- June 1, 2026
- Special Guest POV by Gordon Harling, President and CEO, CMC Microsystems
The Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS) underscores how critical Canada’s quantum industry is to national defence readiness, sovereign capability, cyber resilience, and allied interoperability.
After decades of early investment and visionary research, Canada has established itself as a global leader in quantum technologies. Quantum follows semiconductors as critical infrastructure across many applications beyond defence including vaccine discovery, materials research, and crop management.
Canada’s quantum strategy, as it relates to defence, is about more than just owning quantum computers; it is about retaining critical IP, manufacturing expertise, and research and development capability in Canada as quantum technology heads toward commercial viability. The government’s focus on bolstering sovereignty includes making Canada less dependent on foreign firms for sensitive technologies like quantum.
Recent defence spending and broader government investments are being used to accelerate innovation ecosystems, scale domestic quantum companies, speed commercialization, and support adoption of quantum technologies by the Canadian Armed Forces – and industry at large.
Canada punches above its weight in quantum technologies, whether it’s computing, sensors, or communications. All have been identified as key dual-use capabilities that can contribute to national defence ambitions and map directly onto current Canadian military requirements, and all three have been identified by Canada’s National Quantum Strategy (NQS) as key priorities.
The FABrIC program, managed by CMC Microsystems, is building domestic capacity in advanced technologies such as compound semiconductors, photonics, integrated sensors, and superconductors which are all critical for the fabrication of domestic quantum computers. FABrIC enables the creation of custom components from Canadian factories in support of many advanced technologies, including quantum. FABrIC also provides high-quality training for the designers of the future who will create trusted electronic components, components for secure communications, and advanced sensors.
Canada’s quantum industry is critical to helping the country defend its networks, field advanced military systems, and preserve technological sovereignty in a world where quantum advantage may shape both conflict and competitiveness.
Quantum communications: Defending against current and future cyber threats
Quantum communications innovation is driven by security concerns.
Quantum key distribution (QKD), a protocol that securely shares cryptographic keys between parties, can help safeguard communications and protect command-and-control, battlefield data, and links between headquarters, ships, aircraft, and field units.
QKD can also secure bank-to-bank or headquarters-to-branch links for sensitive financial data and help healthcare and research networks move protected patient or lab data over secured connections.
By generating and refreshing encryption keys with physics-based protection for the most sensitive routes, QKD-enabled cryptography hardens networks against next-generation quantum computers. Unlike “classical” encryption, which relies solely on mathematical complexity, QKD uses the laws of quantum physics to detect or frustrate eavesdroppers.
Canada’s DND/CAF Quantum Science and Technology Strategy prioritizes quantum secure communications as classical encryption will eventually be broken by large‑scale quantum computers.
The KIRQ network, run by Quebec-based, non-profit technology accelerator Numana, is a testing platform for quantum communication that combines quantum and classical technologies in real-world conditions. This allows researchers and companies to validate quantum‑safe communications on live infrastructure without disrupting existing traffic.
Canada’s Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite (QEYSSat), meanwhile, is designed to bridge terrestrial fibre networks and space-based quantum links by using satellites as trusted nodes or relay points by demonstrating QKD between ground stations and a low-Earth-orbit satellite.
Quantum sensing: Sharpening navigation, detection, and monitoring
Quantum sensing can be more sensitive and, in some applications, more stable than classical sensors because it relies on quantum properties rather than on macroscopic hardware.
Quantum sensing can improve positioning, navigation, and timing by using ultra-precise measurements of acceleration, rotation, gravity, magnetic fields, and time. In contested environments where GPS is not available, these sensors help platforms keep navigating and stay synchronized without relying on satellite signals.
Quantum sensing and positioning/navigation/timing (PNT) are also a first‑tier focus area for Arctic/near‑polar surveillance, navigation‑denied environments, and improved situational awareness. For civilian applications, they can do familiar jobs with much higher sensitivity and better reliability in harsh or noisy environments, such as enabling sharper medical imaging, detecting mineral deposits more accurately, and measuring hidden changes in bridges, tunnels, grids, and other infrastructure.
Defence is a major driver for quantum sensing R&D. The National Research Council is investing more than $900 million through the DIS to advance quantum computing, communications, and sensing for the Canadian Armed Forces.
Quantum computing: Code-breaking, simulation and materials discovery
A significant portion of the NRC investment is earmarked for quantum computing, which uses quantum bits (qubits) to perform certain calculations much more efficiently than classical computers.
Quantum computing spans code‑breaking, artificial intelligence (AI) integration, and advanced materials simulation tailored to defence needs. Separate investments have been directed towards defence‑related R&D to help scale up Canadian capabilities in hardware and software that DND can later repurpose. Studying how future quantum computers could break today’s encryption and developing post‑quantum‑resistant protocols and hybrid cryptographic schemes is a high priority.
Systems that combine classical high-performance computing, known as hybrid computing, can help simulate electronic structures, explosives, batteries, and other war‑fighting materials.
Investments in quantum computing infrastructure benefit the broader industry, including:
- healthcare and epidemiology for drug discovery,
- agriculture for improving supply chains and climate-related decisions, and
- energy for modelling batteries, catalysts, solar materials, nuclear processes, grid dispatch, and carbon-capture systems.
While quantum computing can tackle niche problems, scalable classical and high-performance computing (HPC) will continue to support most defence applications.
Canada’s telecommunications sector laid the groundwork for quantum leadership
Canada’s capabilities in quantum technologies are tethered to our telecommunications heritage, which provides a strong base in secure networks, radio systems, switching, and modern digital infrastructure that military and intelligence agencies can adapt for command, control, and operations. That foundation was strengthened by the pioneering leadership of, among others, Gilles Brassard—recognised as a founder of quantum information science in Canada—and Raymond Laflamme, whose leadership helped position Canada at the forefront of the quantum revolution and build world-class research capacity.
Our photonics capabilities are a critical enabler of quantum technologies – they play a central role in quantum computing by using photons as qubits, the basic unit of information in quantum computing, to encode and process quantum information. Integrated photonic circuits route and manipulate these photonic qubits. Photonics also enable quantum communication between nodes, underpinning both computation and networking in future large-scale quantum systems.
Government investment combined with robust research and training capabilities at universities, and a strong cohort of startup companies have supported the creation of a quantum ecosystem recognized globally.
In 2025, FABrIC, the Government of Canada’s Strategic Response Fund (SRF) initiative focused on semiconductors, launched Canada’s first Quantum Computing Sandbox (QCS) to accelerate the adoption of quantum computing technology by providing access to technical expertise and state-of-the-art quantum computing platforms for academics, startups, and small & medium enterprises (SMEs). Quantum technologies are central to FABrIC’s mandate: quantum hardware is part of the broader semiconductor ecosystem, and training people in how to write software for these computers is a critical step to the adoption of the technology.
FABrIC is stimulating the development of industrially relevant applications of quantum computing including energy, materials, and communications. These map directly to defence‑relevant use cases such as optimization for logistics and supply chains, materials and war‑system design, and cryptographically sensitive optimization problems.
FABrIC has already funded Canadian companies advancing quantum technologies. Qubic Technologies, is developing and commercializing disruptive cryogenic superconducting amplifiers for the growing quantum computing market. This enhances national security and resiliency by supplying critical amplifier products from a trusted Canadian source.
Following the funding of FABrIC, the federal government launched the Canadian Quantum Champions Program (CQCP), which committed up to $334.3 million over five years to strengthen the domestic ecosystem. It explicitly links fault tolerant quantum computing and associated quantum technologies to national security and defence‑industrial priorities.
Dual-use quantum technologies benefit defence and beyond
Quantum sensors, computers, and communications are inherently dual‑use and so FABrIC helps companies hard‑wire dual‑use pathways into their roadmaps.
FABrIC emphasizes industry-neutral commercial‑readiness to advance quantum hardware and software for banks, pharmaceuticals, energy, and cybersecurity with the mindset that these successes can be repurposed for defence and security use cases.
FABrIC’s Quantum Computing Sandbox provides access to quantum computing cloud platforms, expert technical support, and is explicitly designed to help Canadian companies build industrially relevant quantum applications. It is complemented by CMC basecampTM Training – upskilling delivered by FABrIC, which helps companies and researchers prepare to adopt quantum technologies.
The current FABrIC program continues to entertain applications for funding that advance quantum technologies and capabilities that could be applied for dual use purposes. As commercial quantum computing looms on the horizon – likely less than a decade away – future iterations of FABrIC and other funding levers must be exercised.
One approach for quantum – and the broader semiconductor industry – is tying the development of defence technologies to search and rescue, first responders, and emergency services. The same quantum sensors deployed for Arctic surveillance can find lost people during a natural disaster.
Canada’s significant shift in national defence policy, which tightly links sovereignty, security, and industrial capacity, is both an opportunity to accelerate the country’s quantum ecosystem and develop practical dual use technologies across multiple industries.
Quantum has a strong foundation of investment, capabilities, and skilled talent. We need to maintain and accelerate momentum as the quantum economy turns from science fiction to economic fact.
Gordon Harling is President and CEO of CMC Microsystems, Canada’s Semiconductor Powerhouse. For over 40 years, CMC has delivered cost-effective access to tools, platform technologies and state-of-the-art design, manufacturing, and testing capabilities, essential for emerging companies, R&D and academic research in Canada and around the world. In 2024, it was mandated by the Government of Canada to manage FABrIC, a five-year, $217M Strategic Response Fund initiative to advance domestic capabilities in advanced semiconductor design and manufacturing.