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Urgent, integrated and coordinated action required to address major challenges in Canada’s pharmaceutical and life sciences sector: task force report

Canada should establish a nationally anchored late-stage scale-up capital vehicle for life sciences and develop an industrial strategy for supporting anchor companies, says a report by the federally appointed Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force.

Also, Health Canada should expand and accelerate the proposed framework for relying on trusted foreign regulators for innovative drug approvals, said the report to the ministers of health and industry.

Among the report’s 39 recommendations also is that Health Canada should establish a dedicated single-window for navigating the regulatory review process for new drugs, therapies and other products.

Given the urgency of the issues and the scale of the opportunity, “incremental change will not be sufficient to meet the moment,” wrote  task force co-chairs Michelle Boudreau and Martin LeBlanc. Boudreau is a former associate assistant deputy minister at Health Canada. LeBlanc is co-founder and vice-chair of CellCarta Biosciences Inc.

“Decisive action, supported by sustained collaboration, will be required to strengthen outcomes for people in Canada and position Canada for greater resilience and growth in the global life sciences landscape,” they said.

The federal government announced the task force on March 18, 2026, with a mandate to explore innovative, made-in-Canada solutions that enhance competitiveness and long-term growth, to support reliable and sustainable access to pharmaceutical products in Canada. 

The 26-member task force included senior leaders and experts from across industry, research and policy communities.

The task force included two experts who participated as panelists at Research Money’s 25^th annual conference in Ottawa in June. They are Stéphanie Michaud, president and CEO of BioCanRX, and Bettina Hamelin, president and CEO of Innovative Medicines Canada.

The task force found that while Canada performs comparatively well on regulatory review timelines, the overall time from market authorization to coverage on public drug plans is longer than in peer jurisdictions – most notably in post-approval processes.

“These dynamics contribute to longer effective timelines from global launch to patient access in Canada, reinforcing the country’s position as a later-launch market for many innovative medicines,” the report noted.

Evidence also suggests that post-health technology assessment processes, such as sponsor submission timing, pricing negotiations and separate provincial listing decisions, are important drivers of these delays.

These sequential processes are compounded by fragmentation across more than 100 public drug plans and approximately 100,000 private plans, resulting in uneven coverage, administrative complexity and incomplete alignment across decision-makers, the report said.

Health outcomes in Canada remain uneven, reflecting a “postal code lottery” in access to medications, according to the report. “Where a person lives can significantly affect the availability, affordability and timeliness of drug coverage.”

Canada possesses all of the potential and essential ingredients to become a global leader in the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industry as well as a preferred destination for life sciences investment and innovation, the report said.

“Despite these strengths, Canada continues to underperform relative to peer jurisdictions in translating its scientific capacity and industrial base into sustained economic growth and global competitiveness.”

This persistent gap reflects structural and policy challenges that have limited Canada’s ability to fully leverage its assets and attract investment, leaving significant unrealized potential, the report said.

To address this need and capture this opportunity, the task force said Canada must urgently address some long-standing fundamental challenges:

• In comparison to other G7 countries, Canada is slower to provide access to innovative medicines, and its pricing policy prioritizes affordability and sustainability of health systems, which may not fully recognize the role of innovation in generating health care cost savings and delivering system-wide value. As a result, Canada is losing ground as a competitive destination for investment and innovation, global pharmaceutical companies are increasingly deprioritizing Canada for product launches, foreign direct investment in clinical trials and manufacturing in favor of other markets with more predictable policies, faster access, and stronger recognition of innovation value.
• Canada has a strong and highly competitive research infrastructure, but a lack of coordination between health and innovation mandates produces fragmentation across funding programs, translational infrastructure and industry-academic partnerships, which creates a sub-optimal path for the translation of life sciences discoveries into venture-backed companies.
• Canada’s clinical trial environment is underperforming due to structural barriers, complex regulatory paths, fragmented investment, weak data infrastructure and drug reimbursement policies. Canada’s global market share of clinical trials has eroded from six percent in 2021 to its current four percent market share, resulting in an opportunity cost of $2.5 billion in clinical trial spending and approximately 20,000 jobs. 
• Canada lacks a sovereign, connected and accessible health and life sciences data ecosystem to fully leverage artificial intelligence and enable measurement of value/outcomes and healthcare savings from life sciences innovations.
• Canada has a solid track record of creating and maturing venture capital-backed innovative biotech and life sciences companies but fails to retain their ownership and scale them into commercial-stage domestic anchor companies due to a shortage of late-stage growth and scale-up capital from domestic sources and a challenging market access environment. Over the past 15 years, 21 Canadian life sciences companies have been acquired by foreign entities for market values of more than $500 million, with an average transaction value of $1.8 billion. These transactions “illustrate Canada’s systematic inability to retain Canadian ownership of these companies once they reach their value inflexion point.”

“The collective impact of these challenges is reflected in a progressive erosion of domestic and foreign direct investment from both innovative and generic pharmaceutical industry that is weakening Canada’s health sovereignty,” the report said.

The task force said that the life sciences sector “must be viewed as a strategic, nation-building sector and fully supported as such.”

“Given longstanding fragmentation across policies, programs and system actors, achieving this ambition will require a more integrated and coordinated approach to action across the full continuum of the sector.”

According to the report, the geopolitical environment provides an urgent need and a unique opportunity to make Canada a place where:

• people in Canada have access to innovative medicines without long delays once they have been assessed for safety and efficacy by Health Canada.
• the Canadian market is seen as a viable market to launch innovative medicines.
• Canadian talent and research is fully supported from bench science to bedside and commercialization.
• innovation and intellectual property born in Canada can mature and remain in Canada.
• clinical trial networks and data infrastructure power drug development, attract foreign direct investments and offer treatments to people in Canada.
• research and development is supported with a coordinated and coherent set of industrial, investment and tax policies.
• domestic value creation factored into procurement and investment decisions.
• regulation, policy environments and decision-making bodies are adaptive, efficient, agile and collaborative.

Canadian innovative biotech companies attract seed and early-stage support but are ultimately scaled-up with foreign capital, particularly from U.S. venture funds, the report said.

For later-stage investment rounds of more than $50 million, international investors account for 76 percent of all investors and 67 percent of deal volume. As the companies grow, the portion of Canadian ownership drops sharply, shifting majority control to foreign investors and causing them to be acquired prematurely by foreign firms.

These later-stage investors and acquirers often relocate intellectual property and commercialization activities abroad to markets with more favourable financing and scale-up conditions, causing capital and economic returns to leave Canada at the precise moment when value is created.

“Of the top 20 Canadian therapeutic exits since 2013, Canadian investors captured only 23 percent of the returns. As a result, many of the highest-value economic benefits – high-skill jobs, strategic infrastructure and broader ecosystem effects – are lost or never fully built in Canada, weakening the ecosystem between cycles.”

This dynamic has contributed to a sustained “innovation leakage” in Canadian life sciences, characterized by lost economic value, diminished domestic ownership of intellectual property and the continued absence of globally scaled Canadian anchor firms capable of benefiting from and acquiring these promising domestic innovations, the report noted.

The report makes 39 recommendations across the areas of: regulatory modernization in Health Canada; assessment of value, pricing and reimbursement; clinical trials environment and competitiveness; data infrastructure and AI; strengthening translational research; scaling Canadian-based anchor companies; health sovereignty and industrial strategy; and system integration, governance and implementation.

These recommendations include:

Regulatory modernization – Health Canada:

• Enable rolling and flexible regulatory reviews.
• Modernize review processes through collaborative structures.
• Establish a structured engagement program for made-in-Canada advanced therapies.
• Strengthen regulatory capacity through targeted modernization investments.

Assessment of value, pricing and reimbursement:

Redefine value frameworks using a multi-dimensional framework, specifically clinical/patient value, health system value and societal value (for example, productivity), that frameworks be further developed to recognize the value of innovation, and that an implementation plan be developed with a broad range of interested parties. 

• Establish a single-window navigator within Canada’s Drug Agency.
• Role and mandate of the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance. Canada should review its pricing policies and pricing frameworks for innovative drugs in consideration of the current geopolitical context, including the current focus on net prices, as well as Canadian sovereignty and security of supply.
• Pricing – Patented Medicines Regulations and the Patented Medicines Prices Review Board (PMPRB). The Government of Canada should quickly consider whether the current model of international price referencing and price monitoring of list prices of patented medicines conducted by the PMPRB remains appropriate and relevant.

Clinical trials environment and competitiveness:

• Maintain and actively promote Health Canada’s 30-day Clinical Trial Application review timeline as a key global competitive advantage to attract investment and trials and avoid changes that could introduce delays or uncertainty.
• Implement pan-Canadian ethics review and contracting, including national harmonization of research ethics approvals.
• Improve national trial coordination and implement a single-window concierge service.
• Invest in national clinical trials infrastructure platform and capacity growth.
• Promote and fund high impact clinical trials, including global trials with Canadian research leadership.
• Adjust Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax incentives criteria to stimulate investment in clinical trials.

Data infrastructure and AI:

• Advance national coordination of health data and real-world evidence and develop pan-Canadian real-time data architecture.
• Leverage nation-wide health data infrastructure
• Collaborate with other countries (middle powers) on health data-related applications encompassing storage, governance, interoperability and secure exchange of health data.
• Support the development of health AI for decision-making, risk prediction, public health surveillance, health system planning, emergency response and research.

Strengthen translational research:

• Establish a federal coordination function for translational health research to overcome fragmentation and better align infrastructure and funding.
• Address translational funding and coordination gaps.
• Strengthen company incubation infrastructure in key innovation hubs.
• Consider a federal tax credit program for investors who make capital investments in early-stage companies (emulating the B.C. venture capital tax credit).
• Leverage the federal Canada Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative program to stimulate private investment in Canadian-based VC funds, to stimulate private investment in Canadian-based earlier-stage venture capital funds focused on life sciences.

Scaling Canadian-based life sciences anchor companies:

• Attract late-stage scale-up capital from Canadian Pension funds. There currently is no Canadian institutional ownership in any of Canada’s top three publicly traded biotechnology companies (Xenon, Zymeworks and AbCellera).
• Develop a Canada-first regulatory strategy for supporting potential anchor firms.
• Consider establishing a Canadian biotechnology index on public markets to support capital formation and attract investor interest, potentially launched, hosted or benchmarked through NASDAQ.

Health sovereignty and industrial strategy:

• Conduct national mapping of life sciences assets.
• Prioritize strategic sectors and niche areas.
• Establish a product policy framework which creates market certainty for medicines that have investments in Canada.
• Align regulatory, access and investment policies to support Canadian R&D, manufacturing, scale-up and commercialization activities of domestic and multinational companies to promote long-term ecosystem sustainability and vitality.
• Strengthen procurement tools.
• Pursue international partnerships for supply diversification.
• Maintain balanced ecosystem and consistent standards for both domestic and multinational firms. Ensure policies support contributions of both domestic companies and multinationals to system resilience, including globally competitive market access and IP policies in Canada.

The task force co-chairs said the Government of Canada should ensure timely implementation and execution of the recommendations by creating without delay a mandate for four dedicated implementation teams constituted of public and private sector members with technical experience and expertise to further define and develop a plan for implementation of task force recommendations.

These teams would report to an overarching body that would oversee the process, ensure overall alignment and monitor implementation progress and target achievement.

The chairs of the task force recommended that the federal government prioritize these recommendations as follows: within 0-3 months, within 6-9 months, and 9+ months.

• Within 3 months all recommendations regarding Health Canada, Canada’s Drug Agency, and the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, and establish the identified technical working groups, as well as the overarching body to oversee the process and measure and report on implementation.
• Within 3-9 months all recommendations regarding health sovereignty and Canada’s industrial strategy, data, infrastructure, AI, translational research and scaling Canadian-based life sciences anchor companies, as well as all recommendations related to the clinical trials environment and competitiveness.
• From 9 months onwards continue ongoing implementation monitoring and reporting of the task force recommendations by the overarching responsible body.

The task force said it believes that successful implementation of recommendations and execution of strategy can yield significant short and longer term economic, R&D and productivity growth for Canada:

• Foreign direct investments of global pharmaceutical companies resulting from policy implementation and ecosystem improvements could yield multi-billion dollar investments in domestic manufacturing capacity from innovative manufacturers.
• Incremental clinical trial R&D spending could exceed $2 billion annually and create thousands of jobs assuming restoration of Canada’s historical six-percent market share of global clinical trials.
• The longer-term development of two or three commercial-stage Canadian life sciences anchor firms with market cap of $50 billion could generate significant annual revenues of $5 billion to $10 billion, annual R&D expenditures of $2 billion to $4 billion and over 10,000 quality jobs.
• National health data architecture and AI strategy could yield additional revenues derived from health IT company growth, real-world evidence data as well as multi-billion dollar savings from health care system cost efficiencies.
• Significant additional system impacts from improved and equitable patient health outcomes, health emergency readiness, health sovereignty and pharmaceutical supply security.

The Government of Canada said it welcomes the task force’s report and “will carefully consider the Task Force’s recommendations as part of its efforts to improve affordable access to pharmaceuticals while strengthening the growth and resilience of Canada's life sciences sector.” Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force

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U.S. President Donald Trump has set his sights on generic drug imports into the U.S. amid the latest bout of trade tensions between Canada and the U.S. In a social media post, Trump said that as of August 1, 2028, generic drugs being brought into the U.S. will face a 100-percent tariff, which will rise to 200 percent a year later. “This is done in order to RESHORE Generic Pharmaceutical Production into America, with a penalty to those Companies that decide not to build Plant and Equipment within the stated period of time given to them,” the post said. According to market research firm Orion Market Research, the North America generic drug market was valued at US$176.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$315.5 billion by 2035. The Canadian Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Exporters Alliance said in a statement it has seen the proposed tariff framework in the social media post and is waiting for details from the U.S. administration. The alliance said it believes “there is sufficient time for industry participants and policymakers to further assess implementation details, supply chain implications, and opportunities to support each other’s domestic manufacturing objectives.” Jim Keon, president of the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association, said in a statement that a resilient supply chain for generic drugs is critical to patient care, health care systems and the security of both Canada and the U.S. The Canadian Press

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Canada needs a domestic semiconductor industry base to achieve sovereign AI and compute: Canada’s Semiconductor Council

Canada’s National AI Strategy rightly puts sovereignty at its centre, but there is no sovereign AI without sovereign compute which requires a domestic semiconductor base, according to a  position paper by Canada’s Semiconductor Council (CSC).

As the national “AI for All” strategy moves into implementation, semiconductors should be scoped in as a named pillar, aligned with the AI strategy rather than separate from it, the CSC recommended.

“This is not a call to rival NVIDIA or the frontier model race; it is a call to put more Canada into sovereign cloud and to build on Canadian strengths in photonics, chip design, advanced packaging and compound semiconductors,” the CSC said.

Canada’s advantage is brain power, not cash outlay, and crucially the pillar needs no large new spending: the funding vehicles already exist, the council said. “The task is to let Canadian industry plug into them.”

The commitment to further enhance and secure Canada’s chip design and fabrication capabilities, building on the spin-off of the National Research Council’s Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre (CPFC), “is a real signal,” the CSC noted.

The national AI strategy estimates Canada will need 5.5 gigawatts (GW) of AI compute by 2030, commits to a world-leading public supercomputer by 2031, expands the Compute Access Fund by $700 million, and points to finalized partnerships proposing 850 megawatts (MW) of sovereign compute by 2030, scaling to 2.3 GW with investments in the tens of billions.

But no section of the strategy speaks specifically to the layer beneath compute, the CSC pointed out. “Chips appear throughout the document as a feature of the compute conversation, never as a strategic base in their own right.”

A compute build of 850 MW scaling to 2.3 GW, backed by tens of billions in spending, will buy an enormous volume of chips, photonics, packaging and systems.

“Without a plan to source Canadian where it exists, that spend flows offshore, and the sovereignty the strategy seeks runs on hardware Canada neither makes nor governs,” the CSC said. “Sovereignty without supply-chain depth is only partial. If Canadian sovereign AI runs on imported chips, the claim is incomplete.”

Four elements would make up the semiconductors pillar:

• Buy Canadian across the whole system.

The compute build will spend tens of billions on hardware. A capability that controls its processors but imports all of its memory, storage and networking is sovereign in name only, so a Canadian-content expectation should reach the whole system, including what Canada buys from suppliers such as AMD and NVIDIA, global leaders that invest in Canadian talent and R&D as partners, not substitutes for domestic capability.

Optical connections in particular, from inside the data centre to the long-haul networks between sites, are a Canadian strength, and tying procurement to open standards such as UCIe keeps Canadian designs compatible with global suppliers.

• Back Canadian chip design, including at the edge.

Canada is strong at designing chips, and not only the large data-centre processors.

The low-power chips that put AI into vehicles, factories, power grids and everyday devices, across sectors from transportation to energy and health, are exactly what Canadian firms such as Blumind, Irreversible Inc., and Taalas are already building, and where much of the value and the jobs will be.

A dedicated design program with access to the financing the strategy already created would keep that work, and those companies, in Canada.

• Build on Canada’s expertise in advanced photonics and packaging.

As the frontier of chipmaking concentrates in a few countries, the supply chain in photonics from design to manufacturing, integration and packaging that turn chips into finished systems (what the industry calls heterogeneous integration) is a layer where Canada can lead, with real infrastructure already provided by CPFC in Ottawa on III-V chip manufacturing, and in integration and advanced packaging provided by the IBM Canada-C2MI partnership in Bromont, Quebec.

Extending the CPFC fabrication facility toward known good die and packaging would build on that.

• Train and keep the talent.

Semiconductor skills, from photonics to chip design, are not the same as software skills, and should be named in the government’s talent programs. Just as important, Canada has to keep training its own: FABrIC, which produces roughly 1,000 chip designers a year, runs out at the end of 2028 and should be renewed. Canada’s Semiconductor Council

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The Government of Canada announced a $50 million investment, through the Strategic Response Fund, in Natural Products Canada’s (NPC) $94.8-million project to strengthen Canada’s agri-food sector. As an industry-led, not-for-profit organization, NPC is well positioned to work hand-in-hand with Canadian innovators and businesses to commercialize breakthrough agri-food technologies and accelerate their adoption across global markets, the government said. The government’s investment will create more than 550 jobs, generate over $1.8 billion in GDP and help NPC establish a new Capacity Building Fund that will support investments in food-related manufacturing and processing capacity and strengthen domestic food production, supply chain resilience and food security. NPC said it has invested in over 100 companies, generated $622 million in follow-on capital, and contributed $900 million to Canada’s GDP. “This funding lets us do more: more capital, more support, and greater capacity to help Canadian companies reach the market and scale,” said Shelley King, founder and CEO of NPC. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

Canada has become the first country to gain observer status in a future fighter jet program run by the U.K., Japan and Italy, even as a decision on Ottawa's current order of F-35s remains up in the air. As an observer nation, Canada will gain insider access to information about the Global Combat Air Program as the sixth-generation fighter is under development. Observer status does not commit Canada to buying the jets. The four countries' defence ministers announced the news in London in a statement timed to coincide with a major U.K. international air show where the next-generation fighter is being promoted. "Observer status will give Canada the opportunity to deepen its understanding of next-generation combat air capabilities, strengthen our industrial collaboration and contribute more closely to the partnerships that will define the future of air power," said Defence Minister David McGuinty. The three partner countries launched the program to replace the Eurofighter Typhoons and Japan's F-2 jets and set a timeline to bring the new fighter into service by 2035. No details were revealed about what Canada's new status with the program will mean, but Ottawa's expression of interest was welcomed by the partner countries. Canada's plan to purchase a fleet of American fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets has been under a review for more than a year. The Canadian Press

The national cyberspying agency will benefit from the Liberal government’s plan to build up Canadian defence capabilities but is claiming a blanket exemption from buying from Canadian vendors itself, its internal documents say. Caroline Xavier, chief of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), signed off on a March proposal to say everything the agency does is a “sensitive operation” and qualifies for exclusion from the government’s Buy Canadian policy, according to documents released in response to an access-to-information request from The Logic. The agency, like the Department of National Defence, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Canada Border Services Agency, is subject to the Buy Canadian policy the government implemented in December 2025, which is meant to “strengthen Canada’s economic resilience by leveraging federal procurement to prioritize Canadian suppliers, materials and content.” However, the policy allows exemptions for things like purchases for the military, for embassies and consulates abroad – and for “sensitive operations,” a term it doesn’t define. In the March memo, the CSE’s chief financial officer, Julie Chassé, told Xavier that Public Services and Procurement Canada (which does much of the buying for other parts of the federal government) would take the agency’s word on anything it wanted to label sensitive. “CSE is seeking Chief endorsement and approval to apply the ‘sensitive operations’ exclusion to all CSE procurement,” and to send “blanket letters for exclusion” to agencies that buy things on CSE’s behalf, Chassé’s note said. Xavier agreed. In response to questions from The Logic, CSE spokesperson Marie-Pier Baril said despite the words in the memo, it did not mean that all CSE procurement would be excluded from Buy Canadian rules. The Logic

The Government of Canada launched the Defence Drone Initiative (DDI), a new initiative that will accelerate the development, testing and production of Canadian uncrewed and autonomous systems to help provide the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) with access to the sovereign capabilities they need in an increasingly complex security environment. Drone technologies can provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, support logistics, protect personnel, counter hostile drones and perform a range of operational tasks. Success increasingly depends on the ability to innovate, adapt and field new capabilities at speed. Led collaboratively by the Department of National Defence and the Defence Investment Agency, the DDI will create a faster pathway for promising Canadian technologies to move from concept to operational testing and, where they meet defence requirements, into production. The initiative will engage broadly with the Canadian defence ecosystem, from startups to medium-sized enterprises and established defence manufacturers. Initial areas where these capabilities could support CAF and CCG operations include:

• low-cost tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones.
• uncrewed ground vehicles for logistics and complex terrain.
• uncrewed maritime surface and underwater systems.
• low-cost, low-collateral counter-drone interceptors.
• standardized drone munitions and explosive payloads.
• deep precision strike systems.

The Request for Supply Arrangement (RFSA) is open on CanadaBuys until August 14, 2026. Qualification under the RFSA will not necessarily result in a contract, but will allow successful suppliers to compete for future work, including testing, prototype development, limited acquisitions and potential production opportunities. National Defence

The federal agency in charge of drawing direct investment from abroad is proposing a “high-impact deals hub” for investments that need special attention, and a “Canada Dealbook” that would be a catalogue of projects foreign investors might be interested in. But if Canada actually wants to attract $500 billion in private capital, federal departments will have to stop pursuing incompatible goals, says Invest in Canada in a written plan that The Logic obtained through an access-to-information filing. Prime Minister Mark Carney is planning to hold a Canada Investment Summit in Toronto in mid-September, convening global investors to pitch Canadian nation-building projects as targets for their capital. Canadian pension funds are to co-host, though they’ve long shied away from many Canadian investments themselves. The Invest in Canada framework warns that different parts of the government often work at cross-purposes because they have different targets and performance measures. That “prevents joint planning, goal-setting, incentivizes different behaviours, results in competing priorities and undermines cohesion.” The federal players alone include Industry Canada and the National Research Council, Natural Resources, Agriculture, National Defence, Transport and Infrastructure; plus financing agencies like the Business Development Bank of Canada, Export Development Canada, Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canada Growth Fund. Regulators like Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, and the Impact Assessment Agency are involved, too. “While many departments contribute to making Canada a good place to do business, clarity is required for each organization to be effective and accountable,” the document says. The goal should be “seamless investor experiences across all federal touchpoints.” Invest in Canada would lead this initiative, with protocols requiring everyone – even ministers’ offices – to inform it of upcoming meetings with foreign multinationals, to report on those meetings afterward, and to refer those potential investors to Invest in Canada for any follow-ups. The Logic

Canada needs to be much more strategic about foreign direct investment (FDI), Independent Senator Colin Deacon from Nova Scotia said in a LinkedIn post. FDI is perfectly suited for investments in tangible assets because the resulting opportunities and jobs naturally stay in Canada, he said. However, intangible assets (IP, data, etc.) are mobile and the evidence shows that the majority of the future opportunities, jobs and wealth migrates out of Canada. Deacon said he hopes there is a federal process for determining what type of investment a given investor should – or should not – be directed towards (e.g., tangible/intangible, new/existing). However he noted that nearly half of Canada’s record levels of FDI, an amount that leads the G7, was used to acquire existing Canadian companies – “ownership changing hands, not new capacity built.” (LinkedIn post by Qi Wu). Deacon noted that three years ago the Senate Banking Committee dedicated an entire report to the urgency with which Canada needs to address this critical problem. According to the report, “Current government policies, programs and technical knowhow are not adapted to the realities of the innovation-based and data-driven economy – or the intangible economy. This is where the lion's share of value is created today and will likely be created in the future. Most peer nations, including the United States, have already shifted their attention. Without coordinated policy changes that adapt to the realities of the intangible economy, Canada will continue to see an erosion in both domestic and foreign investment, and in standards of living.” Deacon said Canada urgently needs policies that mobilize domestic investment in growth companies built on intangible assets. “FDI should no longer be used as a crutch propping up these firms, or an exit strategy that stands in for the domestic capital discipline necessary to build global leaders,” he said. The federal government has lots of room to move if it wants to increase domestic investment in companies built on intangibles, Deacon said. For example, 166 “Business Innovation and Growth Support” programs across government are spending provided $6.4 billion to over 47,000 businesses in 2023, according to data from Statistics Canada and the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. “Imagine if this [money] was used to catalyze domestic investment in Canada’s world-class companies built on intangible assets,” Deacon said. Colin Deacon on LinkedIn

A federal “axe the fax” digital prescription program that was shut down earlier this year after low uptake, contentious parliamentary hearings and nearly $300 million in spending has been given new life as the Government of Québec plans to roll out the platform widely to the province’s doctors and pharmacists. Quebec said it will operate its version of PrescribeIT, known locally by its French-language name Prescription Québec, with provincial funds. The main technology vendor will remain Telus Health, which collected about a third of the federal spending on the program and retains ownership of most of the intellectual property. Canada Health Infoway launched PrescribeIT in 2017 as part of initiatives to replace fax machines with digital alternatives for sending prescriptions between doctors and pharmacists. Nearly $300 million in federal funds was invested in PrescribeIT over the years. The program was shut down May 29 in most of the country because of low uptake, with less than five percent of prescriptions going through the system. Quebec Health Minister Sonia Bélanger convinced Infoway and the federal government to keep a pilot project in the province going past the May shutdown. Infoway and Santé Québec, the provincial authority for health care delivery, announced they reached a deal to continue the Prescription Québec pilot project and expected to expand it to the rest of the province’s 1,900 retail pharmacies. One reason for PrescribeIT’s low uptake in other provinces was a per-prescription fee charged to pharmacists, which caused some to stop using the platform. Quebec has said it won’t charge such a fee. The Globe and Mail

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) announced a public consultation seeking views on how to strengthen transparency for AI systems and AI-generated outputs. The public consultation supports the Government of Canada’s commitment to advancing AI transparency as outlined in Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All and centres on:

• detecting and identifying AI-generated content.
• helping individuals know when they are interacting with an AI system.
• improving access to consistent, understandable information about AI systems, including their development, capabilities and limitations.
• enabling the tracking of serious incidents related to AI systems.
• advancing ways to better track the activities and interactions of AI agents.

Canadians and residents of Canada are invited to read the discussion paper and to share their views on these topics and on actions the federal government should consider to support greater transparency for AI systems and their outputs. Respond to the anonymous survey in the discussion paper or submit comments by email to AIConsultations-ConsultationsIA@ised-isde.gc.ca The consultation will run from July 23 to September 23, 2026. Anyone with an interest in shaping Canada’s AI future is encouraged to participate. Feedback will inform the government’s next steps to advance safe, responsible and reliable AI in Canada. ISED

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced a combined investment of nearly $40.5 million through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative and the Regional Defence Investment Initiative for 23 Waterloo and Brant region businesses and organizations. The investment is to grow, strengthen domestic supply chains and advance next-generation defence, security and AI technologies. This includes an investment for XL Tool Inc. to modernize operations and expand domestic technical capabilities, supporting entry into the defence and aerospace markets. The company is undertaking a more than $4-million project, with FedDev Ontario supporting up to $1 million. FedDev Ontario

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced a combined investment of $7.5 million to support three Burlington-based businesses as they scale and seize new growth opportunities in the defence, manufacturing and telecommunications sectors.

• PV Labsis undertaking a $14-million project, with FedDev Ontario supporting $5 million through the Regional Defence Investment Initiative, to expand domestic manufacturing of its advanced aerial stabilization and imaging systems, helping build Canada’s sovereign aerospace and defence capabilities by strengthening domestic production capacity and reinforcing Canada’s role in global aerospace and defence supply chains.
• Modern Elevator Innovationsis receiving $1 million through the Regional Tarriff Response Initiative, to support facility upgrades, including modernizing its equipment and processes to increase fabrication capabilities.
• Software and geospatial solutions company, Spatial Data Analyticsis undertaking an almost $4-million project, with FedDev Ontario supporting $1.5 million, through the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative, to commercialize and scale its AI-driven solutions to support utility and telecommunications infrastructure inspection and management. FedDev Ontario

Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan) announced over $10 million to support nine projects with businesses and other organizations in Saskatchewan. Among the projects announced, organizations like the Global Agri-Food Advancement Partnership, the Global Institute for Food Security, and the Prairie Agriculture Machinery Institute will help businesses develop innovative products across the agriculture sector and expand capacity for new and increased production for import and export markets. POS Biosciences Corp. and Bioriginal Food & Science Corp. will modernize and expand processing and packaging infrastructure to help extract and deliver more high-value nutrients and specialty products. Livestock sectors in Saskatchewan will benefit from the expansion at North 49 Foods Ltd. to increase production and develop new export markets; also, upgrades at Prairie Meats Inc. will allow them to manufacture food regulated to a high standard, for distribution across Saskatchewan and all of Canada. PrairiesCan

Ten Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia are generating their own renewable energy after an investment of more than $4.8 million from the Government of Canada and the communities. The project, which is now complete, included the installation of net metered solar panels. Net metering allows the communities to generate their own electricity and supply it to the electrical utility. As a result, they only pay the “net” amount of electricity, which is the difference between what their solar systems produce versus the amount of electricity that they actually consume from the grid. Each community will reduce their energy costs and carbon footprint while creating employment opportunities in the renewable energy sector and giving the Mi’kmaw more control over their energy and environmental future. Ulnooweg Development Group, a not-for-profit organization that supports Indigenous businesses in Atlantic Canada, managed the funding agreement on behalf of the 10 participating First Nations communities: Acadia, Annapolis Valley, Eskasoni, Glooscap, Millbrook, Paqtnkek, Pictou Landing, Potlotek, Wagmatcook, and Waycobah. Two majority Indigenous owned renewable energy construction companies, Bayside Renewables and Eskasoni Renewables, successfully installed all of the solar systems across the 10 communities, building capacity for future renewable energy projects. Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) invested $4.5 million in Toronto-based space and defence company Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC) to advance Canadian-made energy solutions that will secure the North. This investment will accelerate the development of CSMC's micro-nuclear reactor towards detailed design and a fueled demonstration, readying the technology for deployment in Canada's Arctic. This project represents a critical step toward ensuring Canada can meet its energy and defence needs with sovereign, made-in-Canada solutions, CSMC said. Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation

The Government of Alberta said the province now has 14,156 fully registered physicians, an increase of 1,226 physicians, or almost 10 per cent, compared with the same time last year, according to statistics from the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Alberta. This represents the largest year-over-year increase in physician numbers on record and an all-time high for Alberta. Every health zone in Alberta recorded physician growth over the past year, with increases in both family medicine and specialist care. This growth is translating into more options for accessing care than ever before, the government said. Physicians provide care through walk-in clinics, urgent care centres and other community-based practices, with many clinics in larger urban centres offering same-day appointments and some accepting new patients into ongoing care. Govt. of Alberta

France's parliament has approved a law to ban social media for under-15s from January 2027, making it the first European country to block young people from the platforms. The law will mean everyone in France must verify their age to access social media; the move comes as the U.K. and EU are developing their own limits in response to concerns for children's mental health. French President Emmanuel Macron has welcomed the move, which he had pledged to introduce to mark the end of his decade in office. While skeptics have questioned the law's viability, the government has insisted the online tools to put the age checks in place are effective and safe. Both the French Senate and National Assembly adopted the ban, despite criticism from some on the left. It will be implemented in two stages:

• From September, people under 15 will not be able to open accounts and age verification will be required on all new accounts.
• In January 2027, this rule will apply to all existing accounts – meaning everyone in France will have to prove they are over 15 to use social media.

Once the ban is in place, social media platforms would need to use age-verification tools approved by the French privacy regulator, according to Reuters news agency. BBC

The U.S. federal government is proposing to overhaul radiation safety regulations for nuclear power, including by eliminating a long-term principle for nuclear safety. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed to get rid of the requirement for nuclear plants to ensure that radiation exposure is “as low as is reasonably achievable.” Proponents of the change say just using radiation dose limits is less subjective than going by the “as low as is reasonably achievable” principle – and that it led to overly conservative protections that stifled the nuclear industry. Supporters of the current language, however, say that having the “as low as reasonably achievable” principle, also known as ALARA, in place ensures that nuclear plants take all measures possible to reduce exposure for workers and the general public. NRC Chair Ho Nieh said in a statement that the agency is “raising the standard for regulatory clarity, not lowering the standard for safety.” “Our radiation dose limits remain unchanged – what we’re eliminating is unnecessary ambiguity,” he said. But critics say that eliminating ALARA means getting rid of a key incentive for energy companies to keep radiation levels as low as possible – and could mean more cancer cases. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, warned that the change could ultimately make it so that currently low doses of radiation that workers and the public are exposed to “could increase really all the way up to regulatory limits without any sanction from the NRC.” The Hill

RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

The Outaouais Health Hub project at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) received a $70-million investment from the Government of Québec. These new spaces will allow UQO to increase its training capacity in several health disciplines, including nutrition, speech-language pathology, psychology, physiotherapy and kinesiology, contributing to the development of a qualified next generation of health care professionals in the Outaouais region. The future Outaouais Health Hub will be a convergence point for training, research, innovation and practice settings. The construction of the building that will house the Outaouais Health Hub is scheduled from January 2028 to August 2030, for occupancy in September 2030. UQO

Université Laval will proceed with plans to create a new research station in Northern Quebec after receiving $4.1 million in funding from the Government of Québec. Located in Umiujaq, Nunavik, the station will be managed by the university’s Centre d’études Nordiques. It will serve as a base for researchers studying permafrost and global warming impacts on the Arctic. The Quebec government’s funding will build on the existing $1.8 million funding for the station provided by the Government of Canada’s ARDEC North program. Located in a key northern region undergoing rapid transformation, the new station – planned to open by 2028 – will be a training ground for the next generation of scientists and will provide an ideal environment for welcoming local, national and international partners in northern research. Université Laval

École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) will receive up to $33 million from the Government of Québec for a new aerospace engineering pavilion at the École nationale d’aérotechnique (ÉNA) of Cégep Édouard-Montpetit. The three-storey building will include classrooms, laboratories and a research cluster. The new ÉTS pavilion will facilitate collaboration with industrial and educational partners, including the ÉNA and the Centre technologique en aérospatiale, to develop cutting-edge technological solutions for the sector. This will strengthen Quebec's innovation capacity in the field, while also supporting its R&D position and international competitiveness. Government of Québec

University of Victoria researchers partnered with The Australian National University (ANU) to develop a training technique that improved people's ability to detect AI-generated deepfake faces by nearly 30 percent in under an hour, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. AI-generated deepfake faces have become so realistic it is difficult for people to tell them apart from photos of real humans, contributing to increases in AI-related fraud. The researchers trained people to spot AI-generated faces by drawing their attention to six perceptual qualities: distinctiveness, memorability, proportionality, symmetry, attractiveness and expressiveness. “It was amazing to see the dramatic improvement in people’s ability to detect AI faces,’’ said Amy Dawel, associate professor and director of the ANU Emotions and Faces Lab. “We’ve shown our training is effective for some of the most convincing fakes available, StyleGAN faces. Now we need to find out whether that training generalizes to other AI-generated faces.” University of Victoria

The British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) launched the Digital Twin Innovation Hub (DTI-Hub) an applied research facility that will help evaluate new technologies before their deployment. The DTI-Hub can simulate complex operational environments such as electrical grids, renewable energy systems, EV charging infrastructure and other complex operational environments using real-world data. This allows industry partners to work with researchers and students to evaluate, test and validate emerging grid technologies before they are deployed in the real world and, crucially, without affecting live systems. By testing technologies in a digital environment first, organizations can reduce risk, identify potential issues earlier, evaluate cybersecurity considerations, and make more informed decisions before investing in or deploying new solutions. The DTI-Hub was made possible through the support of funding agencies, including Future Skills Centre and the National Cybersecurity Consortium, as well as contributions of current and past partners across industry and academia, including: BC Hydro, Siemens, Hydron Energy, EdgeTunePower, FortisBC, Powerinex AI, Awesense, Evectrix and Thompson Rivers University. BCIT

Canadian non-profit Futurpreneur is seeing an uptick in program applications as more Canadians appear interested in entrepreneurship. The organization provides startup financing and business development support to Canada’s young entrepreneurs aged 18 to 39. It has seen a significant year-over-year spike in applications its programs, including a 50-percent increase nationwide and a 65-percent increase in Alberta, during the last fiscal quarter. Futurpreneur CEO Karen Greve Young believes that growth – which itself comes on the heels of a 15-percent increase the year prior – is due to more young Canadians choosing entrepreneurship amid an uncertain job market. A labour force survey from June, conducted by Statistics Canada, shows that youth unemployment remains high in Canada and Alberta, at just over 12 percent (it hovers at just above five-and-a-half percent for people aged 25 to 54, many of whom still count as “youth” under Futurpreneur’s criteria). In Alberta, the unemployment rate was seven percent overall, but roughly double that, at almost 16 percent, for those aged 15 to 24. BetaKit

One out of every 10 emergency physicians in Canada have left their specialty while the vast majority of others are reducing their hours or taking time off to manage burnout, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Journal. The findings are based on a 2025 cross-country survey of hundreds of emergency medicine doctors. "The prevailing theme was that the [health care] system is broken," wrote co-author Dr. Kerstin de Wit, an emergency physician at Kingston Health Sciences Centre and professor at Queen’s University, who conducted the research with the Network of Canadian Emergency Researchers. Nearly half of survey respondents said they’ve reduced their clinical hours while 20 percent have taken time off and 10 percent have left the specialty, the researchers found, with women and younger physicians reporting higher rates of burnout. High levels of physician burnout can lead to lower-quality care and put patient safety at risk, the researchers concluded, and shouldn’t be considered just a "pandemic phenomenon." The results were based on an online survey of more than 400 doctors, with respondents from every province and territory except Nunavut and Yukon. Dr. Kaitlin Stockton, a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, said it's "demoralizing" for doctors to witness patient harm and voice their concerns, yet never see any changes. "We're seeing this alarming exodus of health-care workers across the country," she said. "And these are not people that are nearing retirement. These are people that are three, five, 10 years out from school that are leaving emergency medicine, leaving hospital-based medicine or actually leaving medicine altogether – because they can no longer sustain this job and still maintain their own well-being." The survey results come at a time when millions of Canadians lack access to a primary-care provider and emergency departments are grappling with chronic overcrowding and staff shortages. CBC News

Edmonton-based Zero Point Cryogenics, which manufactures cooling “dilution refrigerators” for quantum technologies, is opening its first international Innovation and Service Hub at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) in Chicago. The company will also supply cryogenic systems to IQMP, expanding its role as a critical supplier to one of North America’s fastest-growing quantum ecosystems, while continuing to design and manufacture its systems in Alberta. The new Chicago Innovation and Service Hub positions Zero Point Cryogenics to strengthen relationships with government, defence, universities, research institutions and industry partners advancing quantum technologies across North America, supporting future collaboration and the commercialization of Canadian innovation. The hub will provide installation, maintenance and technical support for customers across the United States. Zero Point Cryogenics

Quebec-based shipbuilder Davie announced the formation of Davie Autonomous Inc., an Ontario-based company that will manufacture and integrate uncrewed and autonomous maritime vehicles and systems in Canada. Davie Autonomous will initially focus on advanced composite uncrewed surface vessels developed with U.K.-based Kraken Technology Group. In May, Davie announced a strategic collaboration to establish Canadian production of Kraken’s autonomous solutions. Davie is also in advanced negotiations with several Ontario sites to establish a production network as part of an all-of-Canada manufacturing strategy. This will combine Ontario’s strengths in advanced manufacturing, composites, robotics and automation with Davie’s sovereign shipbuilding, systems integration and maritime expertise, supported by suppliers across Canada. Davie

Airbus Defence and Space and Medicine Hat, Alta.-based Landing Zones signed a strategic partnership agreement for advanced uncrewed aerial systems (drones) in Canada. The partnership will include training and simulation capabilities to help prepare Canadian and allied forces for “the complex, drone-heavy battlefields of today and tomorrow,” Airbus said. The agreement includes an investment of an undisclosed amount from the European aviation giant and a representation on Landing Zones’ board of directors to expand competitive simulation capabilities and training services in the Canadian market. Landing Zones will also serve as a dedicated representative for Airbus Defence and Space services in Canada. In April, Landing Zones was also the first recipient of an investment from the Business Development Bank of Canada’s new defence-oriented StrongNorth Fund. Airbus

Mississauga-based Magellan Aerospace Corporation will begin producing M-72 LAW anti-tank weapons in Canada under a new federal contract aimed at strengthening the country’s defence manufacturing capacity. The M-72 LAW is one of the world’s most widely fielded and combat-proven shoulder-launched anti-armour weapons. According to the official CanadaBuys Contract History, a non-competitive "M72 Initial flow through purchase" contract was awarded to Magellan Aerospace Winnipeg (where the company has its largest manufacturing facility) on December 19, 2025, with an amendment value of just over $29 million. This initial phase runs through December 31, 2029. Magellan Aerospace

The Nisga’a Nation-backed Ksi Lisims LNG project in British Columbia garnered support from the Gitga’at First Nation, two sources told The Globe and Mail, as the Nisga’a and other proponents get closer to making a decision on forging ahead with construction. Ksi Lisims, which received regulatory approval last year, plans to export liquefied natural gas to Asia from northwest B.C. The B.C. Government’s Environmental Assessment Office listed six participating First Nations during the regulator’s review of the yet-to-be-built project. The Gitga’at becomes the fifth First Nation to sign a benefits agreement with Ksi Lisims, in what is an important step toward bringing the project to fruition, the sources said. The Nisga’a Nation, Houston-based Western LNG and a group of natural gas producers called Rockies LNG are collaborative partners in the Ksi Lisims project near Gitlaxt’aamiks, which is home to the Nisga’a Lisims government. The Globe and Mail

Researchers at York University’s Schulich School of Business produced the first comprehensive mapping of the country’s data centres. Their working paper, “Data Centred: the Shifting Landscape of Canada’s Digital Infrastructure,” identifies 194 active facilities drawing 1.6 gigawatts today, alongside 213 announced or under-construction projects representing a potential 22.2 gigawatts of capacity, nearly 14 times the existing base. Alberta alone accounts for 92 percent of that planned capacity. In June, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew halted a hyperscale project near Île des Chênes in the rural municipality of Ritchot, citing “a big threat to the environment and not much benefit to the economy,” after a local petition drew more than 13,000 signatures. In Hamilton, hundreds of residents packed a city hall hearing over a proposed data centre on the former Stelco lands, carrying signs reading “You can't drink AI.” The rezoning application was procedurally in order, but councillors denied it in the face of overwhelming public opposition. On June 27, demonstrators protesting data centres marched in 14 cities across five provinces in a national day of action. The Council of Canadians published a toolkit, co-written by organizers and academics, to help communities understand and challenge data centre proposals in their localities. Montreal AI Ethics Institute

Export Development Canada provided between $100 million and $200 million in project financing for the natural gas-fired plant that will power Meta's data centre in Sturgeon County, Alta., Canada's National Observer reported. The federal Crown corporation, which is backstopped by Canadian taxpayers, lent the money on July 2 – the same day that Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management reached a final investment decision on the $4.6-billion project. The Crown corporation is not financing the data centre itself, only the power plant. The plant is classified as Category A – a project that is “likely to have significant adverse environmental and social effects.” The gas plant, known as Greenlight, is predicted to generate up to 5.65 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year when it is fully built. It was not required to undergo a comprehensive impact assessment by the federal government. EDC classifies it as a utilities project, and says the financing aligns with its mandate to back “infrastructure that enables export capacity in data processing and digital services.” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate at Environmental Defence, said the group is concerned with the public financing, describing it as "very risky for Albertans given the impacts of the data centre on electricity costs.” Canada’s National Observer

Canadian-founded and Miami, Florida-based Hut 8 has fully leased its one-gigawatt Beacon Point AI data centre campus in Texas after signing a second 15-year, US$9.8-billion agreement with an existing, unnamed customer in the state. This expansion cements Beacon Point as Hut 8’s first fully commercialized AI data center campus, anchored by long-duration, investment-grade leases that underpin more predictable infrastructure-style cash flows across its growing AI portfolio. Hut 8 transformed its core strategy from a pure-play Bitcoin miner into an energy infrastructure and high-performance AI data centre platform. Hut 8

New York-headquartered Brookfield (whose parent company is Toronto-based Brookfield Corporation) along with South Korea-based NAVER and California-based NVIDIA, announced a proposed expansion of Korea's sovereign AI factory infrastructure, with planned investments that will grow the initial NVIDIA^® DSX™ AI factory deployment to 200 megawatts (MW) – more than tripling the 55-MW buildout announced last month. Chipmaker NAVER intends to expand its deployment of NVIDIA AI infrastructure to 1 gigawatt. The expanded infrastructure will be built with the NVIDIA DSX platform at NAVER’s GAK Sejong hyperscale data centre in Sejong, South Korea. NVIDIA plans to invest $1 billion into NAVER Corp. and Brookfield plans to fund up to $9 billion for AI infrastructure. NAVER will fund the remaining amounts to finance the project. The expanded infrastructure will provide Korea- and U.S.-based AI innovators with access to production-scale AI compute for building next-generation models, agents and AI-powered services. Brookfield

 Data centres in the U.S. will account for about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity consumption in 2035, up from 5.9 percent today, according to BloombergNEF (BNEF). That compares with an estimated 12 percent in 2030, BNEF said in a report. In states such as Virginia and Texas where data centres are concentrated, their share of electricity use will be even higher. Given the speed at which soaring demand from AI is increasing, BNEF projects data centre power needs to reach 194 gigawatts in the country by 2035. That’s a jump of 83 percent from its December forecast. The gain reflects a growing pipeline of AI facilities poised to be built within the next decade. One gigawatt is equivalent to the capacity of a traditional nuclear reactor. Surging demand from AI data centre is already straining electric grids that are racing to provide enough energy to meet customer needs after two decades of stagnant load growth. The United States currently hosts 5,427 data centres, more than 10 times any other country, according to a brief from the Stanford AI Index. Bloomberg Law

California Democrat Ted Lieu and Texas Republican Nathaniel Moran introduced proposed legislation that would require firms developing the most powerful AI models to also create the technical ability to “throttle, suspend, or shut them down.” The U.S. government would be able to order companies to hit the kill switch of an AI system that can cause catastrophic harm. AI companies are deploying increasingly advanced frontier models and autonomous "agentic" systems capable of independent action. There is currently no requirement that developers of these powerful models maintain a functioning ability to intervene if an AI system begins behaving in unintended or dangerous ways. The danger of advanced frontier AI models is no longer theoretical. OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol model recently went rogue, escaped its testing sandbox, and hacked its way into AI company Hugging Face. Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models had cyber hacking capabilities so advanced that the Department of Commerce had to awkwardly use an export law to shut down those systems. The bill is supported by: The AI Policy Network, Americans for Responsible Innovation, ControlAI, Future of Life Institute, and The Alliance for Secure AI. Ted Lieu Congressman

More than 70 technology companies, investors and foundations – including Cohere, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Amazon, Intel and IBM – signed an open letter supporting open AI models. Open-weight systems – which users can download, modify and run themselves – let both the private and public sectors use AI more cheaply and efficiently, and give users more control over the technology, signatories said. Most leading open-weight models come from Chinese developers like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Z.ai. Officials in the Trump administration have accused some of those firms of ripping off U.S. technology, via a process called distillation that uses the responses of advanced generative tools to train competing ones. The letter calls distillation a “widely used technique” that’s in line with the tech industry’s longstanding traditions, and said unlawful use should be addressed through legal means rather than restrictions. Software developed by the open-source community now supports most of the internet and underlies systems used by the world’s largest technology companies, as well as the U.S. military and federal agencies conducting scientific research, cybersecurity and other critical missions, the signatories said. However, an executive at Anthropic – which has not signed the letter – called distillation “IP theft and industrial espionage.” Microsoft

The U.S., China and 19 other Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies agreed to support open source AI while calling for stronger safeguards around security, privacy and intellectual property – a rare consensus as competition over AI intensifies. The statement also specified support for models and projects “that employ strong security assurance through development and deployment.” Those details reflect how open source is moving further away from its libertarian roots and toward one involving more state oversight. China has led recent open-source AI development, amid U.S. claims of stealing from American tech to do so. Open-source models from Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and GLM 5.2 are free to use and download, in contrast to U.S. companies such as Anthropic that only offer closed, pay-to-use AI models. The APEC AI statement is the first one to include open-source cooperation at a minister level, according to Li Lecheng, China’s industry and information technology minister, who chaired the leaders’ meeting. CNBC

The Port of Long Beach in California became the first port in the United States to sign a memorandum of cooperation with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) to advance work on the development of small modular reactor (SMR) technology. It is the first port partnership designed to support nuclear-powered vessels for commercial service and ties in with Long Beach’s growth aspiration. Demand for reliable electricity sources is forecast to grow substantially as the Port of Long Beach pursues a goal to double container volume by 2050. It is already one of the largest ports in the U.S. having handled a record of nearly 9.9 million of Twenty-Foot Equivalent, or TEU (one TEU equals the volume of a standard 20-foot-long shipping container) in 2025. In the first half of 2026, it has handled more than 4.8 million TEU, and the port continues to grow as the home to key industries. Under the agreement, the port and MARAD will collaborate with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to help define the operational protocols, safety standards and inspection processes needed to support the safe arrival and servicing of SMR-powered vessels at U.S. ports, as well as to develop and share other best practices. The Maritime Executive

European Union regulators fined Google €890 million for favouring its own services in search results and restricting app developers from steering users to cheaper offers outside Google Play. It marks Google’s first penalties under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, a landmark law aimed at curbing the power of the world’s biggest tech companies. The European Commission argued Google's practices limited consumer choice and gave its own services an unfair advantage over rivals. EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said companies should succeed because of the quality of their products – rather than their market position. Google criticized the decision, arguing the EU's requirements could damage services used by millions of European customers. Google now has 60 days to comply with the regulations – or challenge them by taking the Commission to court. BBC

VC, PRIVATE INVESTMENT & ACQUISITIONS

 NAventures, the National Bank of Canada’s corporate venture arm, participated in raising US$570 million in a Series C funding round for Spanish AI firm Multiverse Computing. The round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International, BNPP SIVF and Bullhound Capital, with additional commitments to date from investors including Santander Alternative Investments, Tikehau Capital, HP Inc., Orange Ventures and Scania Invest. Multiverse Computing’s technology makes AI more efficient, so models require less memory and compute capacity, making them cheaper to run – and, Multiverse claims, faster and more sustainable. It could also help AI run on devices instead of in data centres. Multiverse is headquartered in the Basque city of San Sebastián, but the firm’s chief technology officer Samuel Mugel and chief technical product officer John Malcolm are both based in Toronto; its Canadian R&D hub hosts 15 of the firm’s 300 or so staff. Multiverse Computing

Wyoming-based Prime Movers Lab led a $152-million Series A funding round for London, U.K.-based Humanoid, an AI and robotics company building industrial humanoid robots, with participation from strategic investors Schaeffler, Bosch and other backers. The 250-person firm has a Vancouver technical office staffed by several former employees of Sanctuary AI, a local firm that also started out trying to build humanoids. Humanoid said it will use the new capital to develop its technology, including development and launch of its next-generation humanoid robotics platform, start mass manufacturing wheel-based humanoid robots, and roll its robots out to more customers. Humanoid

Toronto-based superfoods company Organic Traditions raised US$10.5 million in Series A funding to expand its U.S. retail presence. The investor group, organized through OT Investors LLC, includes executives and operators with experience at companies including Freshpet, Shopify, Frito-Lay, Colgate-Palmolive and City National Bank. The company, which sells fibre supplements and other health foods like mushroom coffee and smoothie mixes, expects to roll out in 1,500 U.S. retail shops this year. Organic Traditions launched its fibre products in Costco Canada earlier this year and also sells its products in Hollywood grocer Erewhon. Organic Traditions said proceeds from the financing will support U.S. retail expansion, direct-to-consumer growth, new product development and additional hiring as the company expands its North American footprint. Retail Insider

Nova Scotia-based Elle, MD Technologies raised $1.1 million pre-seed financing round to support the first human clinical trial of its non-hormonal contraceptive device. The round included investments from H Venture Partners, Invest Nova Scotia, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, CBDC Hants-Kings, Queen's University Tricolour Venture Fund, Spring Invest Together and Startup TNT. Physician Robin LeBlanc also participated in the round. The company said the funding will allow it to begin its first-in-human clinical trial of Livv at The Ottawa Hospital. Livv is a non-hormonal vaginal contraceptive ring designed to provide birth control without the hormones used in many existing contraceptives. The company said the device is intended to reduce the side effects and trade-offs associated with common birth control methods, including oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices. Entrevestor

North Vancouver, B.C.-based Jane Software (Jane App) acquired Vancouver-based startup Ginger Desk, integrating human virtual assistant services directly into its comprehensive clinic administration platform. The move marks Jane App’s first public acquisition and significantly expands its offerings past pure software functionality. Before the integration, Jane App provided a robust online platform for running health clinics; now, it incorporates trained virtual assistants who manage complex clinic workflows, including patient scheduling and bookings. Julie Durnan, founder of Ginger Desk and naturopathic doctor, will join Jane App as head of services. Canada’s private health sector market is projected to see total private-sector health expenditures increase by 5.2 percent in 2025, and provincial governments are actively funding the expansion of private clinics. Boreal Signal

New York-based Brookfield agreed to acquire Texas-based battery storage firm Aypa Power from Blackstone Energy Transition Partners for US$7 billion. Aypa is the largest standalone battery storage developer in North America, with a highly contracted and diversified portfolio across attractive power markets in the U.S. and Canada. The company has 6.5 gigawatts of operating and contracted battery capacity and over 20 gigawatts in development. Under the terms of the agreement, Brookfield will acquire Aypa's operating, under-construction and contracted project portfolio, together with its development platform and approximately 200-person team. The transaction provides Brookfield with a leading presence in the North American battery energy storage systems market, and will help Aypa deliver on its next phase of growth, supported by Brookfield's differentiated operating and development competencies, procurement, commercial and capital markets capabilities. Brookfield

REPORTS & POLICIES

Tie funding for Canadian university research to commercialization outcomes: Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness

Funding for Canadian university research should be tied in part to commercialization outcomes, with universities left to decide how to deliver them, according to a policy brief from the Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness.

Canada spends about $19 billion a year on research and development in the higher-education sector, “but the system surrounding that investment does too little to turn that research into patents, Canadian firms and advanced industry output,” said the report by Lawrence Zhang, head of policy at the centre, which is affiliated with the Washington, D.C.-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

“Too much of the downstream commercialization that does occur happens elsewhere. Worse, governments still cannot say clearly, in public, what their research spending is producing at any given institution,” Zhang said.

This is largely an incentive problem, he said. Provincial operating grants flow on enrolment and formula. Federal research funding flows on peer-reviewed project quality. Tuition flows on student numbers.

“None of these funding streams gives universities much reason to care whether their research leads to a patent, a company in Canada or advanced industry domestic output,” he said.

“The system pays for research activity and training, then treats commercialization as a bonus outcome rather than something the funding model is designed to produce.”

In both its 2018 and 2025 “State of” reports on science and technology, the Council of Canadian Academies found that Canada’s strongest academic fields do not consistently align with its areas of industrial R&D strength, and that Canada is comparatively weak in several enabling and strategic technologies with high commercial relevance, Zhang noted.

Part of that misalignment reflects downstream weakness in firm absorption and industrial capacity, he said. Part of it reflects upstream incentives that do not push universities to align research priorities with where Canada has, or is trying to build, industrial strength.

A meaningful share of public funding for research-intensive universities should be tied to standardized commercialization outcomes, measured in ways that capture real economic results, Zhang said.

That does not mean dictating intellectual property rules, tenure structures, or tech-transfer office design, he said. Universities should remain free to organize themselves as they choose, but the results of those choices should be reflected in how public money flows.

Canada is not failing because it neglects university research, Zhang said.

The country’s higher-education R&D spending is among the highest in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a share of gross domestic product. And Canada ranks among the highest in the world for postsecondary attainment.

But publications are not the final output of an innovation system and neither are citations, rankings or international co-authorship, he noted.

“They show that knowledge has been produced and recognized. They do not show that this knowledge has been protected, financed, licensed, absorbed by Canadian firms, or scaled into industrial capacity.”

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s (2025 Hamilton Index shows advanced industries fell from 10 percent of Canada’s economy in 1995 to 6.9 percent in 2022, “which is precisely why university commercialization should be treated as one lever in a broader effort to rebuild advanced industrial capacity, not as a self-contained campus problem,” Zhang said.

Topline publication measures also flatter Canada’s commercialization position because they count research across the whole academic system, including fields where patents, licences and spinouts are not the expected output, he pointed out.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council accounts for roughly $1.4 billion in the 2026-2027 Main Estimates, or about 31 percent of combined Tri-council spending.

Social sciences and humanities research produces value through policy, institutions, law, culture and public understanding, not primarily through patents, licences, or spinouts, he said.

“That is precisely why aggregate publication strength can mislead. A country can publish a great deal and still underperform in the parts of the research system where commercial value capture is realistic.”

Canada’s largest gaps in patenting are in biopharmaceuticals, information and communications technology, semiconductors and optics, and chemicals – sectors where downstream value is concentrated and defensible, Zhang said.

“The issue is not a general shortfall in patent counts. It is that Canada’s research strength is not being matched by an industrial IP base in the sectors wherein commercialization matters most. Canada is producing research in high-value technology fields without building a comparable industrial patent base.”

AUTM (previously the Association of University Technology Managers) collects voluntary reporting from university technology-transfer offices across North America. Canadian institutions that report to AUTM consistently lag behind their U.S. counterparts on licences executed, licensing income, startups formed and follow-on capital raised.

In 2024, AUTM reported 112 startups formed from Canadian institutions, compared with 941 in the United States. Normalized against publication output, that works out to roughly 10 startups per 10,000 Scopus-indexed citable documents in Canada, compared with 15 in the United States. “Canada generates fewer reported startups relative to its publication base, a measure closer to commercialization than publication volume,” Zhang said.

Canada looks strong where governments measure academic production: research spending, publications, citations, rankings and international collaboration.

But the country looks weaker as the indicators move closer to commercial use: high-tech exports, Patent Cooperation Treaty applications relative to publications, World Intellectual Property Organization’s sectoral patenting gaps, and AUTM-reported licences, startups and follow-on capital.

“Canada is performing reasonably well up to the publication stage. The weakness comes after, where knowledge has to be protected, financed, absorbed and scaled,” Zhang said.

When publicly funded research is not matched by Canadian firms, financing and industrial ecosystems capable of absorbing and scaling it, more of the downstream value is realized elsewhere, he said.

Three streams account for the bulk of institutional revenue at most Canadian research universities, “and all three streams mostly ignore commercialization,” Zhang said.

1. Provincial operating grants, the largest single source of institutional revenue, flow through total enrollment and historical formulas.
2. Federal research funding through the Tri-council agencies flows through peer-reviewed judgments of project quality.
3. Tuition flows through students.

“None of these streams tells a university that the results of its research – whether it becomes a Canadian spinout, a patent licensed to a Canadian firm or downstream value retained in Canada – has any bearing on its financial position. The core funding mechanisms treat commercialization as, at best, a nice to have.”

University tech-transfer offices are chronically under-resourced relative to their U.S. counterparts, and commercialization staff are often hired on short-term grants, which makes it difficult to retain the patent agents, licensing specialists and business development professionals who make these offices effective, Zhang said.

“The problem is not that basic research has no value, but that Canada overemphasizes funding discovery more coherently than funding for institutional, engineering, translational and firm-level capabilities needed to turn discovery into domestic economic capacity.”

Right now, public funding for research-intensive universities flows almost entirely on inputs, Zhang said.

Provincial operating grants flow on enrolment and formula. Federal research funding flows on peer-reviewed project quality. Tuition flows on student counts. None of these streams signals to a university that whether its research produces a Canadian spinout, a patent licensed to a Canadian firm, or downstream value retained in Canada has any bearing on its financial position.

Under a funding regime tied to outcomes, Zhang said that universities would remain free to organize themselves however they see fit. They could:

• continue to choose creator-owned, university-owned or hybrid IP models.
• centralize technology transfer in a single office, decentralize it across faculties, or pool it regionally, rather than treating the tech-transfer office as a residual administrative unit.
• revise tenure and promotion criteria to credit commercialization work, or accept that the current criteria will continue to direct faculty effort elsewhere.
• run incubators, accelerators and entrepreneurship leave programs as core institutional capacity, or not at all.
• build translational infrastructure as a deliberate institutional commitment, or continue to rely on grants and individual persistence to keep it running.
• expand research programs that better capture the research needs of industry in Canada.

A funding regime tied to commercialization outcomes is only as good as the outcomes it can measure, and the outcomes it can measure publicly, Zhang noted.

Governments cannot fund institutions differently from one another on the basis of data the public cannot see. Canada does not yet have the public, institutional-level commercialization data needed to support that kind of funding model, he said.

ISED, the Tri-council funding agencies, or the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) should require research-intensive universities receiving federal research funding to publish institutional-level commercialization data on a common framework, using SRACIPHE (Survey on Research Activities and commercialization of Intellectual Property in Higher Education) definitions wherever possible, Zhang said.

The data would stay with the institutions and the reporting obligation would come through public funding, which would put the publication requirement outside Statistics Act confidentiality. 

“A common reporting framework would force institutions to define what they count and fill the gaps where the data does not currently exist. Without that, commercialization-linked funding would rest on private data, partial data or no data at all.”

Canada needs a comprehensive innovation policy package that changes university supply and company demand together: commercialization-linked university funding, scale-up capital, procurement, industry-facing research programs, sector strategies, stronger support for adoption and deployment, and research vouchers that let firms buy applied research, testing, prototyping, validation, and technical problem-solving from universities and other public research organizations., Zhang said.

“Commercialization-linked funding is not the whole agenda. It is the university-facing part of a broader policy shift from funding research activity to building industrial capacity,” he said.

The report makes several recommendations, stating that for provinces, the central task is straightforward:

• Tie a non-trivial portion of operating funding for research-intensive universities to standardized commercialization outcomes. The regime should be phased in over several years, with differentiated expectations where institutional roles or capacities differ.
• Scale provincial research voucher programs that give firms purchasing power to buy applied research, testing, validation, prototyping and technical problem-solving from universities, colleges, research hospitals and other public research organizations.

The federal government’s role is to make the system measurable and make federal money to institutions reflect commercialization performance. Ottawa should:

• Require research-intensive universities receiving federal research funding to publish institutional-level commercialization data on a common framework, using SRACIPHE definitions, as a condition of funding. The reporting requirement should sit with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the Tri-councils, or CFI as part of contribution agreements and program terms.
• Require reporting frameworks to capture sectoral patterns of commercialization activity, so that governments can see whether university research is contributing to sectors of industrial priority.
• Allocate a meaningful share of Tri-council funding envelopes across research-intensive universities on the basis of standardized commercialization performance, with project selection within each envelope continuing to be made on peer-reviewed scientific merit. Institutions whose research base is producing measurable downstream outcomes should see larger envelopes; those whose research base is not should see smaller ones.
• Apply the same logic to federal institutional research support flowing to research-intensive universities, including the Research Support Fund and CFI infrastructure funding, where the recipient is the institution rather than the individual researcher.

“What makes this urgent is not that Canada lacks ideas. It is that delay compounds the loss,” Zhang said.

Research that is not commercialized here often does not sit in limbo waiting patiently for better policy. It is licensed elsewhere, scaled elsewhere, and folded into other countries’ firms, supply chains and industrial capabilities.

“Each year the system continues to fund activity while treating downstream capture as optional is another year Canada pays for research and leaves more of its value to accrue somewhere else,” Zhang said. “If governments want different results, they need to tie funding to them.” ITIF

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Embed students and graduates in SMEs to gain early-career experience and encourage business AI adoption

Canada can help small and medium-sized enterprises responsibly adopt AI by empowering students and recent graduates to contribute to AI’s design and implementation, according to a new report by non-profit organization Venture for Canada.

The report, Student-Led AI Adoption Model: Aligning Youth Employment and SME Productivity Through Applied AI Implementation, argues that two of Canada's most pressing workforce challenges have traditionally been treated as separate issues.

Young Canadians are entering a disrupted economy and gain meaningful early-career experience at the same time many SMEs lack the capacity, expertise and resources to integrate AI into their operations, the report said.

At the same time, Canada's global leadership in AI research has not translated into broad productivity gains, particularly among SMEs.

Rather than addressing these challenges independently, Venture for Canada proposes connecting them as an integrated solution where labour and technology policies come together.

The model embeds students and recent graduates into SMEs through structured AI implementation projects, where they can assist businesses to identify practical AI opportunities, improve workflows, test accessible AI tools and implement responsible, human-centred solutions.

AI implementation can range from helping SMEs use AI tools to generate business outputs and improve day-to-day workflows, to custom GPTs, chatbots, workflow automation and, where appropriate, agentic solutions, depending on business needs and student capabilities.

In return, students gain hands-on experience applying AI in real business environments – experience that is increasingly difficult to obtain through traditional education alone.

"The model simultaneously strengthens early-career AI literacy and accelerates responsible AI adoption across Canada's productive base," said Steven Wang, CEO of Venture for Canada.

Unemployment among young Canadians aged 15 to 24 is roughly double the national average, with employment for this age group falling to 54.8 percent in December 2025.

Employers report that new graduates lack essential soft skills, business acumen and applied workplace experience, even as many young people work in roles below their qualifications.

At the same time, only 12.5 percent of Canadian SMEs report using AI in producing goods or delivering services – even though SMEs account for approximately 98 percent of businesses and more than 63 percent of private-sector employment.

Many SMEs are experimenting informally with consumer-grade AI tools, yet few move beyond pilots into operational integration. This reflects a broader implementation gap observed globally, where experimentation far outpaces measurable deployment.

A 2025 International Work Group report found that 55 percent of Gen Z employees in Canada are actively coaching older colleagues on AI, and 61 percent of directors reported that AI innovations introduced by younger employees had unlocked new business opportunities.

Venture for Canada’s report argues that Canada's productivity challenge is increasingly an implementation challenge rather than just a technology challenge. “Canada needs not only AI users but AI-ready decision-makers who can integrate these tools responsibly into real business contexts.”

“Without structured opportunities to build these capabilities, young Canadians risk being left behind at precisely the moment when applied AI skills are becoming a prerequisite for long-term competitiveness,” the report said.

Venture for Canada’s proposed model builds on infrastructure that already exists. “What is missing is a coordinated mechanism that directs this emerging AI-literate talent toward SME productivity challenges in structured, outcome-oriented ways.”

The framework is designed as a delivery overlay that can be integrated into existing internships, co-op placements, fellowships, youth employment initiatives and experiential learning programs, including the federal government's Youth Employment and Skills Strategy and the Student Work Placement Program, through which Venture for Canada serves as a major delivery partner.

This approach doesn’t require the creation of new institutional infrastructure. It leverages existing youth talent pipelines, employer networks, placement infrastructure, and program coordinators and oversight mechanisms that are already in place.

“The model connects three federal priorities: youth employment, SME productivity and responsible AI governance into a single coordinated delivery mechanism,” the report said.

In this model, students receive training in responsible AI and work alongside SMEs through structured implementation sprints focused on identifying business opportunities, evaluating AI use cases, and delivering measurable productivity improvements.

The model operates within existing funding envelopes, redirecting effort toward measurable productivity impact.

Also, the model is inherently scalable and replicable across institutions, including non-profits, postsecondary institutions and workforce development providers. It is not proprietary, nor dependent on a single organization’s structure. It is designed to be adopted, adapted and implemented wherever youth talent and SME partnerships already exist.

The proposal also aligns with recent commitments to accelerate AI adoption among Canadian businesses as well as the federal government's broader strategy to boost economic productivity.

The Student-Led AI Adoption Model is intended as a practical framework that governments, postsecondary institutions, workforce development organizations and innovation partners can adopt and adapt within existing programs to strengthen both youth employment outcomes and SME competitiveness.

“Without low-friction affordable, and outcome-oriented mechanisms to responsibly accelerate AI adoption among SMEs, Canada risks falling behind, not because it lacks innovation, but because it cannot operationalize it at scale where most of its economy actually operates,” the report said.

By connecting youth employment with SME productivity, Venture for Canada said it believes Canada can simultaneously strengthen workforce readiness while accelerating responsible AI adoption through building upon existing infrastructure and platforms.

"Our goal is not just to help businesses adopt AI to increase productivity for the country," Wang said. "It's to ensure the next generation of Canadians develops the practical skills and professional judgment needed to use AI responsibly and strengthen trust in how these tools are applied." Venture for Canada

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British Columbians’ mistrust of AI is growing as they become more aware of the technology

British Columbians are growing increasingly wary of artificial intelligence and the companies behind the technology, according to a Simon Fraser University (SFU) survey.

As AI becomes more prevalent, B.C. residents are becoming more skeptical about its impact and less trusting of tech companies and those who lead them.

The findings also indicate that British Columbians expect governments to play a central role in regulating AI, while there is limited appetite for solutions whereby companies self-regulate or individuals become more literate about AI.

The survey of around 1,000 British Columbians was carried out earlier this year by the Dialogue on Technology Project, part of the Morris J. Wosk SFU Centre for Dialogue.

The aim was to see how people’s views had changed, following an initial survey in 2024.

• British Columbians’ awareness of AI has increased substantially since late 2024. A majority of people in the province (54 percent) now say they have heard or read “a great deal” or “a lot” about AI, up 17 percentage points since 2024.
• An increasing number of British Columbians have used some form of AI. More than six in 10 now say they have used AI in some form, a nine-point increase.
• 79 percent say they are “more concerned than excited” about AI in daily life, a seven-point jump.
• 86 percent (up six percentage points) of respondents worry that AI will make people feel more disconnected in society. Eighty-five percent are concerned about losing the human touch with more AI.
• 75 percent do not trust AI to avoid discriminating or showing bias towards certain groups of people, up five percentage points.
• 65 per cent of respondents believe the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits of AI, compared to 56 per cent in 2024.

“The national conversation around artificial intelligence often assumes that low public trust of the technology stems from a lack of familiarity with it,” said Fergus Linley-Mota, founder and director of the Dialogue on Technology Project.

“Our research turns this on its head. As British Columbians become more aware of AI and increase their use of it, they’re actually becoming more wary of its effects on society,” he said. “Literacy programs won’t solve AI’s trust problem on their own – people need to feel that they can be protected from the unsafe design of these systems.”

 Impact of AI

• More residents now feel AI is going to fundamentally change B.C. society – 41 percent, up nine percentage points.
• Most (52 percent) continue to believe that AI has a positive impact on the amount of time it takes to get things done. On the other hand, a growing majority of people in the province (77 percent, up five percentage points) think AI’s current impact on people keeping their information private is more negative than positive.
• Close to two-thirds see AI more negatively when it comes to the way students learn (64 percent, up 12 percentage points).
• Half of British Columbians now feel the use of AI in the workplace is having a more negative impact on BC workers generally, up 10 percentage points from 2024.

 Concerns about the use of AI

Five specific uses of artificial intelligence continue to generate the highest level of concern among respondents:

• Manipulated video/audio (deepfakes) used to discredit political opponents (91 percent say it’s a concern).
• Unregulated use of personal information to train AI models (89 percent).
• Government agencies using AI to make critical decisions (83 percent).
• Companies cutting jobs using AI for greater efficiencies (81 percent).
• Use of AI systems to replace medical professionals (75 percent).

British Columbians expressed a growing level of concern about other uses of AI, including:

• Governments using AI systems to determine citizen access to essential public benefits or services (75 percent, up 10 percentage points).
• Environmental impact of amount of energy needed to train/run AI models (69 percent, up 13 percentage points).
• Employers using AI to screen job candidates (69 percent, up six percentage points).
• Use of AI in education (66 percent, up 13 percentage points).

 Regulation, trust and information

• British Columbians remain steadfast in their view that it is government’s responsibility to regulate companies developing AI to ensure it is accurate and not harmful. A majority (52 percent) hold this view, about the same number as in 2024.
• Unchanged from 2024, fewer (27 percent) say it is the companies themselves who should be responsible for keeping their AI systems safe for users.
• One in five feel it is up to individuals to become literate and build up their own ways of using AI and minimizing its risk to them, unchanged from 2024.
• Most British Columbians continue to not trust most key actors to manage and develop AI systems carefully and with the public's well-being in mind, the sole exception being academic institutions.
• The harshest judgment when it comes to trust is directed at tech companies with more than three-quarters of the B.C. population saying they do not trust them, including almost half who now say they do not trust them at all (up seven percentage points since 2024).
• Trust levels in the federal and provincial governments do not fare much better; more than half do not trust either one to act in the public’s interest when it comes to AI, with close to three in ten saying they do not trust them at all.

“People are looking to government to regulate AI in a way that will keep them safe from its risks, and yet trust in institutions remains low,” Linley-Mota said.

“Nationally, the federal government is taking aim at some of the public’s concerns with new online harms and privacy legislation, but many details about what safe design regulations will look like in practice remain unclear, and it could be a long time before they come into force,” he said.

“In the meantime, it is critical that government of all levels engage with the public around AI’s use and effects, and focus energy and resources on rebuilding institutional trust.” Simon Fraser University

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AI Large Language Models can stereotype and discriminate in hiring even more than people

New research suggests that AI Large Language Models (LLMs) can develop their own biases from experience – and stereotype job applicants more than humans do, according to a story in MIT Technology Review.

Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago ran LLMs, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, through a simulated hiring game, adapted from a psychology study that explored how humans can form stereotypes.

Each model was told it had been hired as a consultant by the mayor of a fictional city and was then asked to help hire people for 20 jobs, including doctors, lawyers, child-care aides and janitors.

Candidates came from four fictional ethnic groups: Tufa, Aima, Reku, and Weki.

In each round, there was a new job opening and four candidates, one from each group. After the model hired a candidate, it learned whether they succeeded at their job and moved onto the next round. The model was told to make as many successful hires as possible over 40 rounds. Unbeknownst to the models, all candidates were equally likely to succeed at every job.

The models quickly started segregating candidates from different groups into different jobs on the basis of early observations of hiring outcomes.

For example, when a model was told an Aima had failed as a doctor, a job considered to require high levels of warmth and competence, it veered away from hiring all Aimas as doctors. Instead, it started hiring Aimas as janitors, which the model classified as being less warm and competent than doctors.

Newer models with higher reasoning capabilities, such as OpenAI’s o3 and DeepSeek’s R1, showed stronger biases. The models were even more likely to stereotype people by demographic group than the human participants in the original study.

On the study’s segregation scale, where 2 means every group has been completely confined to its own job niche, human participants scored 0.84. The models scored roughly 65 percent higher, with OpenAI’s reasoning model o3 scoring 1.83, close to the maximum possible.

That’s because LLMs “really are eager to create generalizations from limited data,” said Ryan Liu, a PhD student at Princeton University and a co-author of the study, published in a paper at this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul in July. “That’s literally a lot of what they’re optimized for.”

Because LLMs are trained on math, coding and science problems – tasks that reward generalizing from just a few examples – they can settle on a hunch too early. And the same instinct that helps LLMs crack logic puzzles also makes them quick to stereotype.

When LLMs rush to generalize in social settings, “that’s when things tend to go wrong,” Liu said.

The finding is especially relevant now that chatbots are gaining improved memory and personalization features, said Angelina Wang, a computer scientist at Cornell University who did not work on the study. When a chatbot draws on its previous conversation history, it can “over-index on the same kinds of behaviors it’s experienced before” and form biases, she said.

Telling the model to be fair didn’t change its behavior much. “Either it can’t put these values into action or that process is being submerged under the tendency to try to optimize for the goal of getting the most correct hires,” Liu said.

But promising the models an additional bonus for diverse hiring made them far less biased. The trick, then, is to design goals that “incorporate desirable social values in order to make the large language model act in socially desirable ways,” Liu said.

The models also became less biased when they were told more personal information about individuals. In another experiment in the same study, the researchers asked the models to resettle members of different ethnic groups in cities across Canada.

When the models were told personal information relevant to the ability to adapt to a new city, such as age and education, they were less likely to segregate people by their ethnicity. But when they were given irrelevant information, such as hair color and tattoo shape, the models largely fell back to sorting people by their ethnicity again. 

To what extent AI systems will stereotype job applicants in the real world is still an open question. While the models in the experiment immediately learned whether they’d made successful hires, a model screening résumés in the real world doesn’t get an instant report card.

Companies can take a long time to find out whether a new hire is any good, if they ever do.

But when feedback does trickle in, a model could still read too much into those results when making future hires.

As companies increasingly deploy LLMs to screen résumés and even conduct interviews, the finding that models can form biases from their hiring experience “is a really serious implication that they should grapple with,” Wang said. Michelle Kim in MIT Technology Review

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Initiative aims to build support for new electricity transmission interties to electrify Canada’s economy

A new initiative called Western Transmission Catalysts, launched in Calgary, aims to build support for new electricity transmission interties required to electrify Canada’s economy, according to a story in The Hub.

The $4.2-million, multi-year collaborative initiative, launched by the Indigenous Power Coalition, includes a mix of economists, engineers, Indigenous leaders and industry experts. Funded by the federal government and working alongside provincial governments and utilities, the group hopes to spend the next three years turning promising interties into shovel-ready projects.

“We’re clearing the landscape for what’s possible” said Blake Shaffer, a University of Calgary professor and former energy trader who’s directing the initiative. “We’re calling it pre-pre-development.”

An intertie is a high-voltage transmission line connecting two electricity grids. Most provinces have plenty of transmission lines within their own borders. Between provincial borders – not so much.

That gap means one province can be sitting on surplus power while its neighbour is spending billions of dollars to build new generation. With stronger interties, the provinces could treat electricity more like a shared resource – buying and selling wherever it’s cheapest, instead of leaning so heavily on U.S. markets.

Right now, Alberta connects to B.C., Saskatchewan, and Montana. B.C. also trades with Washington State. Manitoba links to Saskatchewan, Ontario, and several U.S. states.

In fact, more than 80 percent of Canada’s electricity trade still moves north-south. It’s simply been cheaper and easier to hook up with a nearby American grid than to bolster the lines across the provinces.

The three principal interties linking Western Canada remain relatively weak. The B.C.-Alberta, Alberta-Saskatchewan, and Saskatchewan-Manitoba connections were largely designed decades ago to provide emergency backup rather than serious day-to-day trading.

The biggest gains would come where neighbouring provinces have complementary systems.

B.C.’s hydro reservoirs provide flexible, dispatchable power that can quickly ramp generation up or down, while Alberta’s grid is powered by natural gas alongside a fleet of wind and solar projects. A stronger tie would let Alberta lean on B.C. hydro when it needs firm, reliable power, while B.C. saves water behind its dams whenever Alberta’s wind and solar are running strong.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba both have smaller grids, which makes them more exposed when a single power plant goes down. A bigger intertie would give them a safety net. It would also support Saskatchewan’s plans to add nuclear power, allowing the province to export surplus electricity when demand is low and import hydro power when reactors are offline.

In March, Ontario initiated a National Energy Corridor Agreement with nine other provinces and territories – including all four Western provinces – to advance new transmission projects and strategic interties across Canada.

The federal government has since followed up with its National Strategy for an Electrified Canadian Economy, which identifies stronger regional electricity ties as key to both energy security and economic growth.

Rather than pushing one specific line, Western Transmission Catalysts is trying to clear away the obstacles that have killed these projects before construction ever starts – commissioning independent economic studies, working out financing, bringing utilities and provincial governments to the table, and helping First Nations organize early.

Most of the group’s energy currently is going into the B.C.-Alberta corridor, where talks are furthest along. The provinces are already linked by Western Canada’s largest intertie, crossing the southern Rockies near Cranbrook, with a nominal transfer capacity of roughly 1,200 megawatts.

Kwatuuma Cole Sayers, executive director of the Indigenous Power Corporation, told The Hub that that Indigenous leadership could make these intertie projects easier to build. By involving Nations before a route is selected, many land-use, cultural and community concerns can be resolved before the project hits the formal regulatory process, where delays get expensive. Falice Chin in The Hub

See also: Ottawa will invest in expanding interprovincial electricity grid but only if provinces are interested

Feds need to use their power to get interprovincial electricity transmission lines built

 THE GRAPEVINE – News about people, institutions and communities

Jacob Tsimerman, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, won the prestigious Fields Medal. He becomes the first scholar based at a Canadian institution – and the second Canadian – to receive the award, often described as “the Nobel Prize of mathematics,” since it was established in 1932. The Fields recognizes extraordinary research achievement and the promise of future discoveries. It’s awarded every four years by the International Mathematical Union to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40. Tsimerman was honoured in part for his role in proving the André-Oort conjecture, a problem that has occupied mathematicians for decades. Tsimerman found the André-Oort conjecture – or his “mathematical home” as he describes it – during his PhD at Princeton University, where he was advised by number theorist Peter Sarnak. At a high level, the conjecture concerns the appearance of highly special points inside geometric spaces that encode rich arithmetic information. Mathematicians suspected that whenever these special points appear in large numbers, they do so because they are part of a larger hidden geometric structure. Tsimerman’s work was crucial in establishing the conjecture and confirming that intuition. The result is significant not only because it solved a long-standing problem, but because it opened entirely new directions of research. University of Toronto

Former Government of Québec minister Pierre Fitzgibbon joined Paris-headquartered private equity firm Jolt Capital as an operating partner. From October 2018 to September 2024, Fitzgibbon served as Quebec’s minister of economy, innovation and energy, also holding the roles of minister responsible for regional economic development and minister responsible for the Montreal Region, where he played a central role in shaping the province’s industrial and innovation strategy. Fitzgibbon is currently a special advisor to Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP and sits on the boards of several private companies, as well as the advisory board of Concordia University’s Volt-Age program and the Board of Fondation HEC Montréal. Jolt Capital

Rachel Wernick and Joe Wong jointed the board of directors at the Council of Canadian Academies. Wernick has held senior leadership roles across the federal public service, including positions at Employment and Social Development Canada, Canadian Heritage, and the Privy Council Office. Throughout her career, she has championed the use of evidence to inform policy and decision-making, while fostering partnerships across government, academia, and the not-for-profit sector. Wong brings extensive experience in higher education, international engagement, governance, and philanthropy. As Vice-President, International at the University of Toronto, he has advanced major mission-driven partnerships and contributed to the governance and fundraising efforts of numerous educational and charitable organizations. Council of Canadian Academies

Montreal-based fashion retailer Groupe Dynamite Inc. appointed former Cohere president and chief marketing officer Martin Kon to its board, as the Garage and Dynamite owner invests more heavily in data and AI. The appointment comes as Groupe Dynamite continues to expand its retail and digital operations internationally while focusing on technology, data and artificial intelligence as part of its business strategy. Kon’s current roles include serving as an industry advisor to KKR, a member of the Client Advisory Council at J.P. Morgan Advisors and a member of the McGill Desautels International Advisory and Advancement Board. He  is also scheduled to begin doctoral research at the University of Cambridge in October 2026, where he will study what Groupe Dynamite described as “The Reinvention Paradox in the Age of AI.” Retail Insider

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Western University survey finds overwhelming majority of teens are exposed to violence and gore online

Eighty-five percent of teens in a Western University survey said they’ve been exposed to violence and gore online.

A research team at Digitally Informed Youth (DIY: Digital Safety), a Western University-based research project that builds resources to help navigate online risks, collaborated on the survey with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. The team included Alexa Doge, Charlotte Nau, Christopher Dietzel and Kaithlynn Mendes.

They surveyed more than 1,000 teens aged 13 to 18 across Canada about their exposure to real-world violence and gore online. Half of them had seen footage of the murder of right-wing commentator and social media influencer Charlie Kirk on a university campus in September 205.

Images of violent content – self-harm, suicide, fist fights, stabbings, mass shootings, animal abuse and sexual violence – used to remain in the internet’s dark corners, the researchers said.

“Now they circulate widely on social media, often right at young people’s fingertips.”

Most teens – 73 percent – had seen videos of physical fights, 65 percent had viewed police violence, 52 percent saw someone injured or killed in a war and 50 percent watched someone injured or killed in a car accident.

When asked about the worst video they saw online, the teens talked about a range of distressing content. Fist fights or beatings, including to the point of severe injury or death, were the most mentioned. The next were of people being injured or killed by police and ICE officers, such as the killings of George Floyd and Renée Good in the United States.

Videos of war or genocide, including those showing the bombing and killing of children in Palestine, were the third most mentioned. Distressing video content such as mass shootings, school shootings and animal abuse followed closely behind.

Teenagers most often saw violent content on YouTube (44 percent) and TikTok (42 percent), with high rates of exposure also occurring on Instagram (31 percent) and Facebook (28 percent). These platforms are known for their sophisticated algorithms, which feed users tailored content based on presumed interests.

The majority of teens said they never sought out violent or gore content. Only seven percent had searched for it. Just under 40 percent reported they mostly saw this content because a stranger had posted it, and around one-third because an app, game or website had shown it or recommended it to them.

“This finding raises questions about the role of social media algorithms, particularly on video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Platforms may be serving violent content to young users who are not actively seeking it out and might not want to see it,” the researchers noted.

This is particularly important because of recent changes to content moderation from tech companies like Meta and X. These platforms have moved to deregulate what can be posted on social media, possibly leaving teens even more exposed to harmful content.

The survey found that 69 percent of teens wanted to see less violence and gore online, and nearly two-thirds said that seeing this content left them with “negative emotions.”

One in five of them spoke about the lasting harmful impacts of this content. In fact, many reported feeling scared and anxious after seeing it.

When asked what should be done to fix this problem, hundreds of participants called for better content moderation on platforms. Many teens wanted faster content removal and warnings before seeing these images or videos.

The survey found that the reporting tools on digital platforms are underused. Only 11 percent of participants used them.

“This suggests that reporting tools are neither sufficiently accessible nor reliable,” the researchers said. One in three of the teens who didn’t report violent content said they didn’t know how, and one in four didn’t think the platform would help.

This content not only circulates widely on popular social media sites but is recommended by their algorithms, the researchers pointed out.

Platforms should stop this amplification and disable autoplay features so that people of all ages do not see unwanted content, they said. Platforms should also offer easy-to-understand, accessible and effective reporting mechanisms so people can quickly remove unwanted content. Western University

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Largely preventable foodborne diseases make hundreds of millions of people sick, killing hundreds of thousands globally

Foodborne diseases, which are largely preventable, remain a significant public health concern around the world, affecting hundreds of millions of people each year.

University of Waterloo public health researcher Dr. Shannon Majowicz contributed research to the new World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, which cover the global burden of foodborne disease between 2000 and 2021. 

Majowicz and collaborators updated 22 of the 42 WHO estimates, focusing on the global, regional and national burden of both diarrheal and invasive enteric pathogens, which contribute to serious illness, long-term complications such as kidney disease, paralysis, septicemia, central nervous system infection, as well as death.

Despite general declines over time, diarrheal and invasive enteric pathogens transmitted by contaminated food continue to be a substantial cause of illness and death globally.

In the study of diarrheal pathogens, Majowicz and colleagues found that in 2021, 14 diarrheal pathogens caused 666 million illnesses, with 265,000 deaths, due to contaminated food. The African continent bore the highest disease burden.

In the invasive pathogen study, the transmission of eight pathogens by food caused 24 million illnesses, with 106,000 deaths, mostly in Africa and southeast Asia.  

The studies, published in the Lancet Global Health (WHO estimates of the global, regional, and national burden of 14 foodborne diarrhoeal enteric hazards, 2000-21: an updated data synthesis; and WHO estimates of the global, regional, and national burden of eight foodborne non-diarrhoeal enteric disease hazards, 2000-21: an updated synthesis), reveal that foodborne disease remains an uneven global health challenge, with unsafe food disproportionately affecting children, populations in lower-income regions and communities with limited access to clean water, sanitation and strong food systems.

For example, children under five make up nine percent of the population studied but bear 30 percent cent of the disease burden.

The updated estimates provide governments with the evidence they need to justify investing in food safety and foodborne disease prevention measures, Majowicz said. University of Waterloo

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