GOVERNMENT FUNDING & NEWS

 Federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced the Phase 1 results of the Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards, marking a significant milestone in Canada’s plan to attract international and expatriate researchers at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels through Canada’s new Talent Attraction Strategy. A total of 659 awards have been offered to citizens from 72 different countries – one-third of them from the United States – under this initiative, representing a commitment of $84.3 million over three years. This marks the first phase of a $133.6-million investment to strengthen Canada’s position as a global destination for the world’s top scientists and innovators. Administered by Canada’s three federal research funding agencies, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards represent one stream of the Canada Global Impact+ Research Talent Initiative, a $1.7-billion strategy, announced in Budget 2025 that aims to attract more than 1,000 international and expatriate researchers, including Francophone researchers, to Canada. In addition to the Canada Impact+ Research Training Awards, this initiative includes:

• The Canada Impact+ Research Chairs program, which provides $1 billion over 12 years to support institutions in attracting and retaining world-leading researchers leading transformational and translational research projects.
• The Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders program, which provides $120 million over 12 years to help institutions attract international and expatriate early career researchers.
• The Canada Impact+ Research Infrastructure Fund, a $400-million investment over six years to ensure that recruited research chairs and ECRs have the world-class facilities they need to achieve their research goals.

Joly said the government is creating a new “channel” at the Immigration Department to process applications from researchers drawn by the new funding. NSERC

The Government of Ontario is investing $1.7 billion to fund an additional 70,000 seats in high-demand sectors such as health care, STEM, education and skilled trades at publicly assisted colleges and universities across the province. As part of the government’s $6.4 billion new postsecondary funding model, this investment will protect students’ access to the education they need to launch successful careers and good-paying, in-demand jobs, ensuring Ontario has the workforce it needs to support the most competitive, resilient and self-reliant economy in the G7, the government said. As part of the call for proposals, colleges and universities will engage with local businesses and employers in their community to submit a growth plan to the government that ensures expanded seats are aligned with local labour market demands. The first of these seats will be open for students in the fall of 2026. Govt. of Ontario

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Federal government looking at Saab to supply “flying radar” aircraft in partnership with Bombardier

The Government of Canada announced it’s entering into discussions with Saab of Sweden as the preferred supplier for the Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEWC) capability.

The government has allocated more than $5 billion to purchase approximately six “flying radar” aircraft, along with operational costs and initial in-service support.

Led by the Defence Investment Agency (DIA), the AEWC project would provide the Royal Canadian Air Force with advanced airborne command, control, and surveillance capabilities to detect, track and respond to threats at long range, including in the Arctic.

The capability would strengthen Canada’s contributions to the North American Aerospace Defence Command and improve operational reach in remote regions. Engagement with Saab as the preferred supplier will allow Canada to further assess the proposed solution and does not constitute a procurement commitment.

The initiative supports Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy and BUILD–PARTNER–BUY approach by combining advanced defence capabilities with economic benefits for Canadians.

Saab’s proposed GlobalEye solution is built on the Canadian-manufactured Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft and is expected to support domestic production, highly skilled jobs, technology transfer and partnerships with Canadian industry.

The project could generate long-term economic opportunities through Canada-based missionization work, technology integration, workforce development and potential participation in global defence supply chains.

Saab is expected to work with Bombardier and other Canadian companies, helping strengthen Canada’s aerospace and defence industrial base while reinforcing economic and technological sovereignty.

At the CANSEC 2026 trade show in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney also announced details of an overhaul to the defence Industrial and Technological Benefits policy that governs domestic investments from foreign military suppliers.

The overhaul promises faster approvals and more advantages for smaller firms; a concierge service to help defence and dual-use firms navigate government resources, procurement pathways and supports; and a new defence advisory forum, chaired by the federal defence minister and the industry minister, aimed at strengthening collaboration and dialogue between government, industry and stakeholders on defence procurement, capability development and industrial priorities. Defence Investment Agency

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced a $100-million investment, through the Strategic Response Fund, in the ELYSIS^TM technology deployment project. This investment supports Rio Tinto Alcan’s $440-million project, involving the design and construction of a demonstration plant for the ELYSIS^TM aluminum electrolysis technology. Aluminum is a strategic sector for Canada’s economy, underpinning key industries including defence, aerospace, automotive, energy and infrastructure. As the world’s fourth-largest producer and a trusted supplier, Canada is uniquely positioned to lead in a quickly shifting global landscape. This investment will help Rio Tinto advance the development and future commercialization of the  ELYSIS^TM emissions‑free aluminum smelting technology in Canada by validating the technology at an industrial scale. Meanwhile, Rio Tinto said in a statement it has started commissioning its US$1.5-billion AP60 smelter expansion at Complexe Arvida in Quebec, marking a major milestone for the deployment of its state-of-the-art, low-carbon aluminum smelting technology. The work, which began in March, is expected to be completed by the end of 2026 with all 96 new pots operating. This will increase the plant’s production capacity by approximately 160,000 tonnes of primary aluminum annually for a total of 220,000 tonnes. Developed by Rio Tinto’s research and development teams, the AP60 technology is among the most efficient and lowest carbon technology currently available, at commercial scale, the company said. When combined with the hydropower used at Rio Tinto’s operations in Canada, the technology generates one-sixth of the greenhouse gas emissions per tonne of aluminum, when compared with the industry average. The AP60 expansion supports the transition to carbon-free aluminum electrolysis technology being developed by ELYSIS in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec, a partnership that includes Rio Tinto. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

Health Canada announced the launch of the Canadian Drug Analysis Centre (CDAC), with an investment of $48 million over five years. This investment will transform Canada’s drug testing capacity by creating new specialized laboratories in Toronto and Vancouver with advanced analytical capabilities. The CDAC will help generate new and innovative intelligence to support ongoing efforts to address the illegal drug crisis in Canada, and will provide law enforcement with stronger tools to address the illegal drug crisis. The analysis will go beyond identifying the components of a sample and look at markers, low-level impurities, precursors and other components linked to the production process. It will help identify trends and patterns related to the origin, distribution and manufacture of drugs, including insights into how and where they are produced. This initiative responds to long-standing needs identified by law enforcement and strengthens collaboration across jurisdictions and disciplines. Health Canada

The Government of Canada is investing $47.8 million over five years, to support wildfire preparedness, response and risk reduction in places administered by Parks Canada. This investment will renew essential capacity under Parks Canada’s National Fire Management Program. Funded through Budget 2025, this investment will support the operational readiness of Parks Canada wildfire response personnel, nationally deployable equipment and proactive wildfire risk‑reduction measures such as prescribed fire and vegetation management to reduce the buildup of flammable material. It builds on previous investments to ensure Parks Canada can continue to prepare for, respond to, and reduce wildfire risks across the country. Parks Canada

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced an agreement between Ksi Lisims LNG and SEFE (Securing Energy for Europe) of Germany, bringing long‑term supply of low-carbon Canadian liquified natural gas to a European buyer for the first time. Under the agreement, SEFE will purchase one million tonnes per year of LNG for up to 20 years, with deliveries expected to begin by the early 2030s. After receiving approval under Canada and British Columbia’s “One Project, One Review” model in September 2025, Ksi Lisims LNG was referred to the Major Projects Office by Prime Minister Mark Carney in November 2025 to support Canada’s efforts to more than double the country’s low-carbon LNG production and displace higher-emitting fuel use abroad, strengthen Canada’s position as a global energy superpower, and diversify exports to new Asian and European markets. The agreement is an important step toward a final investment decision for Ksi Lisims LNG, a project on Canada’s West Coast expected to attract over $30 billion in investment. Once fully electrified, Ksi Lisims LNG will become one of the world’s lowest-emission LNG operations, with emissions 94 percent below the global average. NRCan

Health Canada said it will inspect three Grifols private plasma collection facilities that opened in Ontario last year without inspections, amid concerns about deficiencies the regulator has found at other locations. Grifols opened five for-profit plasma collection sites in Ontario in 2025: one in Whitby, one in Hamilton, one in Cambridge and two in Toronto. Health Canada conducted inspections of the Whitby and Hamilton locations in early 2025 before they opened, but as The Globe and Mail reported, the other three locations were licensed without being inspected. Grifols, the only major commercial collector of plasma with 17 sites across Canada, has come under scrutiny in recent months after the deaths of two donors in Winnipeg and some Health Canada inspections that have uncovered deficiencies, such as staff not being properly trained on how to deal with alarms on donation machines. Health Canada has said it could not establish a link between the deaths in October and January and the plasma donation process, but the family of one deceased donor has called for a new investigation because of inconsistencies between the autopsy report and government records. The Globe and Mail

The Government of Canada said it will amend Bill C-22, its lawful access legislation – which would make it easier for police and spies to tap private communications – as it faces blowback from critics who argue the bill would actually put cybersecurity at risk. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, Bill C-22's sponsor, told reporters he'll propose amendments to better safeguard encryption and clarify what metadata has to be stored by tech and telecommunication companies – but he remained firm the bill would become law. Bill C-22 promises to help law enforcement and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service obtain digital information during investigations – something the security community has been pushing for since the late 1990s. The second half of the bill would force yet-to-be-defined "electronic service providers" to adapt their systems so they all have the ability to hand over information to investigators with a warrant. The bill would also require core providers to retain metadata – which can include information such as who is sending and receiving the data – for up to one year. Some of the world’s largest tech companies as well as several Canadian firms all share concerns that the bill's technological demands would weaken or break encryption, a key safety measure used by activists, lawmakers, journalists and everyday Canadians to safeguard communications and other important information. CBC News

The Bank of Canada announced it is joining the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá, an initiative exploring how using tokens could improve wholesale cross-border payments. The project has successfully tested the feasibility of a multi-currency unified ledger that enables settlement of cross-border wholesale transactions. The Agorá prototype combines tokenized commercial bank deposits and wholesale central bank money on a programmable platform with the aim of improving the speed, efficiency, transparency and accessibility of international payments. The project will continue to test the prototype and examine how an Agorá-type platform could operate within existing legal and regulatory frameworks, including rules on settlement finality as well as laws designed to counter money-laundering and terrorism financing. Project Agorá brings together central banks and private sector financial institutions to experiment with next-generation payments infrastructure. The global project involves seven other central banks – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bank of England, Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank and Bank of Korea – and involves more than 40 financial institutions, including systemically important banks, payment service providers and clearing houses. Bank of Canada

The Government of Ontario, at the CANSEC trade show, unveiled its Framework for the Ontario Defence Industrial Strategy (ODIS), a 10-year strategy dedicated to growing the province’s defence industry and positioning its companies and workers for long-term success. The framework highlights Ontario’s strengths and competitive advantage in research and development, critical minerals, nuclear energy, aeronautics, manufacturing and technology, as well as the province’s world-class workforce. The federal government has committed to invest an additional $81.8 billion over five years to support its defence commitments, including meeting the NATO pledge of investing five percent of GDP in defence by 2035. This could bring annual core defence spending in Canada alone to $150 billion by 2035, while annual global defence spending could reach $6.6 trillion in the same period, driving investments in defence technology, defence infrastructure research and more. Ontario brings decades of experience and a robust defence sector that can support these goals, including 300 defence firms that directly employ over 13,000 workers, the Ontario government said. The ODIS framework, rooted in four pillars, outlines how Ontario will seize this generational opportunity for workers and businesses, serving as the foundation for long-term growth in the defence sector. This includes:

• Strengthening the province’s industrial base: Ensure Ontario’s defence and dual-use firms are ready to capture value from increased federal and allied spending.
• Owning tomorrow’s frontier: Make Ontario the place where future industries and technologies are built, scaled and brought to market, enabling firms to compete in an evolving defence landscape.
• Expanding export reach: Position Ontario as a supplier of choice to the federal government and allies for defence and dual-use technology and equipment.
• Building an integrated supply chain: Capitalize on Ontario’s strength in critical minerals and advanced manufacturing to build a resilient, vertically integrated defence supply chain.

These four pillars will be underpinned by targeted measures that will help build the skilled, industry-ready workforce needed to deliver on the strategy, the government said. Govt. of Ontario

The Government of Alberta is investing $21 million in the University of Alberta-led Dual-Use Ecosystem for Future Engineering, National Defence and Sovereignty (DEFENDS) program. DEFENDS will connect Alberta companies, universities and the Canadian Armed Forces so defence technologies can be tested, certified and brought to market faster. Many Alberta companies already make advanced products for industries like energy, environmental monitoring and construction. DEFENDS will help them adapt and certify those same products for defence use, opening new markets and new income without starting over. The University of Alberta anchors DEFENDS through some of the most advanced and secure research facilities in Canada, including the Centre for Applied Research in Defence and Dual-Use Technologies (Canada's only university-embedded defence innovation centre); nanoFAB (the country’s largest open-access micro and nanofabrication facility); and one of only two North Atlantic Treaty Organization Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic Test Centres at a Canadian university. Three new secure facilities will also be built through the initiative, expanding Alberta's capacity to test advanced manufacturing components, develop microchips and communication systems, and evaluate radar and wireless technologies against real-world threats. Govt. of Alberta

Alberta’s industrial carbon price deal with the federal government will be only a starting point for negotiations to reinstate a carbon price in Saskatchewan, Premier Scott Moe said. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced an accord to reform the industrial carbon price system in that province. It would see the projected headline price of emissions reach $140 per tonne by 2040, a less onerous benchmark than the previous target of $170 per tonne by 2030. The same day, Ottawa changed the benchmarks for all carbon price systems in Canada to align with Alberta’s new targets. But in an interview with The Logic, Moe made clear he does not see the policy as binding on his province. Moe, who set his province’s carbon price to zero last year in response to trade aggression from the U.S., said he’s open to talks, but stressed Saskatchewan won’t adopt the same terms as Alberta. “If we can find a true Canadian space that works not only for the federal government, works for the provinces, but most importantly allows our industry to attract investments, then we would take a serious look at moving forward in that space,” he said. The Logic

The Government of Canada won’t renew its $3.2-billion Universal Broadband Fund for rural and remote regions to get fibre or fixed wireless internet, The Hill Times reported. Instead, the government will rely heavily on low Earth orbit satellite services to connect the most remote areas as the country approaches its 2030 connectivity target. Jointly-funded programs, such as the Alberta Broadband Fund and Connecting Communities BC, will continue to roll out their active high-speed internet projects, as current commitments are generally funded through March 31, 2027. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s Broadband Fund continues to provide funding, supporting underserved areas through targeted intake periods. The Hill Times

Two public servants linked to an internal investigation into the ArriveCan app and broader contracting matters are seeking an appeal of a recent Federal Court ruling. Federal Court Justice Avvy Yao-Yao Go ruled against the two men last month, denying their requests for the court to overrule internal grievance findings and order a new, independent investigation. Cameron MacDonald was ordered to pay the federal government more than $22,000 in legal costs, while Antonio Utano was required to pay nearly $19,500. The two men worked together at the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) as senior officials responsible for IT matters in 2020 when the agency partnered with private contractors to develop and launch the ArriveCan app for cross-border travellers. MacDonald later became an assistant deputy minister at Health Canada, while Utano moved to the Canada Revenue Agency as a director-general. Court records indicate they have been on paid leave as they challenge the CBSA’s investigative process. The cost of the app project grew from an original $80,000 expense to more than $56 million, prompting reviews by the federal Auditor-General and other watchdogs, who later called for greater scrutiny over how federal departments award billions of dollars each year to federal contractors. The CBSA prepared a draft Professional Standards Investigation Report in 2025 that contained “findings regarding several misconduct allegations” involving each of the two men, according to last month’s federal court ruling. The Globe and Mail

The Government of Alberta is launching an expert panel to strengthen how postsecondary education prepares students for an artificial intelligence-driven economy. The panel will begin its work this spring, with findings expected within nine months. In addition to examining AI adoption across the postsecondary system, the panel will assess impacts on graduates and occupations, review best practices from other jurisdictions, evaluate how well graduate AI skills align with market demands and identify opportunities to strengthen Alberta's global competitiveness. The eight-member panel is chaired by Nicole Janssen, co-founder and co-CEO of AltaML, a developer of AI-powered solutions, including for the Alberta government. She’s also a member of the federal Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence. Govt. of Alberta

The Government of Québec will not invest further in the France-based cargo dirigible company Flying Whales, after so far offering more than $75 million to the company. Those capital injections, made in 2019 and 2022 by François Legault's CAQ government when Pierre Fitzgibbon was minister of economy, allowed Quebec to become a shareholder in Flying Whales and its Quebec branch. Unlike her predecessor, Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette and her government are putting away the chequebook. “We have chosen not to reinvest Quebecers’ money in Flying Whales, as the benefits of a new investment would primarily be felt outside Quebec,” said Bernard Drainville, Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy, in a press release. Flying Whales is expected to announce a fundraising round of at least €105 million soon to replenish its coffers. A second round is planned before the end of the year to raise €55 million. Despite raising around $490 million from governments and the private sector, the company still needs money to get its factory off the ground – work is due to start in September – in Nouvelle-Aquitaine (southwest France), a complex that should allow it to build its prototype. The giant aircraft will be specialized in transporting oversized loads – wind turbine blades, hydraulic turbines, mining equipment, etc. – weighing up to 60 tonnes in hard-to-reach places like the Far North of Quebec. La Presse

The Government of Ontario officially broke ground on the new Ontario Science Centre, a milestone in the province’s plan to transform the revitalized Ontario Place into a vibrant, year-round destination for science, entertainment and tourism. The new 400,000-square foot facility is on track to open in 2029 and will feature a state-of-the-art mainland building, an integrated pod complex, new interactive exhibits, an upgraded Cinesphere and more programming space than at the previous site. The revitalized Ontario Place will feature more than 50 acres of free public trails, expanded green space, playgrounds, interactive fountains, new beaches, event spaces, a modernized marina and the redesigned RBC Amphitheatre, a new venue for music fans and artists. The $1.04-billion contract to design, build, finance and maintain the new Ontario Science Centre facility was awarded to the Ontario Science Partners, a collaboration that includes Hariri Pontarini Architects, the design firm leading the redevelopment of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and OpenROM. Govt. of Ontario

Governments should not be “picking winners,” said Jack Newton, CEO of B.C-based legaltech company Clio. Especially in the technology space, picking winners should be left to venture capitalists, not governments, he said at a Toronto Tech Week event. Provincial and federal governments should focus on improving tax and immigration policy to attract company founders, he said. Newton, whose company was last valued at US$5 billion and which previously raised one of the biggest private investments in Canadian history – lamented that foreign investors outnumber Canadians on Clio’s cap table. He said that Canadian backers have historically favoured deals with a U.S. lead investor, and have tended to offer lower valuations and demand stricter downside protections. The Logic

Canadian regulators are “suffocating capital” by prioritizing more traditionally stable investments and not taking risks on tech, said Jim Balsillie, chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators. Canada missed the boat on one of the most important economic shifts of recent memory: the change from a global economy rooted in tangible assets like resource development and manufacturing to intangible assets like intellectual property, AI and data, he said during BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall. “Wealth, power, and security are rooted in the ownership and control of intangible assets,” Balsillie said. “Today [intangible assets] dominate, comprising 92 percent of the S&P 500’s $55-trillion value.” While the U.S. and Canada’s European peers have leveraged their economic policy to reflect this shift, Canada has languished in a bygone era, he said. He pointed to the fact that Canada is projected by the OECD to have the lowest growth in gross domestic production per capita among advanced economies over the coming decades. Balsillie argued that in order to be independent of the U.S., Canada must start adopting some U.S.-style policy, including advancing the country’s interest through coordinated policy instruments. BetaKit

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) launched the application period for the fourth cohort of the Canadian Agricultural Youth Council. During the five-week intake period, young people across the country involved in agriculture or agri-food are encouraged to apply to become a member of the council. The Canadian Agricultural Youth Council provides a forum for the next generation to bring forward innovative and fresh ideas, and to play an active role in the decisions that will shape the future of the sector. The council has a proven track record of providing valuable insights and advice on important issues, including how to: attract and retain young people to the sector, leverage technology for more efficient and innovative agriculture, and make sense of ruptures to global food trade and an uncertain world. Young people aged 18 to 30 who work, study or contribute to Canada's agriculture and agri-food value chain and broader food systems are encouraged to apply. This includes youth involved in farming, food production, innovation, sustainability, food security initiatives and community-based food projects. The application deadline is July 1, 2026, at 11:59pm (PT). AAFC

RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

 The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced nearly $10 million to support 73 grants for projects that will strengthen collaboration and accelerate the use of research evidence in practice. This investment will help improve the implementation of school food programs, strengthen primary care and mental health partnerships, support communities experiencing health inequities, and help health systems adopt evidence-based practices more quickly. The grants were funded under the Partnering for Impact Catalyst Grant program, part of the CIHR Knowledge Mobilization Strategy and Action Plan, which aims to ensure that publicly funded research generates timely, tangible impacts for Canadians. The investment includes contributions from CIHR and Employment and Social Development Canada, which is supporting several partnerships focused on the Government of Canada’s National School Food Program. CIHR

Toronto-based AI developer Cohere and Mila-Quebec AI Institute announced plans to enter into a new academic research collaboration focused on advancing the science of multilingual and multicultural AI evaluation, with an initial emphasis on French-language cultural context in Quebec. By working with Mila, one of the world’s leading AI research institutes, Cohere will support research into how frontier AI models can move beyond standardized language outputs and better reflect the cultural, social and institutional context that shapes how Quebec French is used in the real world. As AI adoption accelerates across enterprises and governments, organizations increasingly need systems that are accurate, secure and culturally relevant to the specific regions they serve. Cohere and Mila’s collaboration is designed to help advance the evaluation methods needed for this next phase of adoption, giving AI builders and adopters stronger tools to assess performance in high-context, multilingual environments. The collaboration will explore research directions at the intersection of language, culture, and model evaluation. Mila

Ontario’s postsecondary institutions need more financial support and expertise to deal with the AI shift in education, according to a report by the Council of Ontario Universities (COU). The report, developed by COU’s AI Task Force, chaired by Vivek Goel, president and vice-chancellor at the University of Waterloo, is a coordinated, sector-wide effort to address four pillars:

• Preparing students and the workforce for an AI-enabled future.
• Partnering with industry to advance AI adoption, productivity, and economic growth.
• Advancing the responsible use of AI across teaching, research, and university operations.
• Building public trust through transparent, accountable, and human-centred approaches to AI.

The COU’s report recommends:

• Federal Government: Invest in secure, sovereign AI research infrastructure; strengthen sustained support for AI research talent; support workforce readiness through AI-related skills development and lifelong learning; and accelerate domestic AI commercialization and IP retention.
• Ontario Government: Support AI adaptation by strengthening provincial leadership in scaling made-in-Ontario AI solutions; enable shared procurement models; invest in sovereign and sustainable Ontario-based AI infrastructure; advance workforce development; and support sector-wide AI adaptation.
• Ontario Universities: Build AI literacy and embed competencies across learning; adapt teaching, assessment and research for AI-enabled practice; strengthen secure infrastructure and human oversight; expand flexible learning and workforce pathways; collaborate on shared platforms and services; advance institutional leadership; steward trusted knowledge and public trust; enhance sustainable AI infrastructure; and deepen global partnerships. COU

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) launched a groundbreaking hybrid weather forecasting system that combines the power of artificial intelligence with the strengths of traditional forecasting methods. Through this strategic use of AI, Canada is enhancing public safety, improving emergency readiness, and giving Canadians more time to prepare for high-impact weather. ECCC has developed a Canadian AI forecast model, the Global Environmental eMuLator (GEML). ECCC research has shown that AI models such as GEML can predict large-scale weather patterns. These models can outperform traditional computer models with higher accuracy for these synoptic patterns, which are especially significant for longer lead times. However, a key limitation of the current generation of AI models is that they forecast only a limited number of variables, making it not suitable for operational needs. In addition, finer atmospheric details are smoothed out, which can reduce accuracy for certain types of extreme weather. ECCC scientists conceived of a hybrid system, known as “spectral nudging.” The hybrid system combines the strengths of AI models with ECCC’s traditional models to improve predictability and accuracy, allowing forecasters to leverage each approach’s strengths. In doing so, it generates the complete set of variables which operational meteorologists can rely on daily. In this hybrid approach, the traditional physics-based model is gently guided toward the atmospheric state of the GEML solution during the calculation. At the same time, the smaller-scale patterns that are important for heavy rainfall or severe storms are allowed to evolve based on existing, well-established mathematical and physical formulations. With continued positive results in all stages of testing, ECCC’s hybrid weather forecasting system is now operational. ECCC

Toronto-based global health company and drugmaker Apotex Health Corp. announced it has filed with Canadian securities regulatory authorities for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Toronto Stock Exchange, under the symbol APTX. The offering will include a treasury offering by Apotex and a secondary offering of common shares by certain shareholders, including SK Capital Partners, the company's controlling shareholder. The number of common shares to be offered and the offering price per share under the offering have not yet been determined. The company has reportedly been planning an IPO of up to $1 billion. Earlier this month, Apotex received Health Canada approval to see a generic equivalent to the weight-loss drug Ozempic, which the company started selling mid-May. Apotex

Toronto-based BenchSci laid off another 30 percent of its staff – affecting 68 workers – as the company embraces AI agents to speed up the process of drug development. Over the last 18 months, BenchSci has launched a new version of its product and rolled out automations in its engineering, operations and science functions, with AI agents “now doing real, meaningful work alongside our people,” CEO Liran Belenzon said in a LinkedIn post. He added that the shift “required a redesign” of the company. “This is the model we believe most technology companies will be running within the next few years. Not AI that makes people more productive. AI that is itself a member of the team – scoped and working alongside humans on the problems that matter,” Belenzon said. Liran Belenzon in LinkedIn post

Canadians claimed more than $122 million in federal subsidies for new electric vehicles since Ottawa reintroduced its rebate program in February, but many car dealers say they’re still waiting to get the funds they are owed. Transport Canada published the database for the new electric vehicles affordability program, known as EVAP, three months after relaunching the program on February 16. The database shows 24,389 claims were recorded but doesn’t yet have a breakdown of the dollar figure per claim because of a technical glitch. A department spokesperson, responding to inquiries from The Canadian Press, said it will update the data once the glitch is fixed. The department also confirmed the total amount of claims at $122 million thus far, leaving more than $2.1 billion available. Ottawa allocated $2.275 billion toward the rebate program, which is to last up to five years. But the Canadian Auto Dealers Association said many dealerships still have not been reimbursed under the new program, and some are waiting for more than $200,000 in rebates. The program is set up so dealers apply the rebate on the final bill and then seek reimbursement from Ottawa. The government set a target of putting 840,000 new EVs on the road by offering up to $5,000 toward the cost of a new EV, and $2,500 toward plug-in hybrids under the new program. The Canadian Press

Hamilton-headquartered drone company Sentinel R&D Inc. is in talks with a Ukrainian company to manufacture drones for the country to use in its war with Russia. According to two sources with knowledge of the talks, Sentinel is working with the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of Military Assistance Coordination (DMAC) to form a joint venture with a Ukrainian company, which would also be supported by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. If successful, the joint venture would be the first of its kind for DMAC, which was tasked with coordinating such partnerships after Canada signed a letter of intent with Ukraine in August. The letter was signed after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the country’s “Build with Ukraine” initiative in June to open production lines in other markets, away from the frontlines, to help supply the country at war. Since the beginning of 2022, Canada has committed $6.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, which will carry through to 2029. Within that commitment is a $220-million donation announced by Prime Minister Mark Carney in August to purchase drone, counter-drone and electronic warfare capabilities, including investments into joint ventures. If the joint venture between Sentinel and the Ukrainian drone company is finalized, the two companies would work together on the production of drones in Canada, which DMAC would then buy and donate to Ukraine. The Globe and Mail

Ottawa-based tech services firm Calian Group Ltd. and Toronto-based AI developer Cohere announced a collaboration agreement to evaluate and integrate sovereign artificial intelligence in defence environments. The initiative will focus on applying secure, Canadian-developed enterprise AI to improve decision-making speed, enhance training outcomes and strengthen operational readiness for the Canadian military, allied forces and small to mid-sized enterprises through Calian VENTURES, the company’s venture arm. The collaboration will apply Cohere‘s secure agentic AI platform, North, within controlled defence environments to explore how sovereign AI can support faster, higher quality operational and training insights. By combining Cohere’s enterprise-grade generative AI capabilities with Calian’s expertise in defence operational readiness and next-gen training, the organizations will collectively assess how AI enhances mission planning, decision support, training effectiveness and operational workflows. Calian

Some domestic defence tech entrepreneurs have become frustrated with how the country is talking and thinking about so-called “dual-use” technologies. The term dual-use, which refers to products with both civilian and military applications, has come to dominate recent conversations about defence tech in Canada. At the Arctic Edge conference, held at Torys’ office as part of Toronto Tech Week, some founders argued that the term has been tossed around so frequently that it has lost its utility, and they asserted that Canada needs to reframe its approach. “As an entrepreneur raising money, I’ve become very annoyed with the term dual use,” North Vector Dynamics co-founder and CEO Paul Ziadé said, arguing that it has become “so overused that it has lost all meaning.” He highlighted that many of the technologies seen as dual-use today were initially funded with solely military applications in mind. Ziadé cited GPS, which was originally built for missile guidance and submarine tracking, and duct tape, which was developed to seal ammunition cases, as two prime examples. Eliot Pence, founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, said that while the industry often thinks the best path to developing dual-use tech is “to go from outside the military to inside, he believes the inverse is true – that “the best way to get more dual-use is to double down on single use.” Pence also pointed out, at BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall that in an era of geopolitical instability and increasingly asymmetric warfare, Canada’s Department of National Defence’s procurement process needs to be more nimble and domestically-focused if Canada is to remain competitive, and ultimately, sovereign. BetaKit

Toronto-based space and defence company Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC) and Ottawa-based satellite operator Telesat announced at CANSEC the signing of a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on the deployment and operation of CSMC’s micro-nuclear reactor technologies using Telesat’s sovereign low Earth orbit satellite network, Telesat Lightspeed. Under the MOU, the companies will work together to deploy highly secure satellite communications that can support the remote monitoring, operation and sustainment of CSMC’s micro-nuclear reactors across both defence and civilian applications. Together, the companies aim to enable advanced, made-in-Canada energy solutions in the Arctic and other remote environments, where reliable power and connectivity are crucial. CSMC is developing micro-nuclear reactors designed to provide safe, reliable and scalable power for remote communities, critical infrastructure and strategic missions, while Telesat provides the highly resilient, secure, low-latency connectivity required to support their safe and efficient operation. The MOU establishes a framework for technical discussions, potential pilot activities and coordinated engagement with government and industry stakeholders. Any future commercial or operational arrangements would be subject to definitive agreements. Telesat

As Canada prepares to award a rich contract to build as many as 12 submarines, Hanwha Corp. of South Korea is sweetening its bid by offering to help in another realm: space. Hanwha Aerospace Co. is set to sign a memorandum of understanding with Canadian spaceport operator Maritime Launch Services Inc., according to Glenn Copeland, chief executive of Hanwha Defence Canada. Canada doesn’t currently have an active launchpad, or a launch-vehicle operator, so its satellite companies have to rely on the likes of SpaceX or other foreign entities. The government of Prime Minister Mark Carney is trying to change that and recently leased a site in Nova Scotia for a commercial spaceport. Hanwha plans to support that effort with launch technology, Copeland said. “We’re going to invest in bringing a rocket capability to accelerate Canada’s Indigenous launch.” Hanwha is competing with Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems GmbH for the submarine contract, one of Canada’s largest available military procurements. The dozen vessels would cost in the region of $25 billion, Copeland said. Including support and maintenance, the overall value might wind up several times that figure, perhaps $100 billion to $120 billion in today’s dollars, he added. Financial Post

See also: Item in the April 29, 2026 Short Report that the space port currently consists of only a concrete pad in rural Nova Scotia. Also see this op-ed by Marie Lumsden in the Halifax Examiner.

Nasdaq Private Market (NPM), a secondary U.S. market that allows traders to buy and sell private company stocks, is suing private stock marketplace Hiive, accusing the Vancouver-based company of patent infringement. In documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the State of Delaware, NPM accused Hiive of violating its patent for its secondary sale settlement and clearance program. NPM provides liquidity for pre-initial public offering companies through what it claims is a proprietary platform to standardize and settle private shares, since there’s no industry-wide standard for secondary markets. NPM filed its patent in 2023 and it was approved this March. In an email to BetaKit, a Hiive spokesperson called the lawsuit a “tactical and meritless claim based on a newly filed patent.” The secondary market has heated up in recent years as fewer companies choose to go public, causing employees at those companies to search for ways to get liquidity. Global transaction volumes for secondary sales hit $312 billion last year, up 41 percent from 2024. NPM’s allegations have yet to be tested in court, but if successful, Hiive could have to pay costly damages or possibly stop doing business in the U.S. BetaKit

Massachusetts- and Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage generative AI-driven biotechnology company, and Human Life Foundation Models, Inc. (HLFM), a newly launched company established by San Francisco-headquartered Human Longevity, announced a multi-million-dollar AI co-development collaboration to build industry's first large-scale foundation models dedicated to human longevity science. Much of Insilico’s core AI work is led in Montreal; founder Alex Zhavoronkov is Canadian, as is Insilico’s head of AI platforms, Petrina Kamya. According to recent analysis by Swiss multinational investment bank and financial services firm UBS, the global longevity market is currently valued at approximately $5.3 trillion and is on a trajectory to reach $8 trillion by 2030. Propelling this evolution is AI-driven drug discovery, which has emerged as a cornerstone of aging research by modeling aging biology, predicting disease risk and accelerating the discovery of preventive and therapeutic interventions to extend healthy human lifespan. The collaboration between Insilico and HLFM aims to jointly develop a super-intelligence AI foundation model to decode the biological mechanisms of aging and enable predictive health care. Insilico will contribute its expertise in deep learning and foundation AI models, applied to extensive datasets on thousands of people from HLFM. By fusing advanced algorithms with deep biological insights, the jointly developed foundation models are expected to be commercially available to drive breakthroughs in the early detection of age-related diseases, predictive health risk modeling, and the discovery of novel AI-driven therapeutics and personalized interventions to extend healthy human lifespan. Insilico Medicine

Toronto-based AI developer Cohere released its new AI model, Command A+, as an open-source Large Language Model (LLM). A “mixture-of-experts” model, Command A+ is an efficient, versatile and privately deployable Large Language Model built for high-performance agentic tasks with minimal compute overhead. Born from a year of deploying North – Cohere’s integrated workspace for building and deploying agentic AI – with Cohere’s business customers, the company said that Command A+ surpasses every previous generation in the Command series and unifies their capabilities into a single scalable model. Now freely available under an Apache 2.0 license, Command A+ advances Cohere’s mission to make sovereign AI a technological reality – giving developers direct access to enterprise-grade agentic capabilities across experimentation, deployment, and production workflows. Command A+ is available on Hugging Face, as well as through Model Vault. Cohere

Canadian business-to-business software companies more than doubled their percentage of the most AI-mature tier global companies compared with last year, but Canada has fallen further behind the rest of the world in company-wide implementation of agentic AI, according to a new survey by investment company Georgian and research firm NewtonX. Canada’s share of “Runners” (the most AI-mature tier) grew to 17 percent in the new survey, compared with seven percent in 2025, reducing the gap compared with 24 percent of Runners in the rest of the world. However, Canada’s 23-point company-wide agentic AI implementation gap (44 percent vs 67 percent) is the largest single Canada-vs-rest of world operational gap in the new survey. The agentic AI deployment that does exist in Canada skews toward individual users rather than company-wide rollout. Thirty-two percent of Canadian tech decision makers say their organization has agentic AI in the form of individual users but no company-wide adoption, twice the rate of the rest of the world at 16 percent. Canada is building AI products slower, the survey found. The pilot-to-production timeline shows this pattern: 35 percent of Canadian tech decision makers take seven to 12 months to ship an AI feature from pilot to production, versus 19 percent globally. Only 62 percent of Canadian tech decision makers ship pilot-to-production in under six months, versus 75 percent globally. Canadian tech decision Makers flagged that integrating with legacy systems is a top barrier to agentic implementation (22 percent in Canada versus 11 percent globally cite it as a top-3 agentic barrier). Georgian said it believes the next phase of AI value creation is increasingly going to be about net-new AI-native products and the agentic systems that power them. “In our view, Canadian tech companies appear to be behind the global trajectory on this next phase.” Georgian

AI hiring tools used by large employers are repeatedly screening out some of the same job applicants, with researchers finding that Black and Asian candidates are disproportionately affected. A study, led by Stanford University’s Stanford Institute for Human-Centred AI, looked at 4 million job applications across 156 employers who used the Pymetrics hiring platform, which assesses people using a series of online games, found evidence of “systemic rejection” linked to the algorithms it used. The research found there were “clear racial disparities” in outcomes. Analyzing individual roles, they found that one in 10 of the positions in the dataset demonstrated “adverse impact” against Black applicants, while one in 20 roles did so for Asian applicants. The research showed that jobseekers would need to apply for at least 25 different positions to be almost certain of receiving at least one recommendation to proceed to the next stage of an application. The study is the largest examination of AI hiring algorithms to date, and adds to growing concerns that widely used automated recruitment tools risk embedding bias across employers. Financial Times

Software tools that remove safety protections from AI models developed by Meta, Google and other tech companies are being used to create thousands of altered versions stripped of their original controls. The modified AI systems provided responses to prompts involving biological weapons, malware and child exploitation, according to tests conducted by the Financial Times and AI safety group Alice. A version of Google’s open-source model Gemma 3 responded to a question on how to disperse chlorine gas through a crowded indoor space, generated code to steal credit card information, and wrote stories describing child sexual abuse. The Financial Times was able to use Heretic, a tool available on the popular code repository GitHub, to remove the guardrails from Meta’s Llama 3.3 model in less than 10 minutes without any specialist hardware. The modified model responded to prompts on topics the original system refused to discuss, such as the number of micrograms of ricin per kilogram of body mass required to achieve a 50-percent chance of death. The revelations may sharpen concerns among policymakers and AI companies that safeguards imposed by model developers may become harder to enforce as open-source systems grow more powerful. The spread of modified models is complicating attempts by governments and AI companies to regulate systems at the point of development because downloadable tools can be copied and altered outside the control of their original creators. Financial Post

VC, PRIVATE INVESTMENT & ACQUISITIONS

Canadian startups rely too heavily on foreign capital to grow: BDC Capital report

Canadian startups rely too much on foreign capital to grow, according to a report by BDC Capital on the 2025 venture capital market.

“Early to late-stage financing remained dependent on foreign participation, particularly from the U.S.,” said the report, Canada’s Venture Capital Landscape 2026.

While foreign capital remains essential to Canada’s VC model, consistent domestic participation at all stages is critical to improving capital recycling, supporting long-term returns and retaining ownership of top-performing firms in Canada, according to the report.

“Strengthening domestic large check capital capacity, normalizing secondaries and other structured liquidity solutions, and aligning policy and capital toward company graduation must become central priorities alongside continued early-stage support,” the report said.

“If high-growth, maturing firms are lost, Canada misses both the value they would have injected into the economy and the returns on the early-stage investments that helped build them,” Geneviève Bouthillier, executive vice-president of BDC Capital, said in the report.

Investments in Canadian companies declined six percent last year, to $8 billion, according to the report.

The deal volume decline was more pronounced at 12 percent, as the market was driven by a few, big-ticket deals. Just 10 publicly disclosed, big-ticket deals accounted for 49 percent of all investment in 2025.

The report also found that investors are increasingly more selective, prioritizing perceived winners like AI (which accounted for half of all dollars invested), as safer investments. 

In large deals worth $50 million and more, between 80 percent and 90 percent of capital came from foreign investors.

The long-standing gap between company inception and company scale up widened significantly, with both deal volumes and investment values declining sharply at Series A, a critical moment for companies seeking to graduate to commercialization.

At late and growth stages, the challenge becomes structural: limited domestic capacity to anchor large rounds and weak exit pathways constrain companies’ ability to scale within Canada.

BDC Capital’s analysis also found that temporary migration via entrepreneurship has shown an upward trend. Entrepreneurship visas granted to Canadians over the 2015-2024 period represented 3.4 percent of Canada’s entrepreneurial population – an increase from 1.7 percent in the previous decade.

“While this trend does not indicate a large-scale or irreversible outflow of entrepreneurs, it highlights emerging pressures at key moments in the company creation and scaling journey,” the report noted.

“These findings highlight the need to enhance opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop and thrive within Canada, especially at a time when its economic sovereignty is increasingly being challenged.”

BDC Capital said its analysis revealed “a clear and pressing need” for the ecosystem to adjust and provide essential liquidity, ensuring that more Canadian companies can grow, remain anchored and generate value and wealth within Canada. BDC Capital

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Purpose Investments founder and CEO Som Seif said the financial services industry is dominated by incumbents who don’t like change, and they use the regulated nature of the industry against potential challengers. Seif made the remarks in a keynote address kicking off the 2026 Canadian Finance Summit during Toronto Tech Week. Seif highlighted what he sees as the challenges and opportunities within the Canadian financial industry, namely that traditional finance is “very self-centred” because it does not consider how to make its products more user-friendly.  “Nine out of 10 executives who run this in this industry today think today is the best day it’s ever been, meaning that they would love it for nothing to change,” Seif said. “The regulatory capture of our industry ultimately enables the major and large incumbents to play that game and make it a headwind against the challengers.” This environment makes it difficult for disruptive firms, which “have to wake up every day and find a way” to win customers, he said. In September 2025, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) alleged that Seif authorized his firm, Purpose, to make false statements about the environmental, social and governance considerations of its investments. The OSC wants to fine and suspend Seif and Purpose from managing investor funds as punishment. Seif has said he will “vigorously contest” the allegations. BetaKit

Public pension fund manager British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) launched its Capital Solutions strategy within BCI Private Equity, a dedicated investment group focused on opportunities to generate equity-like returns that extend beyond traditional buyouts. The Capital Solutions Group provides flexible capital across structured equity, general partner  solutions and strategic opportunities, with a focus on preferred equity, continuation vehicles, recapitalizations and strategic minority stakes. This approach provides additional avenues for BCI Private Equity to strengthen relationships with the more than 1,000 companies it is connected to directly and indirectly through its ecosystem of general partners, funds and institutional relationships, particularly those seeking capital and support for strategic objectives and growth initiatives. The launch responds to a changing private equity landscape marked by liquidity constraints, elevated valuations, higher cost of capital, shifting capital structures and a maturing competitive landscape, which are driving demand for differentiated capital beyond traditional buyouts. BCI

Toronto-based Wealthsimple announced it will give Canadian retail investors the opportunity to participate in initial public offerings (IPOs) at the offering price – access that is typically limited to institutional and high-net-worth investors. Through IPO Access, Wealthsimple clients will be able to request shares of select companies going public on Canadian and U.S. stock exchanges. Specific IPOs will be announced as they become available in the Wealthsimple app. When an upcoming IPO becomes available on Wealthsimple's platform, clients can submit a request for the number of shares they would like to buy. There are no minimums – clients can request a single share – and no fee to participate. If demand exceeds the shares Wealthsimple has available, participating clients are chosen through a transparent process that is disclosed in advance of each IPO, and may differ between IPOs. Clients may end up with all the shares they requested, some, or none. Clients will be notified of their allocation on the day of the IPO. TMX Newsfile

Toronto-based venture capital firm Radical Ventures co-led, with Index Ventures, a US$50-million seed round for London, U.K. AI startup Inherent, founded by former staff at DeepMind, Microsoft and the White House. Inherent is building Faraday (named after the famous scientist Michael Faraday), an AI system that, the company said, allows humans and self-improving AI to work together and tackle what it says are some of the hardest problems in science. Co-founders Tantum Collins, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch previously worked at DeepMind, while another co-founder Kaloyan Aleksiev worked at Reka AI and Microsoft. Tech.eu

Montreal- and San Francisco-based Saris AI raised US$28.8-million in a Series A funding round led by American firm 8VC, which was started by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Fellow U.S. investors Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, Btech Consortium, and Service Ventures participated in the round, which Saris said will help scale its platform and add more staff to reach more financial institutions. Saris is building AI agents to perform back-office tasks like non-customer-facing admin and support functions at banks and credit unions. The company said its agentic workflows (the roadmaps for AI agents to get different tasks done) automate up to 70 percent of consumer, mortgage and commercial lending tasks, with associated cost reductions of 35 percent. Saris said it has partnered with financial institutions including American multinational Fiserv, and California-based MeridianLink. BetaKit

Vaughn, Ont.-based drone company Volatus Aerospace Inc. raised about $30 million from a consortium of investors led by Desjardins Capital Markets in a bought deal of common shares, at a price of 65 cents per share. Volatus said the net proceeds will be used to advance the company’s long-term strategy, including: investing in expanded facilities and manufacturing capacity; product development of further enhanced capabilities for remotely piloted aircraft systems for the defence industry; enhancing the ability to consider larger acquisitions of complementary technologies and businesses; increasing the company’s attractiveness as a stable and reliable long-term supplier; and for general corporate purposes. Volatus Aerospace

Fredericton, N.B.-headquartered cybersecurity company Lastwall raised $16 million in an investment round led by the Business Development Bank of Canada through BDC Capital’s StrongNorth Fund. The round included participation from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, Frostbite Capital, and existing investors Blue Bear Capital, BlueWing Ventures and 18West. Trusted by the U.S. Department of War and the Government of Canada, Lastwall has spent nearly a decade securing some of the world’s most sensitive government environments. From air-gapped defense environments to operational technology systems powering energy and utilities, Lastwall secures access across cloud, hybrid and disconnected environments, including denied, degraded, intermittent and low-bandwidth conditions where traditional identity systems often fail. Following its success in the U.S. federal market, the company is now accelerating its expansion into Canada at a critical moment for national resilience, underscoring growing demand for homegrown cybersecurity solutions. Lastwall

Toronto-based cryptocurrency company WonderFi Technologies Inc. announced it received approval from the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization for California-based stock giant Robinhood Markets, Inc.'s previously announced acquisition of WonderFi.  WonderFi offers centralized and decentralized financial services and products. Robinhood is buying all issued and outstanding common shares of WonderFi for approximately $250 million. WonderFi’s leadership and entire 115-person team will join Robinhood Crypto’s Canadian workforce. WonderFi and Robinhood expect the deal to close by or on June 1, 2026. TMX Newsfile

According to law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP’s latest Deal Points Report, artificial intelligence companies captured 54 cents of every dollar invested last year – more than double their share the year before. AI is now the single largest industry captured by the report by both deal count and dollars invested, being well represented across every stage from seed through Series D. Total capital invested in financings covered by the Deal Points Report reached approximately US$4.5 billion, surpassing 2024 and marking the highest investment level, for deals on which Osler represented a client, in the five-year period covered by the report. Series C and Series D and beyond financings represented a significant portion of 2025 capital deployment, with approximately US$1.4 billion and US$2 billion, respectively, invested in later-stage companies. Seed stage financings represented 40 percent of all financings in 2025, while Series A financings represented 30 percent. “It remains clear that investors are continuing to make long-term bets on exciting companies with good prospects, strong existing or potential economics, product-market fit and exceptional founders,” Osler said. For the first time in 2025, Series D and beyond financings reached double digits, representing 10 percent of all Canadian financings (but 43.6 percent of all dollars invested), up from two percent in 2022. Early-stage financings (Series Seed and Series A) continued to dominate the Canadian investment landscape in 2025, representing 70 percent of all financings closed (but only 15.9 percent of capital invested). Osler

REPORTS & POLICIES

Public research funding agencies need “coherent framework” to measure the value of investment in research

Public research funding agencies need to develop cohesive guidelines on governance of the intangible assets (IA) and intellectual property (IP) generated by the research they fund, according to a new report by Forum international de la propriété intellectuelle-Québec and Axelys.

“Not only do we not have a coherent framework with which to measure the value of our investment in research, we do not even collect the data that would be needed to apply it were we to develop one,” the report said.

Collecting and reporting this data should be mandatory and at the very least made a condition of future funding, the report’s three authors said.

Once a cohesive data collection framework is in place, backed by harmonized IA/IP policy guidance across research funding agencies, Canada can begin the process of collecting the data that will allow it to assess the value of IA/IP assets, they said.

“Government policymakers should invest in cross-cutting research that can demonstrate this impact at an aggregate level; and use it to guide and influence future social, environmental, cultural and economic policies and programs for Canada,” the report said.

The goal is – for the first time in Canada – to objectively measure and assess whether public research funding is being transformed into products, services, processes and organizations that generate economic and societal value, while developing highly skilled people who will contribute to economic and social wellbeing.

Canada invests heavily in public research. However, the resulting economic and societal benefits remain difficult to measure and are often underestimated, according to the report.

Intangible assets and intellectual property resulting from research are strategic drivers for innovation, economic competitiveness and the country’s sovereignty, the report noted.

In recent years, universities have been under increasing pressure to include innovation as part of a “third pillar” of contribution to society – along with education and research – demonstrating the economic and social impact of their research.

This is a challenge: despite being an explicit part of the mission, funding for universities has historically been focused almost entirely on education and research, with little incentive for innovation and research commercialization, the report said.

“This has been limiting tech transfer activities in Canadian universities, with various reports noting challenges getting intangible assets, including intellectual property relating to research technologies out of the lab and into commercial development.”

Issues that contribute to this situation include:

• poor retention of domestic control over IA/IP assets, with recent research pointing out that in some cases, a majority of IA/IP arising from publicly funded research finds its way abroad.
• Fragmented IA/IP governance.
• Underinvestment in commercialization, especially in the pre-revenue phase of commercial operations involving research IA/IP.

To better assess the impact of research, it is necessary to track the trajectory of IAs and IP, from their creation in research settings to their use by businesses and end-users, the report said. This also involves establishing a more coherent framework for governance and data collection to better document the use and impacts of these assets, according to the report.
The report is published by Montreal-based not-for-profit Forum international de la propriété intellectuelle- Québec (FORPIQ), and Axelys, a non-profit organization responsible for developing and transferring innovations stemming from public research in Quebec.

The report’s authors are IP lawyer David Durand, co-founder of MVIP Solutions Inc. and board member of FORPIQ; physicist and deep-tech entrepreneur Kyle Briggs, entrepreneur in residence at the University of Ottawa; and Coryell Boffy, vice-president, impact and innovation policies, at Axelys.

When it comes to measuring the value of research and tech transfer, traditional indicators, such as the number of patents or licensing revenues, capture only a limited portion of the value actually created, they noted in their report.

A large part of this value is instead manifested through:

• the creation of innovative companies.
• the generation of highly skilled jobs.
• the attraction of investment.
• the development of solutions addressing economic and societal challenges.

The report recommended strengthening Canada’s approach to managing IA and IP arising from publicly funded research by:

• clarifying funding agencies’ expectations regarding governance and accountability.
• improving mechanisms for collecting and sharing data on the use of IA and IP.
• providing greater support for commercialization and transfer capabilities.

“Canadian innovation funding and data collection practices are fragmented and do not work together effectively. To address these challenges, we must first harmonize the approach to both licensing and data collection.”

Specifically, the report recommended that:

• public funding agencies develop cohesive guidelines on governance of the IA/IP arising from the research they fund, guidelines that should include a mandate to collect and report on access to IA/IP, among other indicators.
• Collecting and reporting this data must be mandated, or at the very least made a condition of future funding.

This in turn requires that postsecondary institutions’ license agreements and non-disclosure agreements are compatible with the downstream reporting requirement, for example by requiring explicit carve-out for disclosure of required data, or by making it a legal requirement under funding agreements that, in turn, causes the required data to fall under the standard carve-out for legally required disclosures that all such agreements should have, the report said.

These required disclosures should be sufficient to make research IA/IP assets traceable at the level of individual patent families or other licensed IA/IP portfolios over the long term, giving funding agencies visibility into what entities, domestic and foreign, have access to these IA/IP assets; any revenue streams from products, services or sublicenses in which they are incorporated; and the details of the sale or subsequent sub-licensing.

Currently, most IA/IP transactions occur in the form of licenses that are usually under non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and are not typically made public, the report noted.

The standard practice employed by most Canadian postsecondary institutions of licensing under an NDA when licensing to industry has been the basis for pushback against provision of data to the federal government on the ground that doing so would violate NDA obligations.

This problem was made clear by a recent attempt by Statistics Canada (StatsCan) to conduct a survey on licensing activity from postsecondary research IP. Many universities were unable or unwilling to provide the required information.

“The report produced by StatsCan was published and available for only a few weeks before being withdrawn following criticism based on the incompleteness of the data that went into it,” the report said.

Canadian universities reported just $170,000 in licensing revenues per $10 million spent on research in 2023. However, this represents only a fraction of the value of IA/IP and is only loosely connected to economic activity arising from the IA/IP in question, according to the report.

The fact that effectively all resulting economic activity will take place behind an NDA, and that StatsCan is unable to collect actionable data as a result, makes it impossible to estimate the economic activity resulting from these licenses, according to the report.

But precedent exists elsewhere for this data collection. The Bayh-Dole Act in the United States, for example, has strict reporting requirements for the IA/IP licensed by academic institutions to the private sector.

In the U.K., the Spinout Register provides a centralized platform for reporting on commercial activity arising from university spinouts.

The U.K. also developed the Research Excellence Framework that aims to provide indication of research excellence, ensure accountability for public investment, provide evidence of the benefits of research investments, and serve as a basis for block-grant capital allocation.

Canada should learn from these examples and enact similar frameworks for required data collection, adapted to the Canadian context, the report said.

Such data could in principle be cross-referenced with tax data held by Canada revenue agency to create aggregated and anonymized but highly valuable reports on economic and societal activity arising from specific IA/IP assets.

While harmonized IA/IP governance and an associated data sharing framework would be tremendously valuable, they are only feasible with appropriate funding, the report noted.

Canadian tech and knowledge transfer offices are underfunded relative to the size of the IA/IP portfolios they manage, and only through appropriate resourcing will the report’s recommendations be actionable, the report said.

Major inefficiencies exist that can be addressed through harmonized IP governance and policies, wider-use of  express licenses (SAIL10 and others), and other measures that would reduce time spent negotiating licenses in favor of time spent collecting performance data, according to the report.

These licenses also provide a platform through which to deliver the suggested data collection mandate and are a vehicle through which to ensure that licensing activity results in demonstrable “benefit to Canada.”

“Such an approach would help better document the value creation associated with public investments in research and strengthen Canada’s ability to transform its scientific  discoveries into sustainable economic and societal benefits,” the report says. Axelys

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Canada requires “serious policy change” to address weak innovation, productivity and competitiveness

Canadian innovation, productivity and competitiveness are weak and, absent serious policy change, will likely get even weaker, according to a new report by the Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness.

“A turnaround requires addressing Canada’s core challenges – most fundamentally, a Canadian political economy that is not designed for the techno-economic environment the country now faces,” said the report by Robert D. Atkinson, founder and a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), with which the Ottawa-based Canadian centre is affiliated.

The key takeaways from Atkison’s report are:

• Canada has seen weak productivity and innovation and deindustrialization. Limited capital investment, R&D and entrepreneurship contribute to the problem.
• Many of the purported theories of poor performance, such as monopoly, housing capital crowding out investment, and problems with foreign investment, “simply do not hold water.”
• Restrictive regulation, interprovincial trade barriers, too many small and medium-sized enterprises, shallow capital markets, foreign ownership restrictions and high immigration rates are more relevant.
• But the real question is, why has more and better action not occurred on core problems? Faulty or shallow analysis and a limited political economy coalition for change contribute.
• Canada’s largely European Union-style social democratic system and politics lead to a deep skepticism of technology-driven, dynamic capitalism and largely favour [economic] redistribution.
• The Canadian national state is weak and prioritizes stability over change.

What is needed is a deeper political economy analysis of the Canadian techno-economic challenge and why Canada seems so resistant not just to taking bold reform steps, but also even acknowledging that such steps might be needed, Atkinson said.

His report argues that Canada suffers from three major limitations:

1. No strong political coalition for a dynamic, industrial capitalism supported by techno-industrial policy.
2. Weak and shallow analysis that continues to “paint within the numbers” and not challenge conventional thinking, dominant interests and political ideology.
3. Deeply embedded institutional and cultural factors that limit the emergence of a developmental state that advances needed creative destruction.

“Absent deep change, path dependency suggests that Canada will keep limping along, becoming more and more a natural resource state, akin to what Australia has evolved into,” Atkinson said.

Virtually all indicators of Canadian productivity, innovation and competitiveness are problematic, especially if Canada benchmarks itself against global leaders, he noted.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data shows that in 2023 Canadian workers produced US$74.70 in output per hour worked, compared with US$97.00 in the United States. That means Canada operated at roughly 77 percent of U.S. labour productivity levels.

OECD analysis similarly finds that, from 2019 to 2023, Canada’s labour productivity growth averaged just 0.5 percent, well below the U.S. and below what would be needed even to hold Canada’s relative position. “In other words, Canada is not merely failing to catch up. It is continuing to fall behind.”

In 2024, when compared with the U.S. Canada’s real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), was $51,682, while U.S. GDP per capita was $72,375, meaning Canada fell short by $20,693 (a 40-percent gap).

When it comes to international competitiveness, Canada’s non-natural resource competitiveness problem is visible in its shrinking presence in globally traded advanced industries, Atkinson said.

The ITIF’s forthcoming 2026 Hamilton Index, which aggregates performance across 10 advanced-industry sectors (e.g., machinery, information services, chemicals, motor vehicles, etc.) shows that Canada’s national location quotient (which compares a sector’s share of the Canadian economy with that sector’s share of the world economy) fell from 0.87 in 1995 to just 0.59 in 2022. (In the Hamilton Index, 1 and greater means the country is more specialized than the global average, while a score below 1 means the country has less of the industry than the global average).

Canada’s Hamilton Index score is not just below the global average but also behind countries such as Argentina, Russia, and Indonesia. “For a G7 economy sitting beside the world’s largest market, this is a striking measure of industrial slippage.”

As for innovation, the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index ranked Canada 8^th in 2011. By 2025, however, it had fallen to 17^th.

In 2024, Canada did not rank in the top 20 countries for patent applications per GDP or population and was below its expected number of patents given its per-capita GDP.

In 2023, Canada’s total R&D spending as a share of GDP was 42 percent below the OECD average.

The C.D. Howe Institute found that the longstanding gap between Canadian investment per worker and levels in the U.S. and other OECD economies narrowed from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, but has since widened sharply.

In 2025, Canadian workers likely received only 55 cents of new capital for every dollar received by U.S. workers.

According to recent ITIF analysis, Canada’s productive capital stock fell eight percent as a share of GDP between 2013 and 2023, with industrial machinery down 19 percent and computers and electronics down 10 percent.

“Firms that are not replacing and upgrading machinery, equipment, and digital capital end up operating with older, more worn-out tools, and that shows up in weaker productivity,” Atkinson noted.

Canada’s business R&D investment is lower than many other nations. In 2024, Canadian firms spent only $9.3 billion on R&D, ranking 14^th of 45 nations with available data.

When controlling for GDP, Canadian firms ranked even lower at 21^st of 44 nations with available data as they only spent 0.4 percent of GDP on R&D.

In comparison, U.S. firms spent $746 billion on R&D, ranking 1^st of 45 nations. When controlling for GDP, U.S. firms spent 2.6 percent of GDP on R&D.

In contrast, Canadian firms’ GDP-adjusted R&D spending fell behind that of Taiwan, Uruguay, China, and Italy.

The relatively poor performance of Canadian startups is a factor in overall techno-economic performance weaknesses, Atkinson said.

According to OECD data, Canada has 17,188 startups (the data does not specify the specific year). Canada’s startups as a share of the workforce amount to 0.08 percent, while U.S. share of start-ups is 0.11 percent.

Canada’s startup share of labor force does surpass that of Europe at 0.03 percent and Australia at 0.06 percent.

However, the number of Canadian financing deals is only 0.05 percent of its labor force while U.S. is 0.09. Moreover, Canada’s venture capital funding as a share of GDP is only 3.9 percent while the U.S. share is 6.9 percent.

Atkinson rejects what he calls several “dubious causes” put forward for Canada’s weak innovation, productivity and competitiveness, including corporate oligopoly or monopoly, foreign investment, and housing and real estate reducing capital investment in productive assets, such as machinery and equipment.

As for what he considers “valid causes,” he points to interprovincial trade barriers that are not just tariffs in disguise but also a dense accumulation of differing provincial rules on professional licensing, trucking and transport regulation, product standards, procurement, and the sale and movement of goods such as alcohol.

The result is that firms looking to scale across Canada often face the kind of compliance burden one would expect in crossing national borders, not provincial ones, he said. “That raises costs, reduces competition, weakens labour mobility and denies firms the scale they need to invest, specialize, and become more productive.”

The International Monetary Fund estimated that eliminating nongeographic internal trade barriers could raise Canada’s real GDP by nearly seven percent over the long run, or $210 billion in 2025, largely through stronger productivity and more efficient allocation of capital and labour.

Moreover, “Canada is not the easiest place to do business,” Atkinson said. For example, OECD ranked Canada 34^th of 35 OECD countries for permitting approval times as of 2020.

The World Bank listed the time to receive a construction permit in Canada at 249 days, more than three times the number of days in the United States.

Another factor is that Canada has a higher share of small businesses than many nations do, especially the U.S., he said.

On average, small Canadian companies are less productive and innovative than larger ones. According to a report published in 2014, Canadian small businesses were just half as productive as large firms were; U.S. small firms, on the other hand, were 67 percent as productive.

Canada’s economy is relatively small, which makes it harder to scale. Also, Canadian policy puts a “regulatory and tax thumb” on the scale in favor of small business, Atkinson said.

Canada also has a preferential R&D tax credit rate for small companies, and a slew of provincial and national government regulations exempt or reduce regulatory demands for small business.

Other factors Atkinson cites are Canada’s high bankruptcy costs; harder to fire workers in Canada; a high immigration rate; and the country has less-deep venture and growth capital markets;

According to OECD, Canadian venture capital funding is 3.9 percent of GDP, compared with 2.9 percent in the EU and 6.9 percent in the United States. And deal size is about twice as large in the U.S. as in Canada.

A primary “analytical myth” is that Canada should be doing fine because it has lots of the right ingredients: in this case, great universities and educated workers. “The assumption is that these ingredients translate into successful outcomes. But they do not – and especially not in Canada.”

One recent study compared a number of leading countries, including Canada and the U.S., to determine the relationship between increases in graduation rates in higher education and transformation to a more tech-based economy.

It found that Canada is alone among the nations in which an increase in skilled workers does not support technological change in the economy, and that “skilled workers were allocated mainly to the Skilled Non-Market Services” (e.g., health care, higher education, government, etc.).

Another causal factor was the Trudeau government’s massive increase in immigration, Atkinson said.

The only way this immigration surge could have boosted per capita income is if the preponderance of immigrants were scientists and engineers, he said. “In fact, most immigrants were low skilled.”

Moreover, the surpluses of low wage labor was an incentive for Canadian businesses to hire more workers rather than boost productivity, he added.

For many of these issues, policymakers have been aware of the problems for many years, Atkinson pointed out. “There is something more at work than just limited analysis wrapped with ideological blinkers.”

One factor appears to be the lack of a strong set of forces pushing for Canadian technology-based growth and transformation, he said.

The Canadian tech sector is relatively small. And compared with the United States, the tech sector spends very little to shape policy, as does Canadian business overall, Atkinson said.

To the extent that there are other voices for technology policy, they come largely from universities “whose almost sole goal is more government funding for basic research, and from government labs that seek stable budgets.”

Most Canadian think-tank, academic, and civil-society voices consist of technology and business skeptics, if not downright opponents, he said.

Also, unions in Canada and the United States largely oppose technological innovation if it might cause job loss, or even task reorientation, Atkinson said. “The problem is significantly worse in Canada, where unionization rates are roughly double U.S. private sector rates, while the Canadian public sector is heavily unionized at close to 80 percent.”

Canada experienced more than double the number of strikes in 2024 than the United States did, a 20 times greater rate per capita, he said. “And Canadian unions pressure government not to support productivity, competitiveness, and innovation, but rather to expand worker rights, redistribution, social justice and gender equity.”  

Canadian universities, to a greater extent than universities in the U.S., resist government efforts to pressure or even incent them to focus more on industry research needs and commercialization, Atkinson said. “They are the main voices the government listens to when formulating R&D policy, yet they want one and only one thing: more money with fewer strings.”

There are two kinds of core factors that get at the heart of why the Canadian governments and elites have not acted more strongly, Atkinson said. These are structural institutional factors, and culture and values.

Like the EU, “where Brussels has too little power, in Canada, provinces have too much power and regional identity is so powerful that federal politicians must constantly manage provincial sensitivities,” he said.

The standard case for federalism (in Canada’s case, strong provinces) – subsidiarity, policy experimentation, preference heterogeneity across a vast geography – “no longer holds water,” he added.

Canada’s weak central government has led to “regulatory balkanization:” internal trade barriers that are in some dimensions more restrictive than international trade barriers; professional licensing that doesn’t transfer across provincial borders; and securities regulation that is fragmented across 13 jurisdictions.

“In a world where more and more of commerce is cross-border, provincial regulatory fragmentation is an important drag on growth,” Atkinson said.

Strong provinces with fiscal capacity means there are fewer resources at the national level to advance the national economic interest, he said.

If Canada wants to drive innovation in the higher education system to align it more closely with industrial need, Ottawa has relatively few tools by which to do so given that most higher education funding comes from the provinces, he added.

For Canada, three and a half centuries of operating under someone else’s [the United States] strategic umbrella have produced a cautious state that prioritizes reducing risk over dynamic change, Atkinson said. “Societies that have never faced genuine existential economic pressure don’t develop the political capacity for painful self-reform because they’ve never needed it.” That’s not the case with countries that have built the most productive and innovative economies: Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and Finland, he noted. All faced genuine existential pressure at some point that forced deep institutional and cultural adaptation.

In contrast, he said, “Canadians appear to like the stable life. Provincial income equalization. Limits on layoffs. Broad benefits. Regulation that tilts too much toward risk reduction at the expense of innovation.”

“The early-exit pattern among Canadian startups – selling to U.S. acquirers rather than scaling – is perhaps a reflection of that. Easier to exit and live the good life,” he said.

It is not too late for Canada to turn its economy around, but it is getting close to a point of no return, Atkinson warned.

Continued lagging productivity, coupled with a surge in expected retirement benefits in the next decade, will put further pressure on the government, limiting even more its fiscal headroom to make needed tax and non-tax expenditures in innovation and competitiveness, he said.

To start to turn around the situation, Canada needs to take at least two major steps, Atkinson advised. First, wealthy Canadian elites will have to do more to push for and support change.

Second, a much larger share of Canadian elites, in business, government, the media, academia, and civil society, will need to come together to jointly “break glass” and call not for “free glass” or “let the market clean up the glass,” but rather a national strategy to turn things around, he said.

“But Canada may be like the proverbial frog in the boiling water, with the occasional report, article, or speech saying that the water appears to be getting warmer, but then people going back to their pleasant apathy: At least we aren’t like the Yanks.” Information Technology & Innovation Foundation

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Editor’s note: The theme of the 25^th Annual Research Money Conference, June 3 and 4 in Ottawa, is “Acting on Health: Reimagining Canada’s Promise.” Leading up to the conference, Research Money has been highlighting news stories, reports on research, commentaries and analyses focused on health and life sciences.

We are making the exact same mistake in health care as we did in housing

 OPINION

By Rafiq Andani

Rafiq Andani is a family physician and an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Manitoba. This op-ed first appeared here in The Globe and Mail.

For a generation of Canadians, buying a house has transformed from a symbol of stability into a crushing financial burden. Over the past decade, affordability evaporated as population growth vastly outpaced supply.

Today, we are witnessing the same kind of supply-constrained policy failure inside Canada’s publicly funded health-care system.

In 2025, the Canadian Institute for Health Information’s (CIHI) National Health Expenditure forecast puts Canada’s spending on physician services at roughly $55 billion. That massive figure consumes nearly 14 per cent of the country’s health-care budget. To put that in perspective, physician services cost more than public health ($22.2 billion) and provincial and territorial home and community care ($17.4 billion) combined, and about one-and-a-half times the 2025-26 departmental budget for National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces ($35.7 billion).

The Canadian Medical Association projects physician spending to reach a new high. At the same time, a staggering 5.9 million Canadian adults, about 15 per cent of adults, still do not have a regular primary care provider.

Most Canadians do not experience health care through abstract debates over jurisdiction. They experience it through the frantic attempt to find someone who will renew a prescription or assess a chronic illness before it spirals into an emergency room visit.

As access to primary care tightens, the cost of maintaining the system continues to rise. CIHI’s 2023-24 National Physician Database payments data put Canada’s average gross clinical payment for family medicine physicians at $324,000 per physician.

International comparisons are imperfect but revealing. NHS Digital reported average general practitioner income before tax in England at £120,200 in 2023-24, or roughly $220,000. The Canadian gross-payment figure is about 32 percent higher.

Australia points to the other half of the problem: supply. It registered more than 5,400 international medical graduates that same year.

Canada, by contrast, continues to spend heavily while leaving too much medical labour trapped outside practice.

This does not mean Canadian physicians are overpaid. Of those gross clinical payments, doctors must cover the soaring overhead costs of running a clinic. Rather, these figures reveal that Canada has engineered a deeply dysfunctional medical labour market.

In theory, a single-payer health care system should be able to operate as a monopsony: a single dominant buyer, with the market power to dictate prices. In practice, because the unemployment rate for a fully licensed family physician is functionally zero, provincial governments have surrendered that power. They negotiate from a position of scarcity.

When supply is bottlenecked, injecting more money into the system simply does not reliably buy more care. Instead, it can create rent-like effects: incumbents gain bargaining power because entry is constrained. Governments no longer act as dominant purchasers in the tightest parts of the physician labour market; they have become price-takers, paying ever-increasing premiums just to prevent the system from collapsing.

This scarcity is hollowing out the profession from the inside. Raw physician head counts mean little if accessible clinical supply is not keeping pace with population need. While family physician head counts have grown, the supply per population decreased from 11.8 per 10,000 in 2020 to 11.5 in 2024. The few available doctors are forced to absorb massive, highly complex patient rosters while fragmented bureaucracies shift endless administrative work onto their shoulders.

Other sectors would diagnose this immediately. In real estate, we know that a million-dollar mortgage now buys a fraction of the square footage it used to. Prices rose because demand structurally outpaced supply, inherently increasing the value of existing assets while locking out new entrants.

Health care operates under a similar supply-constrained logic. Governments continue to increase physician expenditures because the access pressures are real. The production pipeline for independent medical practice remains tightly constrained. Most frustratingly, thousands of internationally trained medical graduates already living in Canada spend years sidelined by bureaucratic bottlenecks, even when they have practised safely and independently abroad.

Practice-ready assessment programs offer a rational and faster off-ramp for experienced candidates who can demonstrate competence. Rather than assuming every experienced international physician must repeat years of basic residency, programs such as Saskatchewan’s 12-week clinical field assessment and Manitoba’s three-month family-practice assessment evaluate candidates through supervised workplace-based assessment. We need to measure clinical competence, supervise carefully, and deploy them to underserved areas.

We vastly underinvest in nursing, long-term care, and home care, but the fundamental math of our primary care deficit remains undeniable. We finally realized that pumping subsidies into a supply-starved housing market only inflates real estate prices without housing a single new family. It is time we learned the same lesson in health care: you cannot buy your way out of a policy-induced shortage. The Globe and Mail

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Are ecosystem leaders wasting money on business accelerators?

Startup ecosystems around the world are spending significant public money on accelerators and growth programs – but much of it isn't delivering, according to Marc Penzel, founder and president of Startup Genome.

“Not because of a shortage of initiatives, but because they are the wrong programs, run by the wrong operators, measured by the wrong metrics, designed for ecosystems that have fundamentally changed,” he said in a Startup Genome article.

The uncomfortable truth is that many program portfolios were designed for ecosystems that no longer exist, Penzel said. As AI-Native startups reshape every sector and Deep Tech moves from fringe to mainstream, generic accelerators continue to churn through cohorts optimized for a previous era.

Even well-designed portfolios decay: ecosystems mature, founder needs evolve, new sectors emerge. Portfolios that aren't actively managed don't just stagnate, but actively misallocate resources, crowding out the programs an ecosystem actually needs, he said.

A high-performing ecosystem needs a coherent support continuum from venture sprints and hackathons that broaden entrepreneurial participation, through pre-acceleration and core acceleration, to late-stage growth, commercialization and global market access Penzel said.

Each stage requires different design logic, different operators and different success metrics. Few ecosystems have a coherent framework across this full spectrum – and where the private sector does not sufficiently cover all critical stages, public support often has redundancy at some, critical gaps at others, and public budgets spread too thin to make meaningful impact anywhere, he said.

“Governance failures compound all of this.” Public agencies often operate programs directly, despite lacking the incentives, networks and specialist expertise that high-performance acceleration demands.

The consequences are predictable: inability to attract top-tier founders, weak mentor networks, susceptibility to political inconsistencies, and no mechanism to reward performance or remove underperforming operators, Penzel said.

Competitive tenders for private sector operators – with genuine skin in the game via equity stakes or performance-linked funding – consistently outperform direct public delivery, even if those private sector operators need to be imported from overseas, he noted.

“Perhaps most damaging of all is how success is measured.” Many programs are still routinely evaluated on throughput – how many startups completed a cohort – rather than the metrics that actually matter: funding outcomes, revenue growth and global reach.

And where these metrics are measured, there is often little attention paid to programs’ value-add: if programs are selective, it is simply not adequate to compare the selected startups with other, general startups without taking that selection effect into account, Penzel said.

“Without robust evaluation methodology, including longitudinal tracking against proper control groups, public funders have no reliable way to distinguish programs that add genuine value from those that merely select the most promising startups and take the credit.”

However, the research is clear that well-designed accelerator programs can indeed add value, both to startups and the founders themselves, he pointed out.

Moreover, there can be significant ecosystem-level benefits: previous research has shown that venture capital investment increases across an ecosystem – even outside accelerated startups – when the first accelerators appear. “These spillovers provide a clear rationale for public policy support.”

Ecosystem leaders should first start with an honest assessment of where their ecosystem actually stands – its strengths and weaknesses – and leaders’ objectives, Penzel advised.

A small, slow-growing ecosystem has fundamentally different priorities than a maturing one; the former must focus on increased startup creation before anything else. Startup Genome’s Lifecycle Assessment can assist this process, he said.

From that baseline assessment, ecosystem leaders should consider their budget and what support is needed at each startup stage, from entrepreneurship activation through to global growth. In rapidly-developing ecosystems, it is also important to think ahead to the startup mix that will exist in two to three years, he said.

Policymakers should consider the strategic sub-sectors that matter most, and consult local industry about alignment.

Specialization is no longer just a “nice-to-have:” specialist programs consistently attract stronger applicant pools and better mentor-investor fit and, for some ecosystems, such as those with a clear industrial base in the sector concerned, can also play a role in startup attraction, Penzel said. Startup Genome’s Innovation Edge tool can help here.

Next, policymakers should enable private sector operators, not compete with them, using expressions of interest to surface operators, and advertising beyond the local ecosystem where local suppliers do not exist, Penzel said.

Financial sustainability is difficult, especially for programs providing very early stage support, and grants, tax reliefs or public-private partnerships can all help, while public sector competition will harm.

“Many accelerators are like startups themselves: searching for a repeatable and sustainable business model,” he said.

Ironically, however, the owners and operators sometimes fail to reflect the advice given to their startups and find themselves too consumed by day-to-day operations to think about their own strategy and productivity.

Non-financial assistance – such as exposure to international good practice and smarter operating systems – may help in this regard, and there are now a number of tools which reduce the administrative burden for program managers and support them in making better data-led decisions.

The eventual aim should be to develop a series of standalone private-sector program operators, Penzel said.

However, to achieve sustainability, programs themselves may need to double-down on quality: increasing stipends or investment will attract higher-quality startups and better mentors, and increase the likelihood of equity-based programs making sizable returns. Public sector funding can also support this initially.

Additionally, evaluation and accountability should be designed-in from day one, not as an afterthought, he said. For example, it is much easier for programs to produce robust impact analyses if they track all applicants, not just the ones successfully admitted.

Outcomes should be rigorously tracked, and public funders should be willing to expand what works, prune what doesn't, and add specialisms as their ecosystem evolves. “Active portfolio management is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing discipline.”

Accelerators and related growth programs can add substantial value – to founders, to their firms and to ecosystems as a whole, Penzel said.

“However, many public funders are not maximizing this value, through ill-defined strategy, portfolios that are inappropriate for their ecosystem or weak program assessment.” Startup Genome

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Editor’s note: This is the fifth piece in a Research Money series that is examining the benefits and risks of Canada’s nuclear power expansion. The first story was published on March 18; the second story on March 25, 2026; the third story on April 15, 2026; and the fourth story on May 13, 2026. Our stories include the perspectives of both nuclear power proponents as well as those who think nuclear is not the option Canada needs.

 Nuclear power means backing yesterday’s horse while sacrificing Canada’s future

OPINION

By Ralph Torrie

Ralph Torrie is a climate and energy strategist and research director at Corporate Knights. This op-ed first appeared here in The Globe and Mail.

In 1914, the Hudson’s Bay Company built a stable for its delivery horses just as Henry Ford’s assembly line was redefining transportation. Within a decade, the Bay’s horses were gone. Today, Canada risks a similar misstep. Governments are committing to new nuclear reactors at a moment when electricity systems are shifting toward renewables, storage and digitally managed grids.

For all its technical complexity, nuclear power remains a thermal, steam‑cycle technology: Uranium is mined, fabricated into fuel, used to produce heat and leaves behind spent fuel, contaminated materials and decommissioning liabilities. Wind turbines, solar panels and batteries also require materials and end‑of‑life systems; they are not magically circular. But direction is shifting toward modular, increasingly recyclable technologies that utilize renewable energy flows.

Nuclear is a sophisticated expression of a 20th‑century once‑through industrial model, arriving just as the wider economy is trying to move beyond it.

Over the past decade or so, solar, wind and utility-scale batteries have seen dramatic cost declines, with solar and batteries falling by 70 percent to 90 percent. These are now among the lowest-cost sources of new electricity in history. Deployment is accelerating rapidly, supported by global supply chains and continuous technological improvement.

According to the International Energy Agency, annual global investment in wind, solar and storage is now more than US$700 billion – roughly 10 times annual nuclear investment.

Where nuclear construction expands, it is largely concentrated in state-directed economies where governments absorb most of the financial risk. In 2025, all 10 reactors that started construction globally were in China or Russia. Over the past decade, 94 percent of reactors that started construction were of Chinese or Russian design.

Large reactors concentrate risk in single assets that take years to permit, finance and build. Costs remain uncertain until late in construction, and projects often face significant post-startup remediation.

Canada’s most recently completed nuclear build is a cautionary example. Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario was finished after decades of CANDU experience, when domestic design and construction capability should have been near its peak.

Yet serious problems still emerged after commissioning, including cracked turbine-generator shafts, primary heat-transport vibration and fuel-sheath integrity concerns. The resulting outages and remedial work illustrate the limits of nuclear learning: With rare, complex builds, costly problems can remain hidden until after commissioning.

That is not the kind of learning curve seen in solar panels, wind turbines or batteries, where repetition tends to reveal costs before construction, not after. In the 35 years since Darlington was started up, Canada has built more than 7,500 wind turbines. We can estimate the cost and performance of the next wind turbine with far greater confidence. We know how often the turbines fail, and why. Each turbine added to the fleet creates more operating data, more supply-chain experience, more predictability of future performance.

The concept of baseload power is also changing. Modern grids do not need more inflexible supply at any price; they need dependable capacity delivered when required. Wind, solar, storage, hydro, interties, demand response and grid management now compete directly to provide that reliability – and can be deployed incrementally, faster and with less financial risk.

As buildings electrify and winter heating peaks grow, Canada will need generating capacity that may sit idle in warmer months. That is a poor fit for capital-intensive plants whose economics depend on running flat out year-round, but less costly for renewable resources with no fuel costs and low operating expenses when some capacity is seasonally underused.

And yet, nuclear’s historical inertia carries it forward. The federal government has explicitly framed nuclear as a strategic investment priority – supporting it through financial support and tax credits. When capital costs are underwritten, tax credits provided and project risks backstopped, projects become easier to promote to mayors and chambers of commerce as a source of jobs and regional development, even when their economics are weak.

Long construction timelines make them especially lucrative for financiers: Interest during construction can account for 30 percent or more of total project cost. Taxpayers take the risk, ratepayers inherit the cost and the system is locked into a technology increasingly misaligned with the direction of the grid. Electric prices increase unnecessarily just when low rates are needed to accelerate electrification.

The Bay’s delivery horse stable committed capital to yesterday’s system even while its replacement was overtaking it. That is the risk with new nuclear today.

To keep reaching for the nuclear option is to choose the past over the future – and risks weakening Canada’s position in the emerging 21st-century economy. The Globe and Mail

THE GRAPEVINE – News about people, institutions and communities

The Government of Québec appointed Jérôme Dupras, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, as Quebec’s new chief scientist. Dupras, who is also a bassist for the group Cowboys Fingants, wants to inspire young people to pursue knowledge-based careers. Dupras is involved with a UNESCO research chair, the holder of a doctorate in geography from the University of Montreal and a postdoctoral fellowship in biology from McGill University. A selection committee that included international artificial intelligence expert Yoshua Bengio recommended his appointment. As Quebec’s chief scientist, Dupras becomes president and CEO of the Fonds de recherche du Québec, a fund worth several hundred million dollars. He will be a "leading player" in Quebec's science diplomacy, and he’ll advise members of the government on matters of research and science development. Dupras succeeds Rémi Quirion, who held the role since 2011 when the position of chief scientist was created. La Presse

Dr. Paul Hébert, president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), announced the appointment of Dr. Keith Fowke as scientific director of the CIHR Institute of Infection and Immunity for a four-year term, effective July 1, 2026. A professor and head of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Manitoba, Fowke has led globally impactful, multidisciplinary research and training programs in partnership with collaborators in Canada and internationally. His research focuses on defining the cellular immune mechanisms of resistance to viral infections and the control of infection. Fowke is well known for his engagement in research partnerships with sex worker communities in Nairobi, Kenya where he and his colleagues are working to understand why some people who are highly exposed to HIV remain uninfected. This research may lead to new ways to prevent and clear HIV infection. CIHR

Former federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault said Canada is “backsliding” on climate action as he announced that he’s leaving his job as an MP. In an interview with CBC's Power and Politics, Guilbeault told host David Cochrane that he started thinking about leaving politics after Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a major energy accord and a commitment to advance a West Coast oilsands bitumen pipeline late last year. At that time he resigned from cabinet, but remained in the Liberal caucus. Last week, Guilbeault told his party and his Montreal constituents that he is resigning as an MP because he intends to take his fight for the environment outside of government. Guilbeault said Canada "will be lucky" to slash its emissions by 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 under its current policies. He said that through the negotiations with Alberta, Ottawa relinquished one of the strongest tools it has to fight climate change – industrial carbon pricing. CBC News

Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon appointed Alain Langlois as chairperson of the Canadian Transportation Agency for a five-year term, and Fred Gaspar as vice-chairperson for a five-year term. Langlois most recently served as assistant deputy minister at the Department of Justice Canada. Prior to that, he held senior leadership roles overseeing legal operations, legislative and regulatory matters, and transportation-related legal advice across federal organizations, including files related to rail, marine, surface and air transportation. Gaspar held senior executive positions across various federal organizations, where his experience included oversight of licensing, compliance and economic regulatory determinations, as well as leading policy and operational initiatives across the federal government. He also has extensive experience in the air and rail transportation. Transport Canada

Pamela Swett, the dean of McMaster University’s Faculty of Humanities since 2019, will be leaving McMaster to take on a role as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. McMaster’s provost has initiated the Senate governance process, in consultation with leaders in the Faculty of Humanities, to appoint an acting dean. The acting dean will serve until a permanent appointment is made. Swett has been at McMaster since 1999, when she joined the Department of History as a faculty member, later serving as chair of the department from 2011 until 2017. From 2016 until her appointment as dean in 2019, she was the Faculty’s associate dean of graduate studies and research. Her contributions as dean include the creation of Inspiring Sustainable Futures, the Faculty of Humanities’ first-ever strategic plan, as well as the development and launch of significant programs. Swett played a key role in securing the $50 million gift that created the Wilson College of Leadership and Civic Engagement, which welcomed its first cohort of undergraduate students in September 2025.

Montreal-based GHGSat, a leading commercial greenhouse gas monitoring satellite company, announced the appointment of Jean-Marc Nasr as independent chair of its board of directors, effective immediately. In connection with this appointment, the board has separated the roles of chair and CEO, with Stéphane Germain continuing in the role of CEO. Nasr brings nearly four decades of leadership experience spanning satellite technology, Earth observation and international space programs. He most recently served as executive vice-president and head of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, where he oversaw one of the world's largest commercial and institutional space portfolios. GHGSat said separating these responsibilities allows each leader to focus their efforts where they can have the greatest impact: the chair providing independent board oversight and strategic counsel, and the CEO driving execution and day-to-day operations. GHGSat

Royal Bank of Canada is restructuring the leadership of its insurance arm, changes driven by the departure of the division’s head. Jennifer Publicover, who runs RBC Insurance, is leaving the bank effective June 1, RBC confirmed to The Globe and Mail. She has led the division since 2023 and was named a group executive in July, 2024, reporting directly to CEO Dave McKay. Publicover’s appointment to the group executive team landed at a significant moment for RBC’s succession planning, with the announcement made at the 10-year mark of McKay’s tenure. As part of those changes, RBC’s personal and commercial banking arm was split in two for reporting purposes, and the two units’ new leaders, Erica Nielsen and Sean Amato-Gauci, were appointed group heads of the respective units. At the same time, Neil McLaughlin expanded his executive oversight by taking over wealth management. Previously, he ran the personal and commercial banking division. After the latest insurance changes, McLaughlin will now oversee wealth management and insurance. Maria Winslow, a senior vice-president in the insurance division, will be its interim CEO of the insurance division. The Globe and Mail

University of Victoria (UVic) students, faculty, staff, Elders, community members and special guests gathered at the First Peoples House to welcome Dr. Angela Jaime as UVic’s new vice-president Indigenous. An enrolled member of the Pit River Tribe of Northern California, Jamie previously served at the University of Saskatchewan where she held the position of vice-provost Indigenous Engagement. Guided by local protocol and the teachings of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples, the UVic welcome ceremony was a moment of relationship and respect as the local nations formally welcomed Jaime to live and work on these lands. The ceremony offered a moment of grounding for Jaime before beginning her new journey within Etalew̓txʷ | ÁTOL,ÁUTW̱ | the Office of the Vice-President Indigenous, where she will join UVic’s executive leadership in advancing Indigenous priorities and helping guide the university’s ongoing commitments to reconciliation, relationship-building and systems transformation. During the ceremony, Jaime was blanketed in a woven Coast Salish blanket by Myrna Crossley of the Songhees Nation, a meaningful act of witness, support and care as she begins this next chapter at UVic. University of Victoria

Toronto-based AI-powered legaltech firm Spellbook announced that Jean-Michel Lemieux has joined the company. The former Shopify and Atlassian chief technology officer takes on the newly created role designed specifically for AI-native companies as executive individual contributor (EIC). In an era where software is built faster than ever, the new bottleneck is the speed of decisions and coordination. To address this, Spellbook is embedding an experienced technical leader directly into the company’s most challenging projects. Unlike traditional executive roles confined to a single department, the EIC functions as a high-leverage operator working across product, engineering, go-to-market, and internal systems for the AI-native enterprise. Lemieux, who previously helped scale both Shopify and Atlassian from growth stage through initial public offerings, has been an investor and advisor to Spellbook for the past year. Business Wire

Beginning this fall, University of British Columbia (UBC) students experiencing food insecurity will be able to access supports directly through campus health care providers as part of a new food prescription program. The program is one of three UBC food security initiatives supported by a $3.5-million gift from RBC. The gift will also support sustainable agriculture training through the UBC Farm Practicum in Sustainable Agriculture and new Online Practicum, as well as the BC Food Web, a UBC-hosted platform that translates agricultural research into accessible resources for farmers, producers and industry. The $3.5-million gift represents RBC’s largest ever to a postsecondary institution. Beginning in September, the food prescription program will operate out of UBC’s newly opened Gateway Health Building, where student health and wellbeing services are brought together under one roof. Alongside physical and mental health screening, students may now be asked about their food security. If a risk is identified, clinicians will create a personalized food prescription and connect students directly to the campus food supports. UBC

A new partnership between the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN) aims to spur innovation across the automotive and mobility sectors. The strategic collaboration, which involves U of T joining the OVIN Incubators program, brings together the university’s research excellence with OVIN’s extensive automotive and mobility network to accelerate both the conversion of research into market-ready technologies and the creation of new, Ontario-based ventures. OVIN Incubators is creating an open innovation and startup creation platform for automotive and mobility researchers, entrepreneurs, startups and scale-ups. The goal is to commercialize Ontario-made intellectual property into new homegrown ventures that stretch across the entire value chain, from raw materials to consumer products. U of T is home to leading-edge researchers and long-standing academic-industry collaborations in several areas that the automotive sector has determined to be in high demand, including critical minerals, artificial intelligence, energy grid optimization and battery technology. U of T

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