CONTENTS:

Government Funding & News

• Ottawa launches Digital Transformation Canada and names former Google executive to lead effort in using digital solutions for government services
• Federal government announces data centre development principles, but they face restrictive provincial regulatory and policy barriers
• Coalition of nearly 300 labour, civil rights and community groups calls on the federal and Alberta governments not to remove 10 international students from Canada
• Nearly two-thirds of Canadians describe health care in their province as being in a state of crisis
• Global warming-driven climate changes in Canada are “irreversible,” and projected rising temperatures will exacerbate extreme fire weather and other impacts

 Research, Technology & Innovation

• New Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs show promise for boosting Canada’s commercialization of academic research
• Meta’s new hyperscale data centre north of Edmonton could add between $270 and $460 dollars a year to Albertans’ electricity bills, says Pembina Institute

 VC, Private Investment & Acquisitions

• Women-led companies often outperform their peers on revenue generation and capital efficiency, but attract only a fraction of available venture capital

Reports & Policies

• Equity, diversity and inclusion in academia weakens scholarship and wastes money on “left-wing scholar-activist research”
• Canada’s failing innovation ecosystem: The same Canadian pattern, six times
• Canada is overly reliant on the U.S. for agri-food exports, but could increase its global share of exports with the right investments
• C. and Manitoba food industry associations seeking nearly $1 billion in public and private-sector funding to build regional food terminals
• Three racialized groups of Canadians face higher rates of food insecurity, often driven by low income and lack of access to nutritious food

 The Grapevine – News about people, institutions and communities

• Fake clinician reviews often seen as more trustworthy than genuine reviews

GOVERNMENT FUNDING & NEWS

Ottawa launches new organization and names former Google executive to lead effort in using digital solutions for government services

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the launch of Digital Transformation Canada, a new federal organization with a mission to use digital solutions to make it easier for Canadians to access the support and services they need from government.

Carney appointed Patrick Pichette to spearhead this mission as the CEO of Digital Transformation Canada.

Pichette is a distinguished Canadian business leader with more than 30 years of experience in finance, technology and corporate leadership. As chief financial officer of Google from 2008 to 2015, he helped guide the company through a period of significant global growth and transformation.

Under the responsibility of Joël Lightbound, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement, Digital Transformation Canada will bring together Shared Services Canada and selected functions from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada – specifically the Canadian Digital Service.

By combining digital expertise and delivery capacity from across government, Digital Transformation Canada will improve how government develops, buys and uses technology, the government said.

The new organization’s priorities will be to:

• Scale shared solutions across government to reduce duplication and operating costs, making better use of emerging technologies such as AI, strengthening Canada’s digital sovereignty and security, and improving Canadians’ experience with federal services.
• Equip public servants with more modern, secure tools to reduce administrative burden, improve efficiency and help departments focus on delivering their core programs and services.
• Use the Government of Canada’s purchasing power more strategically to help Canadian digital and AI companies test, scale, and commercialize new technologies – creating opportunities for Canadian firms to grow at home and compete globally.

To support its mandate, Digital Transformation Canada will also establish a fellowship model to bring specialized private-sector expertise into government for short-term assignments, including in advanced AI and other fast-moving digital fields.

This model will focus on knowledge transfer – helping build the public service’s own technical capacity, commercial expertise and ability to evaluate, procure, and deploy new technologies responsibly.

The Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) welcomed the launch of the new organization, especially if it helps improve federal procurement policy and processes.

"Access to customers remains one of the biggest barriers to scaling Canadian innovators, and governments at every level should be using their purchasing power to become world-class customers,” said Daniel Perry, director of federal affairs at CCI.

Public buying makes up over 12 percent of Canada’s GDP, but too often, Canadian innovators have to go abroad to find their first public sector customers, he said in a statement. “We can do better.”

Perry noted that for years, CCI has advocated for a focused innovation procurement policy that helps effectively meet government needs, while awarding Canadian innovators what they need most to scale: something much more valuable than a tax break or subsidy – an actual contract.

"This matters for Canada's digital sovereignty and economic prosperity. Government adoption of Canadian AI, cloud and digital solutions keeps more IP, data, and capability and economic value in Canada, and helps Canadian companies build the customers, revenue and scale they need to compete globally,” Perry said.

"With a clear mandate, strong leadership and the resources to deliver, Digital Transformation Canada can fundamentally change how government does business, making it more efficient, more responsive and better equipped to deliver for Canadians,” he said. Prime Minister of Canada

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Federal government announces data centre development principles, but they face restrictive provincial regulatory and policy barriers

The Government of Canada announced Canada’s Responsible Data Centre Development Principles. The principles establish a common national framework for how Canada builds the data centre capacity it needs. The framework sets five clear expectations for data centre projects:

1. Data centres must create lasting local benefits, which can include jobs, skills training, research partnerships and access to compute.
2. Data centres must not shift electricity costs to Canadians. Data centre operators must pay for the costs they create, protect grid reliability and, where required, contribute to new supply.
3. Data centres must minimize water use and environmental impacts. Operators must protect local fresh water, and priority should be given to efficient projects, like those with closed-loop cooling systems or waste heat recovery.
4. Data centres must be transparent about local impacts. Local approval processes must be respected, and local residents should receive independently viable information about noise, emissions, and power and water use.
5. Data centres must bring strategic value to Canada. Projects must create clear and lasting benefits to Canada, including investment, supply chain participation and compute capacity.

The principles are supported by a broad cross-section of Canada’s data centre, cloud, AI and technology sectors. Twenty-three signatories to the federal framework – which include nearly two dozen AI hyperscalers – include: Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Bell Canada, Cohere, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Signatories’ commitments will help grow Canada’s digital infrastructure responsibly and promote a consistent, community-centred approach to data centre development across Canada, the government said.

Data centre development decisions are fundamentally local, shaped by regional priorities, regulatory approvals and unique community needs, Ottawa said.

These national principles are intended to complement existing provincial, territorial, municipal and Indigenous regulatory processes by setting a nationally recognized baseline that communities can use when considering major projects.

Polling by the Angus Reid Institute found that more than two-thirds of Canadians oppose having a large AI data centre being built within a few blocks of where they live.

The Calgary-based Pembina Institute said the new federal framework signals the right priorities for the emerging data centre industry: “attracting investment while aiming to minimize negative impacts on communities, land and water use, and electricity grids.”

Across the provinces, however, a number of restrictive regulatory and policy barriers continue to stand in the way, said Kari Hyde, director of the Pembina Institute’s customer energy solutions program.

“These include unnecessary curtailment, a limited understanding of the role of flexibility, and regulations [such as those in Alberta] that needlessly limit the supply of renewable energy and storage,” she said in a statement.

“Getting this moment right can only be possible when these barriers are removed and, critically, will require strong collaborative action on the part of both provincial and federal governments with clear expectations and accountability measures,” Hyde said.

“If done right, smart and responsible data centre development can support a cleaner, more resilient and more affordable grid,” she said. “Done poorly, it risks locking in higher emissions shifting electricity costs onto households and businesses.”

The Government of Alberta restricts where wind energy turbines can be located and, beginning October 1, will ban landfill disposal for solar panels and impose a $14 recycling fee per panel.

Industry associations and solar energy advocates have said the $14 price tag is far too steep, punitive and is being imposed without clear accounting to back it up.

Independent research commissioned by the Canadian Renewable Energy Association put the cost of recycling a solar module at about $5. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

See also: “Sage roundtable: The costs are local. The benefits are national. Can Canada build the data centres it needs?” (Under Reports & Policies in the September 2, 2026 Short Report).

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The Government of New Brunswick has developed a policy framework to guide the responsible development of data centres in the province – and is seeking feedback from the public. The framework is intended to protect electricity ratepayers; support the responsible use of energy, water, land and other resources; generate measurable economic and community benefits; promote environmental sustainability; and support national data sovereignty and artificial intelligence objectives. The guidelines focus on five areas:

• Protecting ratepayers: Any new data centre project must pay for the costs it creates and cannot lead to higher electricity rates for New Brunswickers.
• Sustainable development: Data centre developments must be designed to minimize impacts on water, land, local infrastructure and the environment, while promoting the responsible use of resources.
• Economic benefits for New Brunswickers: Projects will be assessed on the economic benefits they bring to New Brunswick, including new investments, job creation, workforce training, innovation and opportunities for local and Indigenous businesses.
• Long-term impact: The government will prioritize projects that are technically and financially sound, deliver long-term benefits, and align with provincial and national priorities, including data sovereignty and artificial intelligence growth.
• Community engagement and benefits: Meaningful engagement with local governments, First Nations and communities will be required throughout the development process. Transparency, accountability and measurable community benefits will be key considerations in evaluating and approving projects.

To support consistent implementation, departments and agencies will apply a common approach to evaluating data centre proposals. This includes ensuring that no financial support or incentives, land transactions or asset transfers below fair market value are provided unless authorized by government policy. People will have the opportunity to share their thoughts until October 2, 2026 through a consultation website. Govt. of New Brunswick

Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon said Canada will stick to its own AI rules after U.S. tech giants pushed at the Group of 20 meeting in North Carolina to minimize new regulation. “Our responsibility will always be and is currently to protect Canadians on our own terms,” Solomon told The Logic. Tech executives and Trump administration officials urged policymakers from other leading economies to minimize artificial-intelligence regulations, arguing that strict rules could strangle an industry capable of supercharging global growth and curing diseases. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX were among the speakers at a G20 summit focused on innovation and technology, and they cautioned that aggressive regulations could limit the benefits of AI. Michael Kratsios, a tech adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, called for countries to embrace the so-called Carolina Principles, which advocate for regulations that do not single out specific technologies. Musk directed some of his remarks at European regulation, denouncing what he considered the restrictive policies undertaken by some of the leaders present at the meeting. Innovation, he argued, requires entrepreneurs to be “relatively free of regulation, meaning that new things must be default legal as opposed to default illegal.” Aljazeera, The Wall Street Journal

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that, for the first time in four decades, VIA Rail passenger cars will be built in Canada. The federal government is investing more than $4.7 billion for VIA Rail to acquire and maintain 313 new passenger rail cars from Alstom Canada, a subsidiary of France-based Alstom Group. The cars will be manufactured and assembled in Thunder Bay, Ont., and La Pocatière, Que., with design and engineering work taking place in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, Que. This is the largest investment in VIA Rail’s history and in Canadian intercity passenger rail in a generation, Ottawa said. It will support nearly 700 good jobs in Ontario and Quebec, and generate more than $1.6 billion in economic benefits. In line with the federal Buy Canadian Policy, Alstom will leverage and expand its extensive network of more than 900 Canadian suppliers in delivering the new fleet, while maximizing the use of Canadian steel in structural assemblies, supports and fabricated metal elements. VIA Rail’s long-distance, regional, and remote fleet is approaching the end of its useful life, with some equipment more than 70 years old. The government also recently announced a $1.95 billion-investment in 45 new passenger rail locomotives and a new assembly and maintenance facility in Montreal, bringing Ottawa’s investment in renewing VIA Rail’s long-distance, regional and remote fleet to more than $6.6 billion. Prime Minister of Canada

The Government of Canada is extending the temporary suspension of the federal fuel excise tax until January 31, 2027, and applying 50 percent of the regular excise tax rate from February 1 through March 31, 2027. “This will bring down everyday costs for Canadians, including truckers and businesses in the food, agriculture, housing, construction and delivery sectors,” the government said. On April 20, 2026, the federal fuel excise tax was temporarily suspended, saving Canadians 10 cents per litre on gasoline and unleaded aviation gasoline, 11 cents per litre on leaded aviation gasoline, and four cents per litre on diesel and aviation fuel. Extending fuel tax relief is one of the measures helping families, workers and businesses navigate global economic uncertainty, Ottawa said. Finance Canada estimates that extending the tax holiday will cost an additional $2.9 billion, bringing the total tax relief on fuels since April to $5.3 billion. Department of Finance Canada

The Government of Alberta, through Emissions Reduction Alberta, is investing $20 million from the industry-led Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund to support four projects in rural Alberta. The investment will help innovators test, scale and commercialize innovative technologies that strengthen industry competitiveness, support Alberta-made products and reduce emissions.  In the Brooks-Newell region, a new hydrogen transportation hub will help reduce diesel use by 40 percent for heavy-duty vehicles, and innovative soil treatment technology is being advanced across Alberta to break down oil contamination faster and at a lower cost. In Hardisty, new pipeline technology is being tested to improve the efficiency of bitumen transportation, while in Peace River, carbon capture and sequestration technology is being advanced at the Mercer paper mill to reduce emissions. Govt. of Alberta

The Government of Ontario is investing over $17.3 million in four projects that will modernize forest sector manufacturing, enhance the industry’s competitive advantage and strengthen forestry supply chains by using more mill byproducts and underused wood known as forest biomass. The funding includes over $9.6 million for Interfor to modernize its Elk Lake sawmill with a forest biomass-powered energy system that will increase production by 27 percent, cut natural gas use by 80 percent and reduce annual operating costs by nearly $3 million. This funding is part of the government’s plan to protect Ontario forestry workers in the face of recent U.S. tariff attacks. Govt. of Ontario

The Government of Canada is investing more than $13 million, through the Youth Mental Health Fund, to strengthen youth mental health research and support the delivery of evidence-based care across Canada. Two new funding opportunities will led by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR):

• $7.35 million to establish the National Platform for Evidence-based Programs and Practices.

• $6 million to advance Evaluation and Implementation Science for Youth Mental Health.

Building on previous federal investments in the Integrated Youth Service Network of Networks – which connects provincial, territorial and Indigenous youth service networks across Canada – this funding will generate new evidence to support the identification, evaluation, sharing and scaling of effective mental health interventions for youth across the country. The National Platform for Evidence-based Programs and Practices will serve as a pan-Canadian hub, bringing together youth, families, researchers and policymakers to share resources and make it easier for communities to identify, implement and scale evidence-based mental health programs. The Evaluation and Implementation Science stream will support research focused on identifying successful mental health interventions and understanding how they can be adapted and expanded in diverse, real-world settings. This collaborative work will support tailoring care to meet the needs of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples, as well as equity-denied populations. The funding opportunities for both initiatives are now open. Eligible researchers, clinicians, and community partners are encouraged to review the application requirements and apply through the CIHR Funding Opportunity portal before the fall 2026 deadline. CIHR

The federally funded, Prairies-based Protein Industries Canada global innovation cluster is investing in two new artificial intelligence projects to help Canadian farmers and the value-added agriculture sector improve on-farm productivity with new tools, supporting a stronger, more sustainable and competitive food system. Together, the projects represent a total investment of $4.9 million, including up to $2.2 million from Protein Industries Canada. The first project, by TerraVision360 – the new public-facing brand of Ukko Agro – in partnership with Metos Canada and Rocky Mountain Equipment, will develop an AI-powered tool to help growers better predict and manage the risk of Ascochyta blight. By combining crop and disease data with localized weather information, the tool will forecast disease risk at both regional and individual-field levels, helping growers identify the best times to scout their fields and apply fungicides. In the second project, partners Super GeoAI Technology Inc. and Southview Farms will build an AI-enabled drone and LiDAR (3D scanning) solution to measure grain volumes in on-farm bins quickly and accurately. The system is designed to reduce the need for manual bin climbing, improve worker safety, and provide consistent, audit-ready documentation that can support farm management decisions and verification needs across the value chain. Protein Industries Canada

The Government of Ontario is investing nearly $1.9 million to strengthen the province’s nuclear supply chain in the face of U.S. tariffs threatening Ontario’s economy and workers. Ontario’s planned nuclear build-out is expected to support up to 150,000 workers and generate more than $800 billion in additional gross domestic product, ensuring the province has the affordable, secure and reliable electricity needed to power the most competitive economy in the G7. Through the Ontario Labour Market Partnerships program, the two-year initiative led by the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries will monitor and study Ontario’s nuclear supply chain, workforce capacity and industrial capabilities. The research will identify critical gaps and capacity constraints, assess future demand and develop a roadmap to strengthen Ontario’s domestic nuclear supply chain, prepare workers for emerging opportunities and position more Ontario businesses to participate in major nuclear projects at home, and compete in growing domestic and international markets. Govt. of Ontario

Some of Canada's leading environmental groups are pushing the federal government to change aspects of proposed legislation to speed up development of major projects before it's tabled this fall. Environmental Defence launched an ad campaign to draw attention to the potential fate of the Southern Resident Orcas. The group says the whales are at risk if Ottawa moves ahead with a bill changing how major projects are reviewed. Environmental Defence said it's concerned about Ottawa's plan to establish "economic zones" for transportation corridors, telecommunications networks, and energy production and transmission. Those zones would allow the federal cabinet to decide which activities would be allowed in them, and give ministers the power to pre-approve projects. Separately, Ecojustice – which has dubbed the pending federal legislation the “orca extinction bill” – began its own media campaign after the government began the process to designate the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 as a project of national interest. The Canadian Press

Federal Minister of Jobs and Families Patty Hajdu announced the launch of the Energy and Electricity Workforce Alliance – the fourth Workforce Alliance in a series of Government of Canada efforts towards establishing strong partnerships across key sectors. The new Energy and Electricity Alliance will bring together respected leaders and experts known for their work in the sector, including employers, workers, educators and Indigenous partners, to help build the skilled workforce needed to support energy development, grid modernization, and a more productive energy and electricity sector. Canada’s energy and electricity sector, which includes oil, gas and electricity, plays a pivotal role in supporting the growing demand for electrification and clean energy sources. As a result, substantial investments in generation, transmission, and grid modernization are increasingly necessary. The Energy and Electricity Alliance will be led by the Electricity Human Resources Canada, with support from the Energy Council of Canada, and the Canadian Renewable Energy Association. Together, these organizations will work to strategically identify and address pressing labour market challenges and align investments and activities at all levels to support skills development. Employment and Social Development Canada

A U.S. withdrawal from the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) would represent a total loss of $402 billion in real GDP by 2036 and a loss of 163,000 jobs relative to the status quo baseline, according to a new report from Deloitte Canada and the Future of Canada Centre. In the first scenario, CUSMA Withdrawal Scenario, the U.S. withdraws from the agreement and tariff exemptions on all sectors end. The bottom line is “a severe but not cataclysmic impact” on Canada’s overall economy, although perhaps cataclysmic for some sectors, the report said. Manufacturing is especially vulnerable, with motor vehicles and parts experiencing a 28-percent drop in real GDP by 2036 compared to the July 1 baseline. Electronics, machinery and equipment lose 21 percent, rubber and plastics products 20 percent, and chemicals 13 percent in real GDP by 2036 relative to the baseline. In the second scenario, the Accelerated Diversification Scenario, U.S. tariffs remain at July 1^st levels – the baseline – but Canada responds by both maintaining its existing panoply of trade agreements and continuing to sign new ones. Real GDP grows by 0.6 percent in 2036 compared to the baseline, representing $141 billion in additional cumulative real GDP. The model indicates that while the pursuit of new markets will produce major gains, this upward potential is significantly less than the losses generated by Scenario One. The range between these two plausible scenarios amounts over 10 years to a swing of more than $500 billion – some of it lost real GDP and some new real GDP. A separate Deloitte analysis, completed in 2025, showed that completely phasing out interprovincial trade barriers over five years would generate an additional $881 billion in economic output by 2040 – a 2.4-percent GDP increase – and create 133,000 new jobs. “Even achieving half of that would nearly wipe out the GDP losses from our downside scenario.” Deloitte Canada

U.S. tariffs on Tariffs on drones weighing more than 25 kilograms or equipped with thermal cameras kicked in on September 3, doubling the cost of imports to the U.S. from most sources. The new rules put lower tariffs on some countries, including Japan, South Korea and European Union members, but not Canada. Additional tariffs on drone parts are to apply starting February 9, 2027. President Donald Trump’s announcement of the new import taxes on August 13 didn’t mention China but it dominates the global drone market and is widely thought to be the U.S.’s main target. Heavy users of the types of drones hit hardest, including police, firefighters and search-and-rescue teams, have criticized the move. Canada’s military drone manufacturers hope that carve-outs for Pentagon purchases will protect the growing industry here. The Logic

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Coalition of nearly 300 labour, civil rights and community groups calls on the federal and Alberta governments not to remove 10 international students from Canada

A coalition of close to 300 labour and community groups is calling on the federal and Alberta governments to halt the removal from Canada of 10 international students the coalition says were singled out for enforcement at a protest.

The Migrant Rights Network makes the demand in an open letter sent last week on behalf of several groups, including Amnesty International, Canadian Union of Public Employees, Canadian Association of University Teachers, and Climate Justice Saskatoon.

The network says in the letter that targeting newcomers for enforcement while they’re protesting immigration rules is a violation of the Charter right of free speech and will have a chilling effect on those wanting to speak out.

The letter comes after a recent protest in Calgary by 1,500 graduates from Portage College, a public institution based in northeastern Alberta with programs delivered through partner campuses in Calgary and Edmonton.

The network says graduates completed programs that made them eligible for post-graduation work permits, but over the summer they were refused the permits as the federal government changed the eligibility rules on its website.

In an e-mail, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab said there had been no changes to eligibility criteria for the post-graduation work permit (PGWP) program, but that the government had updated its web page in June to clarify existing requirements.

In March 2024, Immigration, Refuges and Citizenship Canada announced in a news release that international students in programs “delivered through a public-private curriculum licensing arrangement would no longer be eligible for a post-graduation work permit,” starting on May 15, 2024 or later. Those enrolled before that date would still be eligible for a permit.

Emails first published by PressProgress showed that Portage College had been in correspondence with the federal government, which assured the institution that “Currently enrolled students will not be affected in terms of their eligibility for the PGWP (they are grandfathered).”

Yet in July 2026, hundreds of students received letters stating that their “non-credit” programs made them ineligible for a work permit, leaving them vulnerable and without status despite following the appropriate pathway.

Affected students began weeks of demonstrations starting in mid-July in Edmonton and Calgary. At the August 12 protest in Calgary, police were called in on a complaint that protesters were blocking a sidewalk.

A spokesperson for Calgary police said in an e-mail that officers went to the scene, asked for identification from demonstrators and called the Canadian Border Services Agency with concerns.

The border agency said its officers were called in to check if demonstrators were non-compliant under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. It interviewed 12 of them.

Network spokesman Syed Hussan said that number was narrowed to 10 by the day’s end and that those found to be non-compliant were given exclusion orders. Exclusion orders demand the person leave Canada and not return for at least a year.

The network’s letter calls for the post-graduation work permits to be granted, for the actions of police and border officials that day be investigated, and for clear rules not to target migrants at peaceful protests. The Globe and Mail

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The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOC) announced federal investments totaling more than $14.1 million to support 27 businesses and organizations in Nova Scotia. These investments, through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative, are among the first being announced as Canada rolls out recently enhanced measures to deliver fast, simple and agile support to workers and businesses affected by U.S. tariffs. ACOC

Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan) announced $11.6 million for 10 projects led by eight Saskatoon-based organizations through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative. The projects will help manufacturers grow, improve productivity, strengthen domestic supply chains and reach new markets. The investments will support new equipment, automation, marketing, market diversification and expanded production across a range of manufacturing industries. PrairiesCan

Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan) announced $15.9 million for 15 projects led by 11 Winnipeg-based organizations through the Regional Tariff Response Initiative and Business Scale-up and Productivity program. These projects will help manufacturers grow, improve productivity, strengthen domestic supply chains and reach new markets. Winnipeg’s manufacturing sector is highly interconnected, with local companies supplying the equipment, technology and expertise that support production across the province and across Canada. PrairiesCan

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Nearly two-thirds of Canadians describe health care in their province as being in a state of crisis

A new national survey conducted by Abacus Data and commissioned by the Canadian Health Coalition found Canadians are deeply concerned about the state of public health care, but have not given up on the system or the principle that access to medically necessary care should be based on need rather than ability to pay.

Ninety-one percent are concerned about the future of public health care.

Fifty-five percent believe the system has become worse over the past five years, while 63 percent describe health care in their province as being in a state of crisis.

A majority of Conservative and NDP supporters believe the system has become worse, as do nearly half of Liberal supporters.

But frustration with the public system does not translate into broad support for private payment. Eighty-five percent say universal health care based on need rather than income is a core Canadian value, while 80 percent believe the public system can meet Canadians’ needs if governments invest more in it.

“The central finding from this research is that Canadians are deeply frustrated with the health care system, but that frustration should not be confused with a desire to abandon the principles on which it is built,” said David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.

When asked to choose among different approaches, 49 percent say medically necessary health care should remain publicly funded and available based on need at no cost to the patient. Only 11 percent favour allowing Canadians to purchase private insurance to access medically necessary services outside the public system.

Eighty-five percent are concerned about higher health care costs for patients. Eighty-three percent are concerned about unequal access based on income, and the same proportion worry about the additional cost of private insurance.

More than eight in 10 are also concerned about longer public system wait times, weaker public services, and for-profit companies making money from health care.

Fifty-three percent oppose the Alberta government’s Bill 11, compared with one-third who support it. Those who strongly oppose the legislation outnumber those who strongly support it by four to one.

Bill 11, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2025, establishes a dual-practice health care system and alters how private and public health benefits interact. Effective September 1, 2026, The legislation creates a new category of doctor who can bill the public Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan while simultaneously charging patients privately out-of-pocket for certain medically necessary or surgical services.

The Alberta government says close to 400 specialist physicians have expressed interest in taking part, though a formal application process must still be completed before any privately funded surgeries occur, which the province expects later this fall.

Abacus Data’s survey found that Canadians are more likely to believe Bill 11 will make Alberta’s health care system worse rather than better, by 40 percent to 26 percent.

And that concern is not confined to people outside Alberta. Within the province, 47 percent expect Bill 11 to make the system worse.

Although provinces deliver health care, most Canadians do not believe the federal government should stay on the sidelines when the principles of the public system are at stake.

Half say federal and provincial governments should share responsibility for protecting the health care system. Another 27 percent believe Ottawa should play an active role even though provinces are responsible for delivery.

Only 13 percent say the federal government should generally stay out of provincial health care decisions.

When asked specifically about changes such as Bill 11, 53 percent say the federal government should do more to protect public health care. Just 12 percent believe provinces should be allowed to make these decisions without federal involvement. Abacus Data

See also: Canada fails to meet Canada Health Act principles for patients, including access to innovative medicines

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Global warming-driven climate changes in Canada are “irreversible,” and projected rising temperatures will exacerbate extreme fire weather and other impacts

The Government of Canada released its five-year scientific report to inform planning, resilience-building and emergency preparedness in a changing climate.

Underscoring the importance of integrating climate change considerations into existing planning and decision-making processes across all sectors, Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026 contributes to the implementation of the National Adaptation Strategy.

Among the report’s highlights:

• Canada has warmed over the past 75 years due to emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities. Over this period Canada has warmed by 2.0°C and Canada’s North has warmed by 2.6°C.
• Canada has warmed rapidly over the past 50 years, consistent with rapid global warming. Since 1970, Canada has warmed nearly twice as fast as the global average, and the Canadian Arctic has warmed three times as fast as the global average.
• Warming temperatures have driven wide-ranging, interconnected and sustained changes across Canada. The changes include more extreme heat, less extreme cold, longer growing seasons, longer fire seasons, earlier peak stream flow, shorter snow and ice cover seasons, thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost, warming oceans and rising sea level.
• In the near term, annual average temperature in Canada is expected to rise by about 1°C from 2021 to 2040. This unavoidable warming will exacerbate climate trends that are already observed.
• The warming and associated changes in climate in Canada are effectively irreversible. Some warming-driven changes, such as sea ice loss, will stabilize if temperature stabilizes. Sea -level change, glacier melt and permafrost thaw will continue even after surface temperatures stabilize.
• Human-caused warming has already affected the frequency and intensity of extreme temperature events in Canada. Increases in hot extremes and human heat-stress, as well as decreases in cold extremes, have been observed. These changes will intensify with additional global warming.
• Droughts and flash floods will become more frequent and severe with additional warming. Summer droughts are projected to become longer, and more intense, and occur more frequently in central and southern Canada. Increases in the frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers (in high-emissions scenarios) and of extreme rainfall will lead to more frequent and intense flash flooding.
• More frequent and intense extreme fire weather is projected for most regions of Canada. Fire seasons are already longer and will lengthen further with additional global warming.
• Summer freshwater availability in southern Canada is threatened by changes in the water cycle. Many important water cycle processes are occurring earlier in spring, such as snowmelt, peak stream flow and groundwater recharge, with risks to summer water availability. In some western Canada watersheds, declines in glacier contributions to summer streamflow have already been observed.
• Iconic landscapes are changing across Canada as snow and ice disappear. Glaciers in western Canada will largely disappear by the end of this century. Permafrost thaw is transforming the land in many places across northern Canada. These changes will intensify with additional warming.
• Extreme high sea-level events will occur more often where local sea level is rising. Local sea level is projected to rise faster than the global average along parts of the Atlantic and western Arctic coastlines of Canada. In these areas, extreme high sea-level events will be exacerbated during periods of high storm surge and high tides.
• The oceans around Canada have warmed and acidified because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. Marine heatwaves have become more frequent and intense. The oceans will continue to warm, absorb carbon dioxide, and acidify as long as air temperature and carbon dioxide continue to rise.

In August, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the largest clean energy investment in North American history, including expanding the Churchill Falls Generating Station.

Last week, Ottawa announced the groundbreaking of the North Coast Transmission Line that will double the availability of clean electricity along Canada’s West Coast and reduce up to three million tonnes of emissions annually.

This April’s Spring Economic Update set a new goal to deliver $13 billion in international climate finance over the next five years.

To protect Canadians from the impacts of climate change and severe weather, the federal government has committed more than $2.1 billion to implement the National Adaptation Strategy and support a wide range of adaptation-related activities. Environment and Climate Change Canada

RESEARCH, TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

New Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs show promise for boosting Canada’s commercialization of academic research

Twenty-six (41 percent) of the first cohort of 64 new Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada had already commercialized their science, either by generating intellectual property, founding a company, or holding equity related to their research, according to an analysis by Peter Singer.

Thirteen of the researchers had founded 29 companies, and nine were serial entrepreneurs.

Singer used publicly available information and AI assistance to do his analysis. Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, co-founder of the non-profit Grand Challenges Canada, and former special advisor to the director-general of the World Health Organization.

One of five selection criteria for the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs is “Potential for knowledge translation, mobilization and application of research results.”

This criterion is important given that Canada continues to struggle to translate academic research into innovation success and commercialization outcomes.

“The analysis shows that there is an important track record of commercialization in the first cohort of Goldenberg Chairs. The selection criterion related to research translation seems to have done its job,” Singer said.

One of the researchers founded a U.S. company 24 years ago, now worth more than US$30 billion, he noted. “If he had done this in Canada, that would be among the biggest academic spin-offs ever.”

However, Singer said his main finding is that economic value is hard to describe from public information. Many companies are private, licensing agreements are confidential, and other routes to commercialization are even more difficult to value.

Singer also compared the commercialization track record of the new Eddie Goldenberg Chairs to the most comparable existing program, the Canada Excellence Research Chairs, which did not have a separate and equally weighted selection criterion for knowledge translation, mobilization and application of research results.

Goldenberg Chairs led on both measures by about 15 percentage points, although neither difference reaches statistical significance at these sample sizes, Singer said.

The value of past commercialization is much harder to describe than the incidence, he said. “That matters, because the real job is to shift the culture toward commercialization – and the strongest culture changers are likely the serial entrepreneurs and those who have built significant companies. Increasing this subset is probably more important than increasing the raw commercialization number.”

If Canada wants to aim this or future research funding mechanisms more tightly at the problem the country actually has – the commercialization gap — these results suggest the country could do so by elevating the weighting of commercialization in the selection criteria, Singer said.

The program could use the measures he has developed to assess commercialization, while developing better measures of the economic value of past commercialization, he suggested.

“Indeed, the best way to validate these figures and expand on the valuations would be to check them with the researchers themselves — something the program is best placed do.”

Singer said his analysis assumes that past commercialization predicts future commercialization, which he said is a reasonable assumption especially with serial entrepreneurs.

However, three-quarters of these researchers come from the U.S., where the commercialization ecosystem is more robust, he noted. Also, nothing would prevent these researchers from founding their companies in the U.S.

Canada has a documented problem of Canadian-founded companies re-domiciling in the U.S. as they grow, Singer pointed out.

While that problem is not specific to the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs program, it could be tackled by requiring that the government’s grant funding be converted into an equity share should the company be founded or moved outside of Canada, he said.

One objection is that scientific excellence is the only thing that matters – and it will also drive commercialization. “This resonates with me, and I am a huge fan of discovery science,” Singer said.

But as a practical matter, the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs program already accepts translation as one of its five selection criteria and commercialization as an element of that, he added. “Any change would need to safeguard scientific excellence. My proposal is not one of principle but of balance.”

Singer said his analysis and suggestions aren’t meant to diminish the inherent value of social impact, noting that he is a social impact researcher himself.

Social and economic impact are not always so easily distinguished, he added. “Some researchers chose to share their research open source, and I could not estimate the indirect economic benefit of that.”

Other researchers might have research results with important fiscal impacts – savings to the public purse – even though they don’t stimulate economic growth.

The question of how to close the science commercialization gap is a portfolio-wide one for any country, Singer said. He has argued that a Canadian “ARPA-H” (modelled on the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health in the U.S.) would be a good way to close this gap.

The Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada are leveraging Canada’s diaspora and international scientists to support Canada’s economic development, Singer said.

“They will help. Let’s aim our funding programs more squarely at the challenge we actually have – turning science into economic value.” Peter Singer on his substack

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Canadian university researchers can once again access funding to collaborate with international research teams through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Alliance International Collaboration grants program. The program supports innovative natural sciences and engineering research projects that bring together complementary expertise from Canadian and international university researchers to deliver benefits for Canada. The grants provide $20,000 to $100,000 per year for up to three years to support the Canadian research components of international projects. Funding is available to eligible Canadian researchers who hold an active NSERC peer-reviewed grant. Their international collaborators must have secured funding from their respective national funding agencies through peer-reviewed applications that clearly describe the Canadian team and its role in the project. Canadian researchers who missed the May 20, 2025, deadline may still be eligible to apply to NSERC by November 25, 2026, 8 p.m. ET. Contact NSERC to verify eligibility. NSERC will host information sessions to share changes to the grants, the application process, and key deadlines on September 16 at 1 p.m. in English  and September 15 at 11 a.m. in French . Full details can be found on the Alliance International Collaboration grants page. If you have any questions, contact allianceinternational@nserc-crsng.gc.ca NSERC

PitchBook released its annual ranking of universities that have a track record for graduating entrepreneurs. This global ranking compares universities according to metrics such as the number of alumni entrepreneurs and the capital they raised between 2015 and 2026. Separate rankings are created for founders with undergraduate, graduate (including MBA), or MBA degrees. At the undergraduate level, the top three performing Canadian universities were University of Waterloo (#7), University of Toronto (#17), and McGill University (#23). At the graduate level, the top performing Canadian institutions were U of T (#26), the University of British Columbia (tied for #54), and University of Waterloo (tied for #54). Among MBAs, the top Canadian institutions were U of T (#39), York University (#41), and Western University (#42). PitchBook notes that University of Waterloo is the first Canadian university to be included in the top 10 for the undergraduate ranking. University of California, Berkley, and Stanford University ranked #1 and #2 on the undergraduate list, followed by Harvard University, Cornell University and MIT in the top five. Pitchbook

The Canadian Light Source synchrotron at the University of Saskatchewan received $3 million from Innovation Saskatchewan for a “major” technology upgrade. Specifically, a solid-state amplifier – used to power the particle accelerator’s 22 beamlines – will be installed on the machine. The university says this will improve the facility’s performance, reliability and energy efficiency. As Canada’s only synchrotron, the Canadian Light Source is a vital national research facility that brings together researchers, industry and institutions from across Canada and around the world. Its specialized tools allow scientists to examine materials at the atomic level, helping solve complex challenges, advance new technologies and create economic opportunities across sectors such as agriculture, mining, energy and health. Innovation Saskatchewan

Toronto-based BenchSci, which provides AI software for biopharma research and development, announced a two-year enterprise agreement with Argenx, a Dutch-Belgian biotechnology firm, which will use Benchsci’s AI tools for drug discovery. Under the agreement, scientists across Argenx's global research organization will use BenchSci’s EMET platform to support preclinical, computational and drug development workflows. EMET reasons across 38 million-plus open- and closed-access scientific publications, a proprietary knowledge graph, clinical data, pre-print data, and over 100-plus curated scientific databases to execute complex, multi-step scientific workflows and deliver traceable, actionable insights across the full drug discovery journey. Business Wire

New data from Manulife Financial Corporation’s Canada's Group Benefits business shows a sharp increase in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) claims. Over the past five years, HRT claims among women aged 45 to 54 have increased by 228 percent, suggesting more women are seeking treatment and support to manage menopause-related symptoms, as awareness of menopause grows and more women feel empowered to seek treatment. Claims among women aged 35 to 44 rose by 46 percent over five years, while those aged 55 to 64 increased by 66 percent. In all age groups, the past two years have represented the most significant increase in HRT claims. Manulife said there has been a shift toward more proactive menopause treatments across age ranges to help workers cope with symptoms like poor sleep and anxiety, citing data from the Menopause Foundation of Canada, which estimates that the economy could see a $3.5-billion boost if more women could stay in the workforce during their peak working years. Last month, Vancouver-based AbCellera announced a new menopause treatment trial, and telehealth companies like Felix Health have launched menopause care programs this year, citing the broad potential impact for patients. Manulife Financial Corporation

An Ontario university student who lives in Cambridge, Ont. is suspected of espionage after the FBI said he admitted to accessing airport facilities in Toronto and Chicago to take photos on behalf of a shadowy figure from China. Weiheng Zeng, a Chinese citizen, was arrested in Michigan on August 23 after crossing the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor, Ont. He was charged with one count of making false statements. Zeng appeared in a federal court in Detroit and agreed to remain in custody as he awaits his trial. A University of Waterloo undergraduate student born in 2004, Zeng first raised U.S. authorities' suspicions in April, after an incident captured on security video at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, according to a criminal complaint reviewed by CBC News. At first, when border agents found numerous photos of military aircraft on his phone, Zeng purportedly said they were for a flight radar website. He said taking pictures of planes was his hobby. According to the criminal complaint, Zeng eventually said he was being paid by someone – identified in the U.S. court records only as "Chinese contact" – to photograph specific planes and their tail numbers. The allegations against Zeng have not been proven in court. The Canadian Press

French quantum company Quandela has made its Canada-based photonic quantum computer available to users of the Quantum Computing Sandbox (QCS), Canada’s national program intended to accelerate quantum adoption across academia and businesses.  Quandela announced that it signed an agreement with CMC Microsystems to join the QCS as a cloud-based computing services provider. The QCS is a research and development program that’s part of the Fabrication of Integrated Components for the Internet’s Edge (FABrIC) network, a federally funded innovation network managed by CMC to bolster Canada’s semiconductor and quantum industries. Other quantum computing cloud service providers in the sandbox include U.S.-based firms like IonQ, Quantinuum, QuEra, and Rigetti Computing, as well as Sherbrooke, Que.-based PINQ, which operates IBM’s superconducting quantum computer. As part of the QCS, Quandela has agreed to provide companies and organizations with technical and practical assistance on the “high-potential projects” working on the network. BetaKit

Coquitlam, B.C.-based quantum computing company Photonic Inc. published a scientific paper on its advancement in codes allowing larger programs to be run on smaller systems, accelerating the timeline to commercially relevant quantum computing. The paper on SHYPS quantum error correction codes, Computing Efficiently in QLDPC Codes, was published in the journal Nature Communications. Error correction has long been one of the core challenges facing quantum computing companies. As the first to unlock the decades-long promise of Quantum Low Density Parity Check codes, Photonic set a new industry standard, making real the benefits for quantum architectures capable of running this type of code. The paper reports the milestone result Photonic released as a pre-print last year: a new family of QLDPC codes, SHYPS, can efficiently perform both quantum computation and error correction, using a fraction of the physical qubits surface codes need. These advances are only available to high connectivity systems, such as Photonic’s Entanglement First^TM architecture, the company said. “This paper introduced the first demonstrated QLDPC code family capable of performing logic efficiently – not just storing information, but computing with it, using a fraction of the qubits error correction has always demanded,” said Stephanie Simmons, chief quantum officer at Photonic.” Photonic

San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI and founder Sam Altman are facing 30 new lawsuits from witnesses to the deadly mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., with plaintiffs including a teacher who described trying to protect pupils from the shooter, and a teenage student who recalled his classmates arming themselves "with kitchen knives and heavy tools." The lawsuits were to be filed in the Northern District of California by U.S. law firm Edelson PC on behalf of "injured and traumatized students and educators" at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in the northern British Columbia community, said Vancouver-based law firm Rice Parson Leoni and Elliott. Six of the eight victims who died in the shootings were killed at the school. Seven other lawsuits against OpenAI and its CEO were filed in April on behalf of victims’ families. John Rice, lead Canadian counsel, said in a statement that OpenAI had the chance to stop the attack after its staff identified the shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, as a credible threat of imminent gun violence months beforehand, but police in Canada weren't notified. The claims have not been tested in court. The B.C. government is still planning to take legal action against the company. The Canadian Press

OpenAI announced it will begin rolling out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-6 Astra, which the company said is the product of “years of research and big bets.” CEO Sam Altman told CNBC that Astra was a “new capability level” and has changed his workflows. He said he expects “a boom of entrepreneurship, of creativity, of economic growth, of scientific discovery.” The model is launching in phases, and OpenAI said a limited group of companies participating in its application-based cybersecurity program Daybreak will be the first to get access. OpenAI disclosed earlier this week that Astra is its first model to reach its “Critical” internal cybersecurity threshold, and said it planned to limit access to those advanced capabilities. OpenAI has been under pressure to shore up its security and safety protections after two of its models escaped containment, accessed the open web and breached Hugging Face’s systems last month. Open AI temporarily paused some of its research and training efforts following the incident, including for Astra, even though it was not one of the models involved. CNBC

Illinois-headquartered John Deere is bringing AI to the tractor cab. The 189-year-old equipment giant is testing “JD,” a chatbot that draws on a farmer’s own field and machinery data to answer questions about everything from fuel use to harvest timing. Melissa Neuendorf, John Deere's principal product manager for customer AI solutions, told The Robot Report that the company is declining to name the underlying model, citing pace of innovation, and summed up the design goal as "Our job is to hide that complexity from them." For now, JD is available to “select” U.S. customers through John Deere’s digital farm-management dashboard, with plans to eventually put it on tractor displays. John Deere said JD will eventually extend across turf, construction, roadbuilding and forestry customers. AI Weekly

SOCAN (Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada), Canada’s largest member-owned music rights organization, filed lawsuit against Massachusetts-based Suno Inc., alleging that the company’s generative AI platform is producing and streaming outputs that replicate human-created musical works without consent or payment, and as a result has infringed the performing rights in musical works in SOCAN’s repertoire. Suno has built its business by training its generative AI models on virtually all music files readily accessible on the Internet, without obtaining the necessary permissions or licences. The company faces multiple major lawsuits from the music industry – including Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment – record labels and artist organizations over copyright infringement and the unauthorized use of human-created music to train its generative AI models. SOCAN said has identified 15 publicly available Suno outputs that are identical or similar to songs in SOCAN’s repertoire and have been generated and streamed without consent or compensation. SOCAN said it expects other unauthorized outputs and activities to come to light as the litigation progresses. SOCAN

Justice Edward Morgan of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice certified a class-action lawsuit against Galaxy Digital Inc., CEO Mike Novogratz, and former chief financial officer Alex Ioffe over the collapse of Terra-Luna. Morgan found “ample evidence” that the then-TSX listed crypto investment firm misled investors, promoting the linked Terra and Luna crypto assets while failing to disclose key information about their risks. The collapse of Terra and Luna sparked contagion in the crypto market in 2022. Lawyers representing shareholders who bought Galaxy stock between May 2021 and 2022 allege the digital-asset firm was trading at an artificially inflated price, causing Galaxy’s share price to plunge more than 40 percent by the time Luna collapsed to zero. Galaxy spokesperson Michael Wursthorn said the company “regards this lawsuit as without merit and will continue to defend itself vigorously as the action progresses.” Ontario Superior Court of Justice, The Globe and Mail

Meta’s new hyperscale data centre under construction north of Edmonton could add between $270 and $460 dollars a year to Albertans’ electricity bills once the data centre begins operations, according to an analysis by the Calgary-based Pembina Institute. The analysis estimates the overall impact of the Meta data centre on a typical Albertans’ electricity bill from 2027 to 2031. Based on this analysis, the Pembina Institute said that while Albertans could see a six-percent reduction on the transmission portion of their electricity bills as a result of Meta’s grid connection, the market impacts of the new Meta data centre will far outweigh the transmission savings. At the heart of significant electricity market pressures, and the resulting bill increases, are Alberta’s “Bring Your Own Generation” rules, which allow data centres to connect to the grid before their generation is brought online. But Pembina’s analysis shows that when these new large-scale data centres connect to the grid, it puts pressure on the electricity market, increasing costs until new power plants come online. The government’s policy framework also forces data centres to rely exclusively on natural gas for new generation, barring operators from choosing lower-cost alternatives, including renewables and storage – both of which could be used to keep rates relatively low and stable, Pembina said. While other jurisdictions are using a more robust set of policies and technologies to support data centre growth and minimize their impacts on ratepayers, Alberta has taken a much more narrow and restrictive approach, reflecting a wider policy environment that has severely constrained renewable energy development since 2023, the Pembina Institute said. Pembina Institute

Global data centre spending is projected to reach US$31.6 trillion through 2050 to meet the world’s growing appetite for artificial intelligence, an investment boom with no precedent in history, Toronto-based PWC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) said in a report. Nearly half of that investment is expected in the U.S. and most of the money going toward repeatedly replacing chips and other hardware. The Asia-Pacific region would follow at US$8.2 trillion, Europe at US$5.6 trillion, the Middle East at US$1.1 trillion and Africa at US$255 billion of the cumulative capital expenditure, PwC’s inaugural Global Data Center Outlook showed. While global demand is strong, factors such as power availability, data sovereignty requirements and the flow of semiconductors would determine which regions capture the investments, PwC said. Dwarfing projects such as the railways, Internet and electrification, spending on data centres could even hit US$50 trillion over the next two-and-a-half decades if AI adoption accelerates beyond PwC’s “central scenario” forecast, the professional service/accounting firm said. For comparison, U.S. GDP is about US$30 trillion. At least 75 data centre projects, worth about US$130 billion combined, were blocked or delayed by local opposition during the first three months of this year, according to research group Data Center Watch. IEEE Communications Society

Ottawa-based Allen-Vanguard, maker of radio-jamming devices used against drones and remote-controlled bombs, owes creditors more than US$80 million, says a court order filed in Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The company has had a decade of declining sales as Western troops have withdrawn from the Middle East. Allen-Vanguard has been trying to find a buyer since 2023, the order says. The firm has been running on credit and advance payments against a shrinking order list and finally hit a wall. At its peak as a publicly traded company in 2007, Allen-Vanguard made a $650-million acquisition of an Ottawa maker of bomb-disposal equipment. That transaction fell into messy litigation. In 2009, U.S. private equity firm Versa Capital bought Allen-Vanguard in a deal that paid off some of its debt but left shareholders with nothing. Before recent layoffs, it had about 40 employees in Canada and 10 in the United Kingdom, according to a filing in the case. The Logic

Ottawa-headquartered Northern Graphite postponed the restart of its flagship Lac des Îles mine in Quebec, as mounting regulatory and legal pressures add to a severe capital crunch at the company amid shifting global graphite markets. The delay deals a blow to Canada’s ambitions to develop a secure domestic supply chain for critical minerals key to EV batteries and the wider energy transition. The company said its aim to resume operations at the idled mine by the third quarter of 2026 is no longer feasible after Quebec’s ministry of natural resources and forests suspended the mining lease. The halt comes after a dispute over an outstanding payment related to the future restoration of the Lac des Îles site, located northwest of Montreal. Northern Graphite has contested the province's payment calculation and plans to fight the decision in the Quebec Superior Court. The company said it will file an appeal seeking to stay the lease suspension until a final court ruling, creating uncertainty over the future of North America’s only commercial flake graphite mine. Macquarie, an investment advisory group, estimated in a recent market outlook that six million tonnes a year of graphite alone would be needed globally for EV and electricity grid batteries by the end of this decade. Canada’s National Observer

Three of four reactors at Ontario’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station are experiencing prolonged outages, data from the Independent Electricity System Operator show. Ontario Power Generation (OPG) completed a $12.8-billion, decade-long refurbishment of its station in Clarington, Ont., in March. Although provincial officials have portrayed that overhaul as an unqualified success, Darlington’s units have meandered in and out of service ever since. The most recently refurbished unit, Unit 4, suddenly stopped generating power on August 1 – its third outage since returning to service. Two days later, Unit 2 abruptly stopped supplying power to the grid. Unit 3 had already been out of service for several months because of long-planned work, leaving Unit 1 as the lone operational unit. Officials have disclosed little about the causes and implications of the outages at Units 2 and 4, nor when they might return to service. In response to questions from The Globe and Mail seeking details of the outages, OPG spokesperson Neal Kelly wrote in a statement that the two units were taken offline “to complete required maintenance.” He added that Unit 2 is expected to restart in September, and Unit 4 will follow in October. OPG’s Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, is just weeks away from shutting down. Its four operational reactors, representing 2,100 megawatts of generating capacity, are scheduled to come offline next month for their own $26.8-billion refurbishment, expected to wrap up in the mid-2030s. The Globe and Mail

A U.S. federal judge refused to force Google to sell a division of its digital advertising business, rejecting the federal government’s push to break up part of the company’s ad empire. In a court order, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema opted instead for a set of rules governing how Google must operate in the ad market. The decision is the second time in recent years that a federal judge has declined to dismantle a piece of Google’s business, after a judge last year refused to force the sale of its Chrome browser in a separate monopoly case over online search. Those cases are part of a broader effort by the Department of Justice to curtail the competitive dominance of big tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Meta. Brinkema – whose court is in Alexandria, Virginia outside Washington – ruled last year that Google had willfully monopolized both the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets, and had unlawfully tied the two products together. Google has said it will appeal the underlying liability ruling. National Post

The U.S. Justice Department told a Manhattan federal court that it was in the national interest for the judge to find that OpenAI did not violate copyright law when it used articles by The New York Times and other publishers to develop artificial intelligence systems. The filing was the first time the Justice Department weighed in on the use of copyrighted material by AI companies, which has led to several lawsuits. The Justice Department argued that developing AI was critical to national security, and that training AI systems sufficiently transformed the written works to new material allowed under copyright law. The department said the benefits of AI “far outweigh any competitive harm.” The government’s intervention is an escalation in the landmark litigation that could determine whether OpenAI violated the law when it was developing its AI systems and had harmed the news industry and other content creators. Graham James, a spokesman for The New York Times, said in a statement that the Justice Department was siding with a handful of “trillion-dollar AI companies” at the expense of American creators. The New York Times

In China's power buildout, solar has now edged past coal on an installed-capacity basis, marking a major milestone for the country's clean-energy expansion. Using figures from China's National Energy Administration, Oilprice.com reported that installed solar capacity reached 1,286 gigawatts by the end of July, pushing it ahead of coal in China. As of the end of June, China's solar capacity was 1,274 gigawatts, still narrowly below coal-fired capacity at 1,275 gigawatts. By July 31, solar represented 31.5 percent of the country's installed power generation capacity. The milestone reflects installed capacity rather than the amount of electricity actually produced. Coal therefore still has a major role in supplying power across China. July data showed coal provided under 50 percent of the country's electricity output in the first half of 2026 for the first time on record. Those figures also showed renewables at 41.2 percent of China's total electricity generation, with wind and solar together supplying nearly one-quarter of all power output. Yahoo!news

VC, PRIVATE INVESTMENT & ACQUISITIONS            

 Vancouver-based Mundo raised US$20 million in a Series A funding round, led by GreatPoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Next Frontier Ventures, and E12 Ventures.  Mundo develops the data, evaluations and applied research that other AI labs and companies need to train systems capable of processing sensory information (or what it calls “perceptual intelligence”). Mundo plans to use this funding to expand its team with hires in research, engineering and operations. Mundo

Montreal-based Scopia Surgical raised $2.65 million in a pre-seed financing round, co-led  by Linearis Ventures and Anges Québec with participation from Fonds Impulsion, an initiative of the Government of Quebec managed by Investissement Québec, HaloHealth, Richard Rubin, Suresh Madan, and other investors. Scopia Surgical is building a physical AI software platform for robotic surgery. By fusing real-time spatial intelligence with patient-specific digital twins, the company bridges the gap between human intervention and robotic execution. The proceeds will be used to grow the engineering and clinical teams, accelerate product development, and advance the first clinical validation of Scopia Surgical Navigation across several hospitals in Canada and the United States. Canadian Healthcare Technology

Toronto-based The Wellness Company, a product studio that develops health applications, raised nearly $1.6 million in seed funding, in a round led by BDC Capital’s Seed Venture Fund, with support from Toronto’s BKR Capital, Launch, and undisclosed angel investors. The funding will support The Wellness Company’s evolution from a collection of individual apps into a more focused consumer health startup, with Tempo as its central operating system. Tempo is an AI companion to help users create personalized plans to achieve specific health goals like losing weight, completing a marathon, or sleeping better. The company plans to use the funding to grow its three-person team, as well as invest in AI and the rollout of Tempo. BetaKit

Vancouver-based commercial robotics company Norbot Technology raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from a group of undisclosed Canadian tech founders, operators and investors. NorBot aims to act as “the bridge” between the world’s top robotics platforms and Canadian businesses, helping the latter source, integrate, deploy and manage robots across their operations through its proprietary fleet-management and digital twin software. NorBot sees an opportunity to help domestic businesses in logistics, real estate, health care and hospitality choose and deploy cleaning, delivery and security robots, while also ensuring that the data they generate stays in Canada. BetaKit

A growing body of research suggests women-led companies often outperform their peers on revenue generation and capital efficiency, despite attracting only a fraction of available venture capital. According to BCG research, startups co-founded by women generate 10 percent more cumulative revenue over five years than their counterparts, and women-led companies return 78 cents per investment dollar, more than double the 31 cents from their male-led peers. Female-led companies also outperformed all-male founding teams by 63 percent. Yet the share of Canadian risk capital flowing to women founders still sits between two and three percent. Series investor and entrepreneur Michele Romanow and Christina Fox, CEO of TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario, told BetaKit that the underlying issues include who gets seen, backed and connected inside Canada’s venture capital ecosystem. Fox said women-led companies  in Southwestern Ontario are building capital-efficient businesses with smaller rounds. Both leaders believe the government has a role in unlocking more early-stage capital. Fox called for more matched funding for women-led startups at a time when Canadian seed rounds remain roughly 40 percent smaller than their US counterparts. Romanow pointed to British Columbia’s angel investor tax credits as one example of a policy designed to move more money into startups earlier. BetaKit

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and Equinix Inc. acquired atNorth, an Iceland-based data centre operator, in a US$4-billion deal. CPP Investments will own about 51 percent of atNorth after committing US$1.3 billion, while Equinix will hold about 34 percent following a US$895-million investment. Former owner Partners Group will retain about 10 percent after reinvesting US$260 million. atNorth’s footprint spans across all five Nordic countries, with eight operational data centres and several new projects underway across the territory. This includes sites under development in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. atNorth will continue to operate independently under its existing brand. Equinix brings complementary digital infrastructure expertise and global customer relationships to support atNorth’s continued growth. atNorth

Quebec-based pension fund manager La Caisse and Brookfield announced that La Caisse invested about $1.76 billion to acquire a 24-percent stake in Altius Telecom Infrastructure Trust, India's largest independent telecom tower platform. Brookfield remains Altius' largest investor, alongside La Caisse and existing shareholders who are affiliates of GIC and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation. Altius owns and operates more than 258,000 telecom towers and sites across India, giving it a nationwide presence. The platform provides the infrastructure that enables mobile operators to deliver 4G and 5G services. India is the world's second-largest telecommunications market, and continued growth in mobile data use and 5G is increasing the need for digital infrastructure. La Caisse

California-headquartered Nvidia agreed to buy open-source artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face for US$12.9 billion, as the giant chipmaker moves beyond hardware and further up the AI stack. The deal gives Nvidia control of a major hub where developers share and access AI models they can download, customize and run themselves. With the deal, Hugging Face will “remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog post. The acquisition marks Nvidia’s second biggest on record, following the $20-billion purchase of assets from chipmaker Groq in December. CNBC

REPORTS & POLICIES

 Equity, diversity and inclusion in academia weakens scholarship and wastes money on “left-wing scholar-activist research”

 [Editor’s note: Research Money’s report of this study from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute includes the managing editor’s criticism and opinion of this study].

 The pursuit of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in academia is weakening scholarship and diverting millions of dollars to “left-wing scholar-activist research,” according to a study from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Since 2017, the prestigious Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, which sets the agenda for Canadian academic research, has moved dramatically in the direction of implementing EDI ideology and quotas, the study said.

“Regrettably, prioritizing EDI results in an ‘equity-excellence trade-off;’ Canadian taxpayers are funding cultural socialist activism among elite professionals at the expense of the disinterested pursuit of truth.”

Canadian research is paying a high cost for its unfettered embrace of EDI, both through the “non-meritorious appointment of less qualified Black, Indigenous, and female chairs, and by diverting millions of dollars to left-wing scholar-activist research,” the study’s authors said.

According to their analysis – which they said is the first of its kind – EDI ideology is costing approximately $36 million per year, equivalent to a 12-percent “tax” on the CRC’s $300 million annual budget.

“Despite the ebbing of EDI terminology in the media, and a decline in leftwing targeting of dissenting academics, woke is not only not dead, but is actively rising in Canadian academic research,” the authors said.

Who are the study’s three authors?

[Research Money editor’s note: Let’s take a closer look at the study’s three authors.

All three – Eric Kaufmann, Leif Rasmussen and Jonah Davids –are or have been affiliated with the San Gabriel, Calif.-based Center for the Study of Partnership and Ideology.

Influence Watch, a public policy database and watchdog website, describes the Center for Study of Partnership and Ideology (CSPI) as a “right-of-center think tank which studies biases in the media, universities, and the scientific community. The organization primarily reports on bias against conservatives.”

On its website, CSPI says it is “interested in funding scholars studying woke attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. We are also interested in work examining the impact of woke policies and practices on organizational culture and performance.”

The founder and president of CSPI is Richard Hanania, an American political scientist a right-wing online personality and the author of The Origins of Woke.

Hanania was a contributor to Project 2025 regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. His advocacy against DEI has influenced Republican and conservative policymakers in the United States.

Kaufmann, an author of the new Macdonald-Laurier Institute study, is a research fellow and board member of CSPI, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and director of the university’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science, and author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities.

The Centre for Heterdox Social Science says on its website: “We believe that the social sciences have been distorted by excessive normative barriers to publication as well as by political prejudice. This has skewed the entire academic enterprise and, by extension, the state of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities.”

Kaufmann authored a 2021 report with the Center for the Study of Partnership and Ideology, which found that across three Anglophone countries, “a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications.”

Leif Rasmussen is co-founder and director of technology at DeepAudit, a nonprofit group that builds AI tools for institutional analysis. DeepAudit said it uses AI “to expose ideology, bias and extremism in U.S. education.”

Rasmussen authored a report from the Center for the Study of Partnership and Ideology that used natural language processing to analyze the abstracts of successful grant proposals to the U.S. National Science Foundation.

His report found that as of 2020, across all fields 30.4 percent of successful grant abstracts contained at least one of the terms “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” or “disparity.” This is up from 2.9 percent in 1990, and the increase is seen in every field, Rasmussen said.

Jonah Davids is co-founder and director of research at DeepAudit and former director of communications for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology].

Study relies on researchers’ h-index scores as a measure of scholarly “productivity”

In the new Macdonald-Laurier Institute study, the three authors said that while previous studies have examined demographic differences and the effects of EDI on organizational and team performance, none has examined its organizational-level consequences in academic research.

They said their study fills that gap by testing EDI’s impact on research output in the CRC holders program from 2016 to 2025. “It turns out, diversity is not merely neutral – it can actually lower performance,” they said.

To determine the scope of the EDI problem, they measured all 1,906 CRC award holders listed on the CRC site using the standard publication metric, the h-index, which combines both the number of articles a scholar has written or co-written with the number of times those articles have been cited by other researchers.

The authors said their analysis revealed that EDI has actively weakened Canadian research and reduced overall academic performance at Canadian universities, the authors said. Specifically, they found that:

• The average h-index of publication impact for Black or Indigenous chairs is 18, for female chairs is 28, and for White or Asian males is 38.
• The proportion of chairs who are White males declined from approximately 80 percent in 2000 to around 25 percent in 2025.
• EDI hiring resulted in lost productivity equivalent to 10 percent to 15 percent per “equity-deserving” (female, Black, Indigenous) Canada Research Chair between 2016 to 2025.

The authors said they found that EDI language is pervasive throughout the descriptions for CRC positions, albeit with differentiation from agency to agency:

• EDI content throughout all CRC appointee descriptions has doubled since 2016.
• EDI is ubiquitous in descriptions for SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) research chairs. The average SSHRC Canada Research Chair used two EDI research terms in their research description.
• SSHRC chairs are 17 times more likely to describe their work using social justice activist terms than CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) or NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) chairs. Black or Indigenous chairs are four times more likely to do so than White or Asian chairs.
• Across the wider Tri-council agencies, EDI in the form of hiring discrimination and scholar-activist content costs the government an estimated $100 million per year, the authors maintained.

Between 2015 and 2025, the published share of female appointees rose from 30 percent to 60 percent, while Black and Indigenous chairs increased from approximately two percent to around 10 percent to 15 per cent, according to the study.

Demographics with “lower-than-average outputs” are concentrated in SSHRC chair appointments, the authors noted. SSHRC grants contain significantly more EDI terms than NSERC or CIHR grants, they said.

The doubling in EDI terms reveals a significant shift of focus for CRC research, the authors said. “It has transitioned from the disinterested pursuit of knowledge or excellence toward satisfying the race/gender/sexuality-based EDI aims of cultural socialist politics.”

How did the authors arrive at what EDI initiatives cost?

The authors arrived at their cost figures by taking the h-index of a Tier 1 CRC Chair (funded at $200,000 per year) and the h-index of a Tier II Chair (funded at $100,000 annually) and assigning a “ratio” of around $5,000 per h-index point. “Put this way, $5,000 from the Canadian government purchases one h-index point of productivity and scholarly impact.”

Models of the current h-index show that moving from a male to a female chair appointment is connected with a loss of 5.8 h-index points of output, according to their study. Moving from a White or Asian appointment to a Black or Indigenous appointment is associated with a loss of 3.4 h-index points.

At $5,000 per h-index point, this produces a “shortfall” of around $22,500 for female appointments and $17,500 for Black/ Indigenous appointments, the authors said. “This translates to around 15 percent and 12 percent of the average annual value of a Canada Research Chair.”

“Compared to the demography of 2015, this shift in the race and sex composition of CRCs cost $18 million per year, equivalent to nearly six per cent of the CRC’s annual $300 million budget.”

According to the authors, the loss is markedly larger when compared with 2000. In 2025, recipients are 60 percent female and 10 percent Black or Indigenous. This has resulted in a productivity loss of eight percent – $24 million – compared to 2000, when recipients were 80 percent to 85 percent male with very few Black or Indigenous appointments.

“If we take 2000 as our baseline, the loss from EDI hiring is twice as high: approximately $300 million as diversity increased over 25 years,” the authors said.

“Spending on promoting aspects of EDI ideology and politics represents a significant outlay of federal government largesse alongside the non-meritorious funding of some female, Black, and Indigenous chairs.”

H-index doesn’t account for other important factors and can be misused

[Editor’s note: The h-index is simply a metric that measures both the number of papers a researcher has published and the number of times those papers are cited.

A researcher’s h-index naturally grows over time, making it harder for early-career researchers to compare with senior scientists.

Also, citation rates vary widely between disciplines (for example, life sciences vs. mathematics), so it should only be used to compare researchers in the same field.

The h-index doesn’t capture whether a citation is positive or negative, or if an author is a minor contributor to a massive multi-author paper.

Moreover, the h-index doesn’t take into account other important factors, such as the quality of publications, the impact of a researcher’s work beyond citations (and especially real-world impact on communities), or their contributions to teaching and service.

“Hence, the h-index should be used in conjunction with other metrics and qualitative evaluations to get a comprehensive assessment of a researcher's productivity and impact,” according to a peer-reviewed editorial in the Journal of Family Medicine Primary Care.

In fact, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies in 2021 published an infographic on “problems with the h-index and reasons for integrating other contributions into evaluations.”

This infographic gives different examples of how the h-index is influenced by quantity of publications and citations, and how the use of the h-index as a metric for research assessment does not account for qualitative indicators of success, such as teaching, research quality and collaborations.

The Declaration of Research Assessment, which recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated, warns against the misuse of the h-index, and offers comprehensive guidance on the responsible use of quantitative indicators in research assessment to prevent misuse.

In the Macdonald-Laurier study, the three authors reliance on h-index scores to assign an arbitrary dollar value that they then claim equates with “productivity and scholarly impact” is not only not a comprehensive assessment, it is simple-minded and misleading.

Moreover, the authors offer no evidence in their study that the researchers benefiting from EDI initiatives were not academically qualified to be appointed as CRC Chairs.

In fact, the CRC program’s rigorous peer review process sends each nomination to at least three expert reviewers from the College of Reviewers. If all reviewers agree and give positive ratings, the Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat recommends supporting the nomination.

If any review raises concerns or gives an unfavourable score, the nomination goes to the Interdisciplinary Adjudication Committee for a secondary peer review.

All this suggests that the main purpose of the Macdonald-Laurier study was to discredit and devalue EDI initiatives and the researchers who benefit from them.

The authors’ other main goal was to convince policymakers to eliminate EDI targets at federal research funding agencies – an objective that the study's authors explicitly acknowledge].

EDI discriminates against Whites, men and conservatives, study authors say

According to the Macdonald-Laurier study, EDI in American federal research grants peaked in 2021 and collapsed after 2024 under the second Trump administration, but kept on rising in Canada, reaching record-setting levels by 2025.

“The problem is beginning to be addressed in America, but is out of control in Canada,” Kaufmann wrote in an op-ed in the National Post.

In the U.S., the proportion of EDI keywords in government-funded research soared until 2020-21, began to decline in 2024 and plunged in 2025 “as the Trump administration cracked down on EDI-themed research,” he said.

“EDI initiatives in Canadian research impair excellence and discriminate against Whites, men, conservatives, and classical liberals,” the study’s authors argued.

Ending such initiatives should be a top priority for any responsible government, they said. This could be accomplished by proactively terminating scholar-activist grants as well as by eliminating diversity targets, statements, and advertising at the research councils.

“The EDI ethos is politically toxic, racially and sexually discriminatory, and a waste of scarce public resources,” the authors said.

The legitimacy of Canada’s government-funded research base cannot be taken for granted, they said. It hinges on federal research councils returning to their prior focus on “the disinterested pursuit of truth.”

“The goal for the social sciences and humanities must be to study the most pressing social problems for all Canadians, not just those occupying the leftmost end of the political spectrum.” MacDonald-Laurier Institute

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Canada’s failing innovation ecosystem: The same Canadian pattern, six times

By Natalie Yeadon

Natalie Yeadon is Founder & CEO of Augmentios, Co-Founder and Past CEO of Impetus Digital, and life science startup advisor. This article first appeared here, with illustrations, on her LinkedIn.

A pension fund that won't invest in its own country's biotech. A $100-million AI platform layered on hospitals that still fax records. A $13-billion gas plant approved in the same week a Canadian founder gives up on raising growth capital at home. A coordinating body appointed to coordinate four other coordinating bodies.

These read like unrelated stories from unrelated corners of the system. They're not. They're the same issue, wearing six different coats.

Every one of these stories has the same shape: Canada does the hard, early, unglamorous part exceptionally well, then loses the thread at the exact moment value is supposed to be captured. We discover it, build it or test it here. Someone else scales it, manufactures it, invests in it or prices it. And then we buy the finished product back, at a premium, wondering where it went.

Call it "export-and-buy-back." Once you see it in one sector, you start seeing it everywhere.

Canada has a genuinely robust life sciences ecosystem: incubators and accelerators in every province, all doing real, early-stage work. The question isn't whether that work is good. It's whether "ecosystem" was ever what we were short on.

There's a useful distinction in the innovation literature between an ecosystem and a cluster. Ecosystems are built deliberately, through policy and public investment. Clusters form around anchor companies, and self-reinforce through talent poaching, spin-offs, and the informal knowledge flow that happens when people run into each other. Canada has built ecosystems in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and now nearly every province. What we haven't built is an anchor.

The comparison that stops you in your tracks: Massachusetts has 18 biomedical companies with over 500 employees. British Columbia has one – STEMCELL Technologies, which took until 2014 to cross that threshold, three decades after the University of British Columbia (UBC) spun out its first would-be anchor.

B.C. had two other contenders along the way. QLT built Visudyne into a global AMD (age-related macular degeneration) treatment, until doctors began prescribing Genentech's cancer drug Avastin off-label as a cheaper substitute, and sales collapsed.

Angiotech turned a UBC-licensed stent into $1.4 billion in sales in nine months, until a safety study flagged higher clotting risk, and debt from an unrelated acquisition finished the job.

Different failures, same underlying problem: with only one or two anchors, B.C. had no depth to absorb either loss. Massachusetts has 18 for a reason – no single stumble takes down the region. STEMCELL is the one that survived, staying founder-controlled and turning down VC financing entirely.

That gap doesn't close with a twelfth accelerator. Spreading talent, capital, and commercialization expertise across 10 province-sized ecosystems may actually work against concentrating them behind the two or three companies that could become Canada's Genzyme or Genentech.

What would move the number isn't fewer regional organizations – their early-stage work is real. It's a national anchor strategy: identify Canada's strongest scale-stage candidates, and concentrate capital, executive talent and procurement support behind keeping them headquartered here through the acquisition-risk window.

British Columbia's STEMCELL, Xenon, and AbCellera, Atlantic Canada's BIOVECTRA, Quebec's CellCarta – Canada has candidates. The question is whether we build around them deliberately, or wait to see who buys them first.

Denmark did this on a home market a fraction of Canada's size. Novo Nordisk now generates roughly $42 billion in annual revenue, anchored on a domestic market of roughly $4 billion.

Canada's domestic market is roughly $34 billion, the ninth-largest in the world, and our biggest domestic firms are Bausch Health (specialty/legacy) and Apotex (generics) – neither an innovator anchor. The blueprint exists. What's missing is pointing our ecosystem-building capacity at a single, harder target: not another accelerator, but Canada's first anchor.

See also: Canada has the research “spark” – now it needs to create the life sciences economic engine

 A body to coordinate the bodies

Buried near the very end of the federal Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force report is a recommendation that may quietly determine whether any of the other 38 actually happen. It hasn't gotten much attention. I think it deserves some.

Recommendation 39 calls for four dedicated implementation teams – covering regulatory modernization, clinical trials and data infrastructure, anchor company scaling, and health sovereignty – each reporting to "an overarching body" responsible for oversight, alignment and monitoring progress.

It's worth sitting with that phrase. An overarching body, rather than a minister with clear accountability, or an authority with actual statutory power. A body whose role is essentially to help four other bodies stay coordinated.

This reflects something we see across Canadian governance more broadly. The mandate for health, safety and oversight tends to sit separately from the mandate for innovation, growth and commercialization, which means no single minister ends up owning the outcome from start to finish.

When something stalls, it's rarely anyone's fault in particular: health points to industry, industry points to the provinces, the provinces point back to Ottawa. Everyone did their part, and somehow the result still doesn't arrive.

Recommendation 39 seems designed to solve exactly that pattern, and I'd genuinely love to see it work. But as written, it risks recreating the same structure one level up – a coordinating body without much enforcement power, sitting above four teams without a clearly named, individually accountable owner.

We don't have a shortage of committees, task forces or oversight bodies in this country. If there's a gap, it may be that we rarely name one person who's actually accountable when a good plan doesn't get carried through.

None of this means Recommendation 39 is doomed. But it's fair to ask, gently and directly, whether it's been given real teeth, or whether it risks becoming one more well-intentioned structure that quietly loses momentum. That, more than the diagnosis itself, may be the real test of whether this Task Force turns out differently than the ones before it.

See also: Building Canada’s life sciences sector requires shift in research focus and making the sector a priority for the economy

The aluminum problem, applied to medicine

Alberta just approved a $13-billion natural gas plant to power a Meta data centre. In the same news cycle, I keep hearing versions of the same story from Canadian life sciences founders: build something real, do it leaner and better than well-funded American competitors, then hit a wall the moment it's time to scale – because the growth capital needed simply doesn't exist here at the size required. The path forward becomes a U.S.-led raise, and often, a relocated headquarters.

Same country. Same government. Two completely different answers to the question of who gets to build here.

This resource pattern isn't new. Canada is the world's fourth-largest producer of aluminum. We don't have the rolling mills to turn that aluminum into the sheet metal a beer can is made from. So we ship the raw metal out, and buy the cans back.

We do the same thing with medicine. Canada's reliance on imported pharmaceuticals has climbed from 74 percent to 93 percent of total drug spending in a decade. Roughly 80 percent of the active ingredients in the world's medicine now come from China and India. We're not manufacturing the cures. We're importing them, the same way we import our own aluminum back as cans.

And we do it with companies. I've now heard this story enough times, across enough different founders, that it's not an exception – it's the pattern. Real Canadian breakthroughs, built efficiently, with less capital and better discipline than their U.S. counterparts. At the exact moment they prove themselves, the capital to keep them here doesn't show up. So they leave, and the return leaves with them.

I'm not arguing against the data centre. I'm asking why we can find that kind of capital and conviction for imported infrastructure, and can't find a fraction of it for something we actually built ourselves. We keep supplying the raw material. Someone else keeps making the can.

Layering AI on a fax machine

Ottawa recently announced $100 million for VITAL, a health data platform built on St. Michael's Hospital's Gemini program, aiming to connect de-identified clinical data across 160 hospitals in Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec. It sounds visionary. As a behavioral systems strategist, I'm skeptical: layering AI on top of systemic fragmentation doesn't solve the problem, it amplifies it.

Recent history should give us pause. Canada Health Infoway spent $300 million over nine years on PrescribeIT, an "axe the fax" initiative, and reached five-percent national adoption before being shut down.

Ontario has spent hundreds of millions on failed EHR (electronic health record) initiatives that left the system fragmented. Just last month, 22 Ontario paramedic services scrambled back to paper overnight when their e-record vendor entered creditor protection.

Why do these digital dreams keep crashing on the clinical floor? Inertia and diffusion of responsibility, baked directly into our data architecture.

We practice institutional data-hoarding under the banner of privacy: I've heard directly from researchers that co-investigators on the same federally funded genomic grant can wait up to two years just to share data across hospital legal walls. That hoarding doesn't protect patients – it blocks the validation of tools that could help them today.

Underneath it all: a single-payer system with no competitive pressure to perform, and a diffusion-of-responsibility standoff where Ottawa sends transfer payments, provinces set rigid line-item budgets, and hospitals are left with zero flexibility to actually pay for innovative technologies.

Administrators are structurally pushed toward defensive safety over clinical innovation, and we hide the whole arrangement behind the Canada Health Act as a badge of identity, while a private-pay layer already quietly exists alongside it.

We don't need another $100-million point-solution or another white paper. We need the institutional courage for an honest, non-partisan conversation about making both systems work together. Until we fix the incentive wiring, we'll keep spending millions to automate our faxes.

See also: Canada’s health care system needs to change from lowest-bidder procurement to optimizing value across the system

Leveraging Canada’s rich health data to benefit Canadians and the economy requires sharing that data

Our own pension fund won't invest in us

Canada's own pension fund manager just told a reporter, on the record, why he won't invest in Canadian biotech. His answer exposes the exact structural blind spot I keep finding.

CPP Investments – managing retirement savings for over 22 million Canadians – holds virtually zero direct equity in our own life sciences success stories. Meanwhile, they're writing $50-million to $75-million cheques into biotech funds everywhere else in the world.

His reason wasn't that Canadian biotech underperforms. It doesn't. The government's own Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Sector Task Force found that despite accounting for just seven percent of Canadian venture capital, life sciences generated the highest 10-year returns of any sector – nearly 20 percent, beating tech, nearly doubling clean tech.

The real barrier is scale. Canadian health care venture funds average $150 million to $300 million, with typical cheques of $10 million to $20 million. CPP needs to deploy in blocks ten times that size to justify the overhead. So our own national retirement capital skips right past our own companies – not because the science is weak, but because we never built vehicles large enough to hold it.

The same task force laid out how stark this is: there is currently zero Canadian institutional ownership in any of our top three publicly traded biotechs – Xenon, Zymeworks, AbCellera. Of the top 20 Canadian life sciences exits since 2013, Canadian investors captured only 23 percent of the returns.

We fund the early discovery with taxpayer dollars, educate the talent in subsidized universities, and then watch the commercial windfall – the jobs, the manufacturing, the returns – walk out the door the moment it's time to scale.

You can't ask CPP to write smaller cheques; that breaks their own economics. The fix has to run the other way – build aggregator vehicles big enough to hold a pension-sized cheque, pooling several Canadian funds into one vehicle a pension fund can actually invest in.

That's not theoretical: the federal government is trying exactly this right now, through a new fund-of-funds and life sciences stream under the Venture and Growth Capital Catalyst Initiative, with the design consultation open for feedback until the end of August.

The Globe and Mail called this Canada's "biotech moment." I'd call it a structural test. We've been here before. This time we actually have a tool built for the specific problem. Whether we use it well is the part that's still unwritten.

See also: Canada’s structural “scale conversion problem” drives growing companies to foreign buyers

Canadian founders regret selling their scaling companies to foreign buyers but felt they had no choice

The sequential assessment treadmill

Why is Canada losing the clinical trials it used to lead? The federal task force's own numbers: Canada's share of the global clinical trials market has gone from six percent in 2021 to four percent today. That's $2.5 billion in trial spending gone, and roughly 20,000 high-wage clinical and scientific jobs that simply don't exist here anymore.

The easy explanation is that our Research Ethics Boards are slow and study start-up takes too long. Partly true. But it misses what's actually driving the decision, and it misses where the trials are actually going.

Global sponsors don't evaluate a country on trial logistics alone. They're pricing in the whole distance from first patient enrolled to the drug actually reaching a pharmacy shelf. Health Canada approves a drug in about 300 days – competitive by global standards. Then the clock resets: health technology assessment, 200 days; price negotiation through the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance 195 days; then each province decides independently whether to list it, another 99 to 219 days, on top of everything before it.

None of these steps run in parallel. Each waits for the last to fully finish. That's not four checkpoints, it's a relay race where every runner waits at the starting line until the last one has completely stopped. Call it the Sequential Assessment Treadmill.

The task force names this directly: a product of legacy sequential design, not any single person's failure. Each body does its job well and hands off to the next, but nobody owns the total distance the patient waits.

Why enroll patients here if the therapy they helped test won't be listed here for another two years?

Meanwhile, look at where a lot of that investment has actually gone. China's share of innovative new drug clinical trials has grown from four percent to 30 percent over the past decade, while the U.S. share has fallen. A Phase 1 trial in China now runs roughly seven months faster than in the U.S., at a third to half the cost, and China has stopped being a fast-follower and started producing genuine first-in-class therapies of its own. Sponsors aren't just chasing lower costs. They're chasing speed to real patient data, and a regulatory environment built to move at that speed.

Here's what should bother people more than the timeline: every provincial listing decision faces the same incentive. A new therapy shows up as an immediate cost against this year's drug budget, full stop. The ICU bed-days it prevents, the Emergency Room hallway it clears – none of that shows up on the same ledger. That's loss aversion doing what it does: protect a visible, immediate cost while an invisible, larger saving in a different budget goes uncounted.

There's a pilot letting Canada’s Drug Agency and the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance [processes] run concurrently. Uptake so far: three submissions.

We fund the early research generously. We starve the commercial end that would actually pull those trials home, and we're watching capital vote with its feet toward wherever the whole pipeline, trial to patient, moves fastest.

Faster ethics reviews and better site coordination would help. But they're treating a symptom. The actual fix: simplify the downstream sequence, and give sponsors a reason to believe the finish line is real.

See also: Canada’s risk-adverse regulatory system and unpredictable drug access stifle novel drugs and clinical trials

Canada fails to meet Canada Health Act principles for patients, including access to innovative medicines

 One diagnosis, six symptoms

Look at these six stories side by side and the pattern stops being subtle. An ecosystem with no anchor. A coordinating body with no accountable owner. A resource pattern that ships raw materials out and buys the finished product back. A digital health strategy layered on institutional data-hoarding. A pension fund that can't find a Canadian company big enough to invest in. A relay race where every runner waits at the starting line.

Different institutions, different budgets, different press releases. Same three mechanisms underneath, every time: inertia that keeps each layer defaulting to what it already does, bidirectional risk aversion that punishes the visible cost of trying and never counts the invisible cost of not trying, and diffusion of responsibility that lets every actor do their job well and still watch the result never arrive.

None of this is a story about any one government, agency or sector failing. That's actually the more uncomfortable finding. If it were one bad decision, a different decision would have fixed it by now. It hasn't, because the incentive structure rewards caution at every layer, regardless of who's in office or which report gets written next.

The good news, if there is any: once you can name the pattern, you can start asking a different question. Not "what's wrong with this sector," but "who, specifically, is accountable for the handoff." That's a much smaller, much more answerable question. It's also the one we keep avoiding. Natalie Yeadon on LinkedIn

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Canada is overly reliant on the U.S. for agri-food exports, but could increase its global share of exports with the right investments

[Editor’s note: Research Money will be highlighting news stories, reports and op-eds about agriculture and agri-food leading up to our annual conference, Food for Thought: Catalyzing Agri-Food Solutions in an Uncertain World, April 21-22, 2027, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.].

Canada has become overly reliant on the U.S. for agri-food exports and the country’s position in global agriculture and agri-food trade is declining among competitors, according to a report by RBC Thought Leadership.

But with the right investments, Canada can increase its global share of exports from 3.7 percent to 4.8 percent, which could add $44 billion to agriculture and agri-food’s export value by 2035, the report said.

 More than 60 percent of Canada’s agricultural and agri-food exports worth $100 billion go to the U.S., and the value of these exports has quadrupled since 2000, according to the report.

However, U.S. tariffs now pose a threat to Canadian agriculture and agri-food exports, since Canada is now the source of 20 percent of U.S. agriculture and agri-food imports.

At the same time, Canada’s position in global agriculture and agri-food trade has slipped to 7^th  from 5^th place, and could drop to 9^th by 2035 if corrective measures aren’t taken, the report noted.

“To regain market share, Canada needs to focus on innovation, investment, export-oriented infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and overseas agri-food promotion,” the report said.

Canadian food manufacturing has increased its value-add ratio – its production minus its consumption – by 71 percent between 2014 and 2023, according to the report.

Thanks to large crushing facilities, roughly 96 percent of Canada’s canola oil and 65 percent of canola meal export volumes went to the U.S. in 2024.

Canada also supplies 85 percent of the U.S.’s potash needs, which could go higher if the U.S. pulls back from Russia and Belarus, its only other major suppliers.

Thanks to decades of export growth – ahead of most of Canada’s economic sectors – the country’s agriculture and agri-food sector entered the 21^st century as a productivity leader. But with so much focus on the U.S. market, many Canadians didn’t realize that the rest of the world was catching up, and in some categories, overtaking us.

Emerging competitors like Brazil have gained ground in Africa and the Middle-East, while traditional rivals like Australia are gaining market share in Southeast Asia.

A global model developed by the Boston Consulting Group’s Centre for Canada’s Future and RBC shows Canada’s market share since 2000 has declined, relatively, by 12 percent.

Canada has lost market share in two-thirds of the sectors that make up agriculture and agri-food trade – including meat (-2 percent), live animals (-5 percent) and beverages and spirits (-2 percent).

The result for Canada, according to RBC’s model: $23 billion in forgone export value in 2023 as a result of market share loss from  2000, which is worth more than the steel and iron Canada exported to the U.S. in 2024.

“This relative decline could be an early-warning signal that our agriculture and agri-food exports are not only overly dependent on the U.S., they’re likely to face even greater competition abroad in the decades ahead,” the study said.

Average tariffs by a World Trade Organization member charged on an agriculture product is 14.8 percent, compared to eight percent for non-agriculture products.

“A slowing appetite for trade, fewer new trade agreement opportunities, and disruptions to Canada’s North America-first export strategy are among the biggest challenges we may need to consider in the years ahead.”

RBC’s model estimates that Canada’s share of the global export pie could grow by 30 percent by 2035, adding $44 billion to total exports, if the country pursues three main trade objectives: grow where Canada has market access; expand in the world’s best growth markets; and maintain existing relationships through strengthened “food diplomacy.”

Canada has 15 free trade agreements providing access to over two-thirds of the global economy. Through these agreements, there is room to make better use of Canada’s market access in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Taking on new growth markets can start in the Asian markets. Consumers in Southeast and South Asia are expected to have more to spend on higher value products over the next decade, thanks in part to expectations for economic growth that will be among the best in the world.

India is one of the clearest opportunities – a market of 1.5 billion people whose economy and standard of living are growing rapidly. This market will increasingly be an opportunity for Canada’s agri-food processing industries, especially plant-based proteins driven by Canada’s production of legumes – peas, lentils and soybeans, according to the report.

Canada’s oilseed and agriculture waste processing can also help meet expected growth in biofuel demand in Southeast Asia, where blending rates of biofuels with fossil fuels in markets such as Indonesia are expected to stay above 30 percent.

Canada can contribute to linking global marine transportation to local supply chains by helping to build up food corridors and port infrastructure in Türkiye, United Arab Emirates, and Saudia Arabia as key points of entry to growth markets.

Canada also can strengthen and grow current partnerships. These markets include the U.S., Japan, China, and Mexico – the first three of which are projected to have food trade deficits over the next decade that surplus producers like Canada will compete for.

Canada’s advantage is established business networks and consumer confidence in the country’s products.

Canada’s agriculture and agri-food sector is a source of high quality, affordable and nutritious food for a growing domestic population. The country produces more than it needs, positioning Canada as a net exporter of agriculture and agri-food products by $32 billion in 2023.

“However, the production mix of an export-oriented sector may not round out a healthy diet for all Canadians,” the study noted.

Canada has formed trade relationships with countries that specialize in producing foods such as fruit at a more competitive and productive rate. As a result, Canada runs a production deficit in fruits and vegetables, as well as sugar and confectionary products.

Technology can help, in this case through the rise of modern, controlled environment agriculture. Pockets of production in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia have led to greenhouse fruit and vegetable production volumes increasing by roughly five times since 2000.

This growing industry can play a critical role in closing the production gap, where vegetable production would need to double and fruit production would need to grow by five times to feed domestic demand, the study noted.

Canada will need to enable this growth through sufficient utilities, especially water, energy and waste management, according to the report.

Expanding and decarbonizing Canada’s electricity grids will be essential, and could require provinces to invest nearly $160 billion to double their electricity supply with clean energy.

Other areas for growth to meet domestic demand and regain global market share can be found in meat processing as well as fish and seafood production and processing. Meat production nearly doubles Canada’s average consumption rate, while fish and seafood production are just above consumption averages.

These industries have been challenged by high operation costs, volatile commodity prices, labour shortages, and a challenging policy environment for aquaculture, the report said.

“Yet, there is a growing domestic and international demand for sustainable, Canadian-made proteins, which means the efficiencies created through global operations in Canada can help improve the cost and availability for domestic consumers.”

While no country is immune from the negative impact of climate change on crops and animals, yield growth scenarios that account for increasing effects of climate change suggest Canada is projected to increase its role as a global breadbasket of staple crops such as wheat, soybeans and corn.

Canada is also well endowed with natural resources, and home to efficient production systems that responsibly use them. Canada’s agriculture water use for agriculture remains low at 11 percent of total freshwater withdrawal, compared to 67 percent in Australia and 40 percent in the U.S.

Canada’s land use for agriculture also pales in comparison to the U.S. and Australia, which represents over half of their total land masses, while Canada’s agricultural land covers six percent of the country.

According to the study, the five keys to unlocking Canada’s export potential in agriculture and agri-food are:

• Innovation:

Technology adoption is an area for improvement. Take automated steering for tractors and variable rate technology for fertilizers and seeds, as examples. Adoption rates for automated steering for tractors and variable rate technology for fertilizers and seeds remain low, at 27 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

“We also need greater connectivity among researchers, startups, funders and companies, preferably within agri-food innovation hubs like the ones grown in the U.S. Mid-West and Netherlands. That will require us to address the widening gap between private and public resourcing, which threatens Canada’s ability to develop partnerships in IP and commercialization.”

Government spending on agri-food research and development has declined by nine percent on average, annually over the past decade.

• Capital:

Canada is in the top 10 countries for investments in agri-food technology and innovation. The country could be in the top five, if annual investments in Canadian-based startups doubled.

Further expanding Canada’s agri-food processing sectors will require upfront investments.

Protein Industries Canada estimates Canada could own 10 percent of the global market share of plant-based foods by 2035, which would add $25 billion to annual sales.

To achieve this ambition, Canada will need 10 to 15 new plant-based food-processing facilities and $6 to $9 billion of capital investment for ingredient manufacturing alone.

Scaling capital in Canada will also require us to beef up the business case, with more competitive approaches to tax and regulation.

• Digital access:

Canada needs to fix its 5G gaps. Two key agriculture producing provinces, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have only 50 percent and 30 percent rural coverage, respectively, when it comes to 5G.

The use of precision agriculture tools highlights the importance of strong wireless connections in rural Canada. These tools rely on app or web-based platforms to improve use of feed, seed, fertilizer, and pesticide, so Canada can produce more with less.

That requires high-speed internet and strong 5G cell reception, which rural Canada is lagging in. Deetken Insights estimates that if all Canadian farmers had access to 5G, it could add between $2.7 billion and $3.5 billion to Canada’s GDP by 2030, through input efficiencies and enhanced automation on farm.

• Export infrastructure:

Turnaround times at Canada’s ports are slower than many large competitors, averaging 2.7 days in 2022 while the U.S., Brazil, and Australia, had average turnaround times of 2.1, one and two days, respectively.

The Port of Vancouver, Canada’s largest port, has had longstanding infrastructure bottlenecks from the Second Narrows Bridge to the Thornton tunnel, which mechanisms such as the National Trade Corridors Fund or Canada Infrastructure Bank could help transform – if they have transformational funding.

Currently, Canada’s roughly $20 billion a year investment on transportation infrastructure lags agriculture competitors such as Australia and the U.K. Keeping up with these economies would require additional investments of between $13 billion and 20 billion.

[Editor’s note: The Mark Carney government’s 2025 budget set a target of $1 trillion in combined public and private investment by 2030, with port and trade corridor modernization as a central pillar.

The government announced an investment of over $10 billion to expand the Port of Vancouver’s Roberts Bank Terminal 2, aiming to increase container capacity by 50 percent and enable $100 billion in annual trade.

Government funding and fast-tracking also is supporting the Contrecœur expansion of the Port of Montreal and the Port of Québec to improve non-U.S. export efficiency.

Ottawa also is backing the Grays Bay Road and Port project in the Arctic alongside upgrades to other regional gateways like Churchill and St. John's].

While ports are our main connection to global markets beyond the U.S., Canada’s rail system is a major domestic connector, and it is challenged with limited routes and rising labour disputes, that too require a rethink for growth.

• Global marketing:

Canada is suffering from a dilution effect in its market development and access approach – with limited resources to boot. The U.S. spends close to 20 percent of its agriculture support services budget on marketing and promotion, or triple Canada’s share of six percent.

In a similar vein, gaining market share requires robust inspection and control services that ensure food safety and agriculture production’s protection against new diseases and pests.

Canada has a strong reputation, but also must come to grips with a dilemma: even though the country allocates 40 percent of its agriculture support services budget to inspection and control, Canada still faces market access issues and duplicative inspections.

One approach would be to pick the top five products for export potential and develop priority market assessments, such as Europe for seafood.

Pooling public-private resources, the federal government could work with industry associations, companies and provinces in region-specific, agile taskforces to promote exports and inform regulatory bodies on what’s needed to support growth.

A complementary option could be to position regulatory bodies such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to proactively develop standards recognition and harmonization in the identified growth markets.

The study concluded that “Moving from short-term reactionary tactics to strategic growth, Canada can use the U.S. tariff threats as a wake-up call to leverage agriculture and agri-food as a driving force for trade diversification while building Canadian self-sufficiency.”

Under a high-growth scenario, Canada could return to its position as the world’s 5^th largest exporter of agriculture and agri-food products.  In such a scenario, Canada in 2035 would need to expand value added agri-food exports by 50 percent and grow agriculture commodity exports by 10 percent. This would entail:

• The Atlantic aquaculture industry doubles in production and processing, feeding Canada’s European neighbours and the ones just next door.
• Alberta, home to 80 percent of the country’s beef output, advances the resilience of its feedlots and supply chains, contributing to Canada becoming the second largest source of meat in Japan, just behind the U.S., from fourth place today.
• Canada’s greenhouse sector, with aspirations of doubling its acres over the next decade, moves Canadians closer to their fresh produce at an affordable price.
• All these products are delivered to consumers via transportation systems with fewer bottlenecks from rail to port and fewer constraints, from on-farm internet to non-tariff trade barriers. RBC Thought Leadership

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B.C. and Manitoba food industry associations seeking nearly $1 billion in public and private-sector funding to build regional food terminals

Food industry associations in British Columbia and Manitoba are seeking close to $1 billion from government and private business to build regional food terminals as trade tensions with the U.S. continue to expose the risks of relying on north-south trade.

BC Food & Beverage, which represents provincial food processors and manufacturers, is readying a proposal for a massive facility with an estimated cost of $700 million.

The proposed space would be the first in the province and loosely modelled on the Ontario Food Terminal, the only one of its kind, which distributes two billion pounds of food each year across Canada.

The western anchor would be part of a network of terminals that move food along interprovincial routes already running from the port to Alberta, the Prairies and Northern Canada.

Manitoba’s industry association is looking to build its own terminal with a price tag between approximately $150 million and $200 million.

Food terminals, which function as independent wholesale food marketplaces, offer a more efficient way for Canadian supply to meet Canadian demand, said Michael Mikulak, executive director of Food & Beverage Manitoba. By concentrating multiple producers at one facility, these operations can cut the cost of shipping product orders to stores.

Both the B.C. and Manitoba proposals are largely in response to the federal government’s National Food Security Strategy, launched in June. It pledged $3 billion over 10 years to expand domestic processing and production, make supply chains more efficient and improve grocery competition.

The strategy was developed amid rising food costs and trade tensions with the U.S. that threaten decades-old supply routes.

The B.C. concept, which has been dubbed “the Pacific Gateway,” is even more ambitious than its Ontario counterpart. With the Port of Vancouver and Vancouver International Airport already moving mass quantities of food to and from Asian markets, the B.C. terminal has an opportunity to become a regional export hub.

Advocates of the projects say they’re not simply about creating more efficiencies for industry players, but about building out better food distribution to improve Canada’s food security. The Globe and Mail

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Three racialized groups of Canadians face higher rates of food insecurity, often driven by low income and lack of access to nutritious food

Three racialized groups of Canadians face disproportionately high levels of food insecurity, according to recent data from Statistics Canada (StatsCan).

​Black, Arab, and Indigenous populations are most at risk of going without basic necessities, by journalist Radiyah Chowdhury wrote in an article in Future of Good. 

Based on data from StatsCan’s Canadian Income Survey, 9.8 million Canadians, including 2.4 million children, in Canada lived in food-insecure households in 2025.

Chowdhury said this includes 41 percent of Black people, 37 per cent of Arabs, and 35 percent of Indigenous peoples living off-reserve.

Roughly one in four people in Canada experience some level of food insecurity, ranging from marginal worry to severe deprivation.

While the data is based on the 2024 Canadian Income Survey, the disparities remain fairly consistent over time. 

Research by Dalhousie University shows Canada recorded the largest shift in worsening moderate or severe food security, going from #11 globally in 2017-2018 to #6 in 2023-2025. The U.S. was ranked #5 for highest food insecurity rate.

Food insecurity is the “inability to acquire or consume an adequate diet quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to do so,” according to the federal government.

StatCan uses three categories to measure this. Marginally food-insecure households worry about running out of food or have a limited selection due to financial constraints. A moderately insecure household compromises in the quality or quantity of food due to a lack of money. Severely insecure households miss meals, reduce their food intake, or go days without eating.

Data shows that low-income households are at greater risk of severe insecurity, Chowdhury noted. Housing, income, employment and other systemic barriers all contribute to whether a person can access nutritious food, and by extension, a healthy lifestyle. 

Coupled with the fact that poverty disproportionately affects Black and other racialized communities, it becomes clear that simply distributing food isn’t enough to tackle the problem adequately, said Anick Silencieux, founder and executive director of Support Black Charities.

A 2023 StatCan report, for example, showed racialized people start their careers with lower incomes than their white counterparts. They were also less likely to hold unionized jobs or benefit from pension coverage.

How much someone makes affects where they can afford to live, and lower-income neighbourhoods tend to have fewer grocery stores offering healthy options.

​The numbers become even more bleak when considering the most vulnerable. In 2022, 46 percent cent of Black children lived in food-insecure households. 

Another part of the food security puzzle is accessing nutritious, culturally appropriate food. 

A 2024 study led by McMaster University public health researcher Sarah Elshahat examined the complexity of nutrition and food in relation to mental health among Arab immigrants and refugees living in Canada. 

Of the 60 participants in their study, 65 percent experienced food insecurity.

​​The same factors contributing to food insecurity for Black people in Canada, like income and accessibility, apply to Arabs as well. Racism, discrimination, and Islamophobia also play a role, Elshahat said.

As Muslims account for a large percentage of the population in Arab countries, having access to halal food becomes a necessity. This means being able to get halal food in grocery stores, food banks, shelters and more.

​For people trying to make dishes from their home country, being unable to find products they need, especially in smaller cities, can be discouraging. Using ingredients participants knew and could easily find helped honour their identities as both an Arab and a Canadian and improved wellbeing.

Providing nutrition and food literacy education to newcomers can help them incorporate healthy foods into their diets.

Many racialized groups advocate for greater food sovereignty to combat food insecurity, including expanding community gardens, supporting culturally relevant businesses, and strengthening local infrastructure to ensure the needs of diverse populations are met.

​While StatCan ranks Indigenous food insecurity as the third-highest in Canada, people living on reserves or other Indigenous settlements in the provinces are excluded from the Canadian Income Survey, from which this data is based. 

Because of this, there is an incomplete picture of how many Indigenous peoples living in total experience food insecurity across the country, said Shirley Thompson, associate professor at the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute.

But there is other data to help fill the gaps, she said.

Thompson, whose research largely focuses on reserves, points to a 2023 paper she co-authored on food insecurity in northern Canada. It shows people living on reserves making less than $20,000 or living in remote areas with no road access have the highest rates of severe food insecurity.

First Nation households living on reserves and experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity at the time were 51 percent, while those living in urban centres were around 44 percent. Future of Good

​THE GRAPEVINE – News about people, institutions and communities

 Rachel Forrester-Jones, professor and director of the School of Health Studies in Western University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom. Forrester-Jones is the only individual from a Canadian institution among the 74 new fellows announced September 3. As a newly elected fellow, she joins a prestigious community of leading professionals in the social sciences. Forrester-Jones’s research focuses on social inclusion, social support networks and protection for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism, as well as people with mental health issues. Her work across the lifespan, including palliative and end-of-life care, has helped change policy and practice to improve individuals’ quality of life. Western University

Rio Tinto said its chair, Dominic Barton, will continue to lead the company’s board as he takes on a new role as chair of Invest in Canada, where Prime Minister Mark Carney expects Barton to help “catalyze billions of dollars of new investment in Canadian energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and infrastructure,” while overseeing one of the world’s largest mining companies. Barton “remains fully committed to his responsibilities” as chair of the metals giant, said Malika Cherry, spokesperson for Rio Tinto Canada, adding that the company has “established governance policies” for external commitments. Barton is not among the officers who has registered as a lobbyist for the company. Privy Council Office spokesperson Pierre-Alain Bujold said Barton, who will be a part-time appointee, has consulted with the federal ethics commissioner and is establishing a conflict-of-interest screen. Such screens require public office holders to abstain from any discussions, decisions, debate or votes concerning matters that could further their private interests. The Logic

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Scott Jones, president of Shared Services Canada, will become chief of the Communications Security Establishment following the upcoming retirement of Caroline Xavier. Jones has been president of Shared Services Canada since September 2023. Prime Minister of Canada

BDC, the bank for Canadian entrepreneurs, hired deep-tech investor Gareth Keane to join its defence-tech fund StrongNorth. Keane previously invested in national security technologies at CIA-linked investment fund IQT, was a partner at deep-tech VC firm Promus Ventures, an investment manager with Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Qualcomm Technologies. Gareth Keane on LinkedIn

The Toronto-based legal and financial technology company Dye & Durham, which was previously run by a committee of board directors, said chief operating officer Todd Schulte will be chief executive until the company makes a permanent appointment, while existing director Angela Zhang will lead the board. Zhang will take over for Mary Filippelli, who exited the company’s board just months after joining as chair in May. There has been a years-long battle for control of the company between activist investor groups Engine Capital, Plantro and OneMove. OneMove leader and former Dye & Durham executive Tyler Proud led the “transformation” committee behind the latest executive changeover. Dye & Durham

The Sustainable Forestry Initiative announced Matthew Reddy as the next chief executive officer, effective September 1, 2026. Reddy brings more than two decades of executive leadership experience spanning sustainable forestry, conservation, climate and biodiversity initiatives, commodity certification systems, and public-private partnerships. He most recently served as a senior private sector specialist with the Global Environment Facility (World Bank), where he led private-sector investments and initiatives supporting global environmental goals. He is based in the Washington, D.C. area. Sustainable Forestry Initiative

Scotiabank appointed former UBS Group and ING Group chief executive Ralph Hamers to its board. The veteran European banker is known for leading digital transformations at major financial institutions. Hamers spent nearly three decades at ING, joining the bank in 1991 and serving in senior roles across Europe before being appointed CEO in 2013. He subsequently joined UBS in 2020, where he served as Group CEO, playing an instrumental role in the acquisition of Credit Suisse. He is currently chairman of the board of Banking Circle Group, a next-generation financial technology platform for global commerce. Scotiabank

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Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes

“I believe that it is totally impractical for Canada to try and keep all of the technological bases covered on the questionable assumption that we will then be less exposed in international markets and at home. Our resources in research and development will be spread impossibly thin if we seek to be active in every technology and every economic sector. 

We should specialize in developing key technologies over time, and in a concerted effort, move these technologies from the innovation phase to the commercialization phase.

I suggest that we should focus on those high potential sectors in which Canada has a comparative and competitive technological advantage or in which Canada has an established or emerging technological capability. New technologies which are based on special  long-term opportunities or challenges which stem from this country will make Canada a world class leader in major industrial sectors. 

It is in these areas which offer the best prospect for the ultimate edge for Canada – technological self-reliance.”

– Then-federal minister of state for science and technology, John Roberts, addressing an Alberta audience in May 1981 speech about the National Economic Development Strategy and its importance to the West.

[From the PaulicyWorks archives, courtesy of Paul Dufour].

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Fake clinician reviews often seen as more trustworthy than genuine reviews

Fake clinician reviews are often seen as more trustworthy and helpful than genuine ones, according to a Simon Fraser University (SFU) study.

The research reveals fraudulent clinician reviews often seem more credible because they include richer personal health details that real patients are reluctant sharing publicly.

Researchers said these detailed narratives exploit a gap between the information people want to read and what real patients are willing to share.

"Patients naturally want detailed information when they're choosing a health care provider. A real patient might simply say a doctor was helpful, while a fake review tells a detailed story about symptoms, diagnosis and treatment,” said Aishwarya Deep Shukla, associate professor at the Beedie School of Business and lead author of the study. 

“People are drawn to stories. Unfortunately, these deceptive reviews have the kind of information real patients don’t usually share publicly and can influence decisions about who people trust with their care,” Shukla said.

 The study, published in Internet Research, looked at 35,000 reviews collected in India between 2015 and 2017. The reviews spanned medical specialties from family medicine to dentistry and dermatology.

Researchers verified 8,313 fake reviews posted by health care providers and associated clinic staff, some of whom impersonated patients. They exploited a security flaw in an online platform that invited patients to leave reviews following appointments.

The team further analyzed a representative random sample of 5,000 reviews and found fake reviews were longer than genuine ones and gave more detail about symptoms, diagnoses, medications and treatment.

These fake reviews received more helpful votes and scored higher on a measure of perceived trustworthiness than genuine reviews. 

Shukla said the fake review tactics documented in the study persist today, aided by advances in generative artificial intelligence.

He prescribes stronger safeguards, such as appointment-linked review systems, authenticated anonymous reviews, and stronger moderation practices. Revamping review formats to help patients share more meaningful information without revealing sensitive personal details must be part of the solution, Shukla said.

Longer-term solutions should include verified review systems managed by healthcare organizations or public agencies that confirm a patient relationship while preserving anonymity. Robyn Stubbs in SFU News

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