a website that explained in simple terms why hospitals cannot be easily compared with one another when it comes to survival rates for congenital heart surgery. This helped to overcome previous misinterpretations and alarm around the publication of crude league tables.

Yet few funders require participatory research as a condition of grants. Most promotion criteria do not reward it. And few universities maintain dedicated community-liaison staff or citizen panels. 

To move forwards, universities should establish units that provide methodological support, relationship building and logistics for participatory projects.

Funders should make public involvement an expected part of research proposals and projects, from setting the agenda to disseminating the outcomes, and they should properly finance it. 

[Editor’s note: In Canada, specific Tri-Council agency programs – particularly through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research – require public or patient participation as active partners in the research process rather than just as passive study subjects.

Canadian universities also citizen panels and public advisory groups to guide research.

At McMaster University, the McMaster Health Forum regularly convenes citizen panels (typically 14 to 16 “everyday people”) to evaluate research evidence, share lived experiences and address pressing health and social policy issues.

Groups like the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network, which operates out of academic hospital and university environment, maintain dedicated Citizens' Panels to help prioritize research areas and shape study deliverables].

• Make advisory bodies participatory:

Governments should also build community participation into science advisory committees. Public deliberation should be included early, rather than being at the end or ignored entirely, as it often is currently, the researchers said.

For example, since the mid-1980s, the Danish Board of Technology (now Democracy x), a non-profit foundation in Copenhagen, has run more than a dozen consensus conferences on issues such as gene technology and the marine environment to help shape Danish legislative agendas.

[Editor’s note: In Canada, the federal government does not have a dedicated, permanent "Citizens' Science Advisory Committee," though it operates a Citizen Science Portal and receives occasional recommendations on public science from parliamentary groups and bodies like the Council of Canadian Academies.

Agencies like the Public Health Agency of Canada utilize an Advisory Committee on Science comprised of professional experts rather than a citizen-focused advisory panel.

Canada’s chief science advisor has a youth council but doesn’t have a citizens’ advisory committee].

• Embrace diverse knowledge:

Communities outside academia and government also have valuable knowledge. Trust is built when people recognize that their expertise has been taken seriously, the researchers said.

“Researchers, science advisers and policymakers should empower people to voice their questions, values and concerns – and not dismiss ones that they disagree with.”

Formal institutional channels, such as legal frameworks and mandated co-governance bodies, are needed for lasting change; goodwill is not enough. Knowledge holders need genuine decision-making power, and bridging diverse knowledge systems requires skilled cultural intermediaries.

Universities should set requirements to make inclusive knowledge practices the norm, rather than the exception, said the researchers’ commentary. They should change their promotion criteria to recognize co-produced research. Grant funders should require co-production plans for projects, with community partners listed as co-investigators.

[Editor’s note: Canada uses several formal mechanisms to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into research, led by the Tri-Agency granting councils, federal ethics codes and regulatory frameworks.

(See: https://researchmoneyinc.com/article/ottawa-must-do-more-to-weave-indigenous-knowledge-into-canada-s-research-and-policy-development).

The vast majority of Canadian universities use formal mechanisms, research institutes, and ethical frameworks to include Indigenous knowledges in academic research. National data shows that roughly 97 percent of Canadian institutions actively incorporate Indigenous knowledges, methods, and protocols into research projects.

Many campuses (such as the University of Calgary and the University of Waterloo ) feature specialized Indigenous research support teams and offices to guide respectful community partnerships.

The University of Victoria, for example, requires that research involving Indigenous groups must follow protocols defined by those communities to ensure that they own and control the data].

• Be humble, honest and transparent:

Transparency is crucial in cases in which policymaking is urgent and tough choices need to be made quickly. Without it, narratives about back-room science can flourish, the researchers said.

Scientists should be open about their methods, data and uncertainties, including when advising informally. And they should acknowledge the values that shape their recommendations – a rare occurrence in current science advice. 

• Advise any and all governments:

Science advice, with or without public involvement, is useful only if it reaches the right people at the right time. Yet around 90 percent of legislatures lack an adequate governmental science-advisory system.

Often – as in Canada, India, Japan and New Zealand – the executive branch has a science advisory system providing technical advice to help in policymaking, but the legislature lacks an equivalent. “This makes it hard for its members to properly scrutinize the laws it creates.”

“To our knowledge, no judicial branch maintains a standing body dedicated to science advice,” the researchers noted. “But when advice is ad hoc, it can lead to errors, such as misinterpreted genetic results or misunderstood statistics.”

Norway, through its Teknologirödet, a government-funded independent body, provides advice to both the legislature and the executive branch.

• Scale up – radically.

Every research institution and policy organ­ization should establish capabilities and incentives for supporting dialogues between the public, researchers and policymakers, the researchers said.

A research-intensive university might aim for a policy-and-participation office the size of a small academic department. A national legis­lature might aim for a science-advisory body staffed at a fraction of a per cent of the national research workforce.

“Researchers should be incentivized by governments and institutions to consider the societal impact of their work, rather than to publish, publish, publish.”

The UK Research Excellence Framework, which assesses research quality in universities and informs the allocation of public funding, provides a good example, financially incentivizing meas­urable societal impact by making it part of the performance evaluation.

Scientists need to do more public and policy engagement, in fresh ways. Populists talk about “flooding the zone” with a barrage of news and controversies to generate confusion. The research community should answer by bom­barding the information space with credible, accessible science across social-media channels where false information spreads.

Governments with limited resources can partner with civil-society organ­izations and universities to run joint citizen panels.

Universities and research institutions could begin by establishing teams of policy and community-engagement coordi­nators across faculties, funded by writing par­ticipation staff into research grants.

Individual sci­entists could build one community interaction into their next research project – a public pres­entation, a consultation with a patient group or a meeting with a local council – treating the resulting feedback as knowledge, not noise.

“By ramping up participatory research and advisory systems and democratizing how evidence is created and used for policy, members of the public can help to shape the future in a fast-moving and technologically driven world,” the researchers said.

“In time, inclusive processes can help to rebuild trust in governance and academic institutions and democratize and improve knowledge production and decision-making. But first, academic and policy elites need to trust the public.” Nature

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Scientists become less likely to produce disruptive work as they age

Scientists become less likely to produce disruptive work as they age, while younger researchers are more likely to overturn established ideas or open entirely new lines of inquiry, according to a study by University of Chicago and University of Pittsburgh researchers.

The researchers analyzed more than 12.5 million scientists who published between 1960 and 2020. They found that novelty – the linking of previously unconnected ideas – increases with academic age, whereas disruption – the replacement of established ideas with new ones – declines.

“As scientists grow older, their science ages, too – the work to which they anchor, and draw inspiration and expectation,” said study author James A. Evans, the Max Palevsky Professor in Sociology and Data Science, and director of the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago.

“We call it intellectual aging because it’s a social as well as a biological process,” he said.

Evans gives the example of fans preferring to see their favorite, aging musician perform the hits that made them famous, rather than their new music. “Well-known scholars are pushed to return to the work that made them well-known, which accelerates their aging and orientation to older work.”

As scientists move from being trainees to principal investigators, their roles and constraints also notably change. Spending time on leadership, administrative, and reviewing responsibilities can limit the time they have to stay up-to-date on research, which in turn affects how frequently they renew their research references.

This points to how individual aging also has collective consequences, as senior scientists’ preferences can shape their collaborators’ citation practices. Older peer reviewers may also direct authors toward citing familiar or preferred work.

That pattern became especially clear in America after it ended mandatory retirement for academics at the age of 70 in 1994. The average age of papers cited by American scholars increased relative to those cited by their British peers, who were forced into retirement at 65 until 2011.

As well as referencing older material, senior scientists may also be inclined to defend established ideas. The study found that older researchers were more likely to criticize newer papers, often referencing older work as evidence. At the same time, they were less likely to have their own work explicitly criticized by other researchers.

The results of the study are the first to offer careful measurements of innovation over time, versus prior speculative and small-scale work, and they contribute to three areas of innovation study.

First, the study clarifies why previous research on age and creativity has been mixed, while showing that aging enhances combinatorial innovation but limits disruptive breakthroughs. Second, the research connects these cognitive dynamics to team structure, providing insight into why larger, hierarchical teams tend to innovate less, illustrating the social foundations of intellectual aging.

Lastly, the researchers identified the “Nostalgia Effect,” suggesting that, on average, the age of a scientist’s references increases by about one month per career year – shaping how scientists remember, connect, and sometimes struggle to move past ideas over their careers.

“These and other findings invite reflection on potential implications for policy, such as funding, tenure, and promotion systems; immigration and mobility; workforce development; and incentives for (and barriers to) collaboration and innovation,” the researchers said.

Scientific careers today are marked by growing polarization, the researchers noted. A small number of scientists now remain active and influential for longer than ever, whereas many others pass through research as temporary workers, according to the study’s abstract.

Lengthened training periods, the elimination of mandatory retirement, and funding systems that reward experience have concentrated resources among senior scientists.

Evans and his coauthors suggest that funding and promotion systems should promote diverse pathways that enable both continuity and renewal, each of which contribute to scientific progress.

Next, as it relates to the lifting of mandatory retirement, they recommend science policy should assess how funding mechanisms, tenure structures and retirement norms affect the age distribution of fields along with patterns of innovation.

Third, they note that age matters for global competition: Younger scientific workforces such as China and India tend to produce more disruptive work, while older workforces such as in the U.S. and Japan are more likely to incrementally integrate and recombine knowledge.

In the U.S., immigrant scientists (younger on average) often help offset the aging workforce in the country.

“Our scientific workforce, like that of the U.K. and Japan, is growing ever older, and increasingly focused on old ideas and work, leading to a lower and slower churn of new ideas,” Evans said, noting that he hopes the paper helps shape discussion around immigration. “This has measurable consequences for unfolding science.” 

The study emphasizes that team-level actions are an immediate solution to concerns about scientific aging. Institutions are capable of expanding early-career principal investigator and co-corresponding author roles; encouraging intergenerational, flat collaborations; lowering barriers to mobility and cross-institutional work; and recognizing disruptive contributions alongside recombinational synthesis. Sarah Steimer at The University of Chicago

THE GRAPEVINE – News about people, institutions and communities

Dr. Stewart Elgie and Geneviève Morin were selected as co-chairs of the federal Expert Taskforce on Natural Capital Accounting and Nature Financing. Elgie is a professor of law and economics at the University of Ottawa and the Jarislowsky Chair in Clean Economy and Innovation. He is also the founder and chair of the Smart Prosperity Institute, Canada’s major green economy think-tank and policy-research institute. Morin helped establish Fondaction in 1996, a Quebec labour-sponsored investment fund. She held various senior positions with the organization, including chief investment officer, before being appointed president and CEO in January 2020. The Taskforce brings together key leaders from conservation, Indigenous-led conservation, finance, economics, and public policy to help advance innovative solutions that support nature conservation and restoration while strengthening Canada’s economy. Environment and Climate Change Canada

Royal Bank of Canada hired former Ontario minister Caroline Mulroney as vice-chair, tasking her with deepening the lender’s relationships with clients and business leaders globally. Mulroney – daughter of late prime minister Brian Mulroney and previously one of the highest-profile members of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s inner circle – stepped down from her seat in the Ontario Legislature in June. RBC tapped Mulroney for her “unique” experience in public service, legal and financial services, according to an internal announcement viewed by The Globe and Mail. As part of her role, Mulroney will “advise our business leaders on the implications of evolving government policy, regulatory, and public sector developments for our clients,” RBC head of capital markets Derek Neldner said in a memo. The Globe and Mail

CIBC appointed former ADP product and AI chief Prasanna Gopalakrishnan to its board of directors, effective September 1, 2026. Gopalakrishnan brings more than 30 years of experience leading technology, data, cyber and artificial intelligence at scale across banking, wealth management and global consumer businesses. She most recently served as global chief product and AI officer at ADP. Prior to that she served as group chief technology officer at Sky in London and as chief information officer of the Retail Bank at Bank of America, following senior technology leadership roles at Fidelity Investments. CIBC

Montreal-based Shareholders’ Education and Defence Movement (MÉDAC) abolished the executive director position effective Aug. 7. The decision means that MÉDAC, founded in 1995 by Yves Michaud, and its general manager Willie Gagnon are ending their collaboration by mutual agreement after 19 years. Gagnon was a fixture of Canada’s proxy season, regularly appearing at senate committees and corporate annual meetings to press banks and other public companies on various shareholder concerns. During the 2026 proxy season meetings of Canada’s Big Six banks, he was often the only shareholder to speak in support of MÉDAC’s proposals, which ranged from board diversity targets to the governance of AI. MÉDAC said its board has put measures in place to ensure continuity following his departure. MÉDAC

Calgary-headquartered CAD Digital Inc., part of Tetra Digital Group and the company behind Canadian-dollar stablecoin CADD, announced that Carolyn Wilkins, former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, was appointed advisor to the CAD Digital board of directors. Wilkins brings more than two decades of experience across central banking, financial regulation and economic policy. She served as senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada from 2014 to 2020, where she shared responsibility for monetary policy and financial system stability and represented the Bank internationally, including as its G7 and G20 Deputy and as a member of the Financial Stability Board. She is currently an external member of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee and a visiting senior policy scholar at Princeton University’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. The Canadian Press

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McGill University researchers develop more energy-efficient method of building AI systems to measure their own uncertainty

McGill University researchers have developed a more energy-efficient method of building AI systems that are better at measuring – and indicating – their own uncertainty.

This will help users determine when human oversight is needed, when additional data should be collected and when a model is being asked to work beyond the conditions it was trained for, the researchers said. 

“Artificial intelligence systems now play a central role in daily life, from medical diagnosis and content moderation to autonomous driving and AI agents that act on our behalf,” said Mame Diarra Touré, lead author and PhD candidate in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. “As these systems take on more responsibility, they need to become more trustworthy. They should recognize when they are uncertain, rather than giving confident answers in situations where they may be wrong.” 

The research was supervised by David A. Stephens, professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. 

Standard neural networks learn patterns from data and make predictions, but they typically provide a single answer without clearly indicating how confident they are in that response. Bayesian neural networks address this limitation by representing their internal settings as probabilities rather than fixed values, enabling them to estimate uncertainty, particularly when faced with unfamiliar data.

However, this capability often requires significant computational and memory resources, making these networks difficult to deploy at the scale of modern AI systems. 

The researchers found a way to make Bayesian neural networks substantially more efficient while maintaining strong predictive performance. In one experiment, their approach used about 33 times fewer parameters than a commonly used method for estimating uncertainty in AI systems.  

The results suggest that reliable, uncertainty-aware AI can be made practical even for the large and complex systems in use today, Touré said. 

The researchers are now exploring ways to automate the process of identifying which parts of a neural network are most important for a given task. This could help the approach work more effectively across different kinds of data and AI tools, they said. 

Singular Bayesian Neural Networks, by Mame Diarra Touré and David A. Stephens, was presented at the Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026). McGill University

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