Good morning. Canada has a chance to maintain its status as a world leader in the quantum technology space, but the industry as a whole is both teeming with opportunity and clouded by doubts. Quantum computer developers may be just five to 10 years away from getting machines to commercial scale – or maybe decades. Now add volatile stocks, record capital and security threats to the mix. Canada’s quantum leap is in focus today, along with a look at our animation industry.

National projects: Mark Carney announces the first five projects under Bill C-5, says reducing emissions from Alberta’s oil sands will be a “necessary condition” for building new pipelines.

Plus: Here are snapshots of the projects that made the first cut.

Investing: Some investors are stuck paying annual fees for private debt funds that have halted redemptions, sometimes for years

Mining: With Anglo American at its side, Teck’s mission to become a pure critical metals company takes a hit, writes Eric Reguly

• Back to gold: Off the heels of other major mining news, Barrick Mining Corp. is selling Hemlo, its only Canadian mine, to Carcetti Capital Corp. for up to US$1.09-billion.
• Today: We’ll be watching reports on the value of building permits in Canada and the country’s industrial capacity utilization for the second quarter.

Hi, I’m Sean Silcoff, technology reporter with The Globe and Mail. My colleague Ivan Semeniuk, our science reporter, and I have covered the quantum technologies space for the past 10 years, often writing together.

During that time there has been a lot of hype and promise about computers and other breakthrough technologies that will derive their power not from 1s or 0s but the mind-bending physical properties of subatomic particles.

Quantum computers, many believe, will some day be able to solve complex problems that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack, unleashing new capabilities such as more powerful risk modelling, tackling dense optimization problems and discovering new drugs and materials.

That day is starting to feel awfully close, as we explore in this weekend’s Report on Business cover story, which we call our field guide to quantum tech.

This has been a year of huge momentum for the quantum sector. It’s not just that the United Nations declared 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology or that in June G7 leaders issued their first joint statement on the technology.

Stocks of quantum computer developers have been some of the hottest and most volatile on the markets this year, and quantum companies have raised record amounts of capital in 2025 after delivering a string of breakthroughs that are solving some of the big technical challenges needed to turn quantum computers from science projects into commercial behemoths.

Perhaps the biggest bellwether is that Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang has converted from a quantum skeptic to a believer in the technology.

Why does this matter to Canadians? For starters, our country has a teeming quantum sector, including three of the world’s most promising quantum computer developers – Nord Quantique, Photonic, Xanadu – as well as D-Wave, the first company to bring a partial version of a quantum computer to market.

We’ve been leaders in breakthrough technologies before (think search engines, smartphones and artificial intelligence), only to get lapped by foreign competitors or sell out too early. Can we avoid that fate this time?

Our federal government had an early quantum strategy, but that two-year-old plan already looks dated and insufficient. The federal minister in charge of the file, Evan Solomon, is promising a new strategy this fall that will put Canada on par with other countries that have committed billions more to the sector than we have.