Power to Compute: How Alberta is powering the AI age

Daniel Smith: We wanna ensure that we can meet the electricity demands of emerging sectors like data centers, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that depend on secure power 24 7.

John Stackhouse: That’s Danielle Smith, premier of Alberta from a conversation we recorded recently in Edmonton. Part of Alberta’s ambition is to export more energy to the world, but part of the strategy is also to harness that energy at home, to bring in more investment, and particularly to drive the new AI economy.

We’re all using AI pretty much every day and in many parts of our lives, and those data centers require energy. In fact, a lot of energy, which is where Alberta may have a big advantage. It’s got heaps of pretty much everything from renewables, like solar and wind to natural gas to emerging ambitions for nuclear package, all that energy together with an [00:01:00] expanded grid, and you can see the case that Alberta’s making to be one of North America’s leading data center hubs.

And not just for the American hyperscalers as they’re known, but for Canadians trying to build our own tech stack right here so that we’re not as reliant on foreign tech companies or exposed to the risks that we’re all seeing with foreign interference when it comes to our data. This new data economy is where Alberta and Canada really can have game.

But to do that, we’re first going to have to up our game.

Daniel Smith: And our approach is if you build your own power, we’re gonna say yes. If you want to hook to the grid, we’ll very likely build the transmission line for you. And we want to create an environment where we’re incentivizing them to build their own ’cause.

I think the hyperscalers are experts at to supply chain and logistics.

John Stackhouse: Those logistics are considerable. A single medium sized AI data center can draw as much electricity. As a small city, that’s a huge load to suddenly pull from the grid. When it comes to data and this new AI economy, there really is no room for glitches.[00:02:00]

If a site like this goes dark, the economy it supports goes dark as well. So like Daniel Smith said, the expectation is that private players, especially the hyperscalers, step up, invest in generation, and even sell surplus power back into the system. Yes, it’s big and it’s bold, but if you know this province, it’s also a very Alberta model.

Daniel Smith: One of the things we’re hoping to do is bring on AI data centers with a model that they’ll be able to help us out if they can do some behind the grid or behind the meter investment and power build more than they need and then be able to sell us the rest. We think that might be a low cost way of adding new power, but also giving them the reliability that they need.

We’re pretty smart human beings and I think we can figure it out and I, I think it’s important that we do. Especially when we talk about the challenge that we’re facing at manufacturing intelligence, that’s the next really exciting frontier, and I just want North America

to win that [00:03:00] race.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors the Canada Project. This season, we’re crisscrossing the country to meet the builders using technology to tackle Canada’s toughest problems, and along the way, sketch a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive nation.

Today’s destination, the Key Hills and Sundance Power sites just west of Edmonton, near the South shore of Wman Lake. These power plants belong to a company every Canadian should know. TransAlta was formed in 1911 and really represents the story of Canadian energy. It was once a powerhouse of coal. In fact, these plants used to be among Canada’s biggest.

More recently, it’s invested heavily in hydro and renewables, especially wind power in Western Canada, Ontario, parts of the United States, and even Western Australia. TransAlta is now investing more in natural gas, in part to power this new [00:04:00] AI economy. To find out how we’re going to deliver on the promise of AI power, we’re joined by John cus Norris, president and CEO of TransAlta, which owns and operates Key Hills and Sundance.

And is betting that Brownfield Power plants like these can be Canada’s blueprint for AI power, balancing, reliability, speed, and emissions in a world that suddenly needs a lot more electricity and may need it fast. John, thanks for being on Disruptors.

Happy to be here. John. Thanks for inviting me. Well, I’ve been so excited for this conversation, not only because we’re going to look deeper into AI and data centers, but also talk about some of the energy transformation that appears to be underway in Canada, and you and TransAlta are very much a part of that.

But John, let’s start with the big picture around ai. I mean, you can’t turn the corner these days without seeing some sort of hype expression around ai. How are you and TransAlta thinking about [00:05:00] the opportunity?

John Kousinioris: From our perspective, it’s sort of a once in a generation kind of opportunity for a company like ours to see a significant increase in demand for our product, which is electricity.

And what we’re particularly excited about is the ability of the province of Alberta to be a leading location for data centers. Certainly in the Canadian context, given all the natural attributes that we have in our part of the world, I think it’s gonna be critically important for our economy in the future.

To be able to have a significant domestic AI slash data center capability, and I’m, and I’m concerned about us falling a little bit behind when you look at some of the major clusters in the world, you know, you don’t see very many Canadian locations there because I think as you look forward. Having that just compute capability located in your country is gonna be critically important and I think important to support the great AI work that our researchers and universities and, [00:06:00] you know, our commercial enterprises have.

So it’s about marrying that cutting edge capability that we have as a country with actual processing capability within the country going forward and conveniently for us. It also increases the demand for power and creates another pillar in the economy. So very, very important.

John Stackhouse: There aren’t many places better situated than Alberta, both for its energy supply and also access to major markets, including the us.

I’ve read that there are 33 projects, I think, that have submitted applications to Alberta, and in total they would pretty much consume all the electricity that is now generated in Alberta. So how are you? Thinking about doing this in a stepwise, thoughtful manner, when, as you said, there’s other jurisdictions that are racing forward, including with a full kind of array of power sources

John Kousinioris: As you look at the rest of the country, what many people don’t realize is that pretty much in every [00:07:00] jurisdiction, or either short power or on the cusp of being short.

Power and Alberta for a bunch of reasons happens to be relatively long power at the moment. So we actually do have an element of excess supply and, and, and in fact, I’d say we presently have a bit of a supply and demand imbalance when it comes to power. So I think the government realized that and went about in its first phase, considering how much.

Data center load, could it bring into the province while ensuring reliability? And our system operator went ahead with the government that did that work and came up with a 1.2 gigawatt number, and then they went through a process of allocating that act. So, you know, we used to think of a three legged stool for our sector that needed to be imbalanced in order to be successful.

And that was sort of reliability, affordability, and sustainability. There’s a fourth leg now, and that’s velocity. Like it’s just speed to [00:08:00] power. How quickly could you get it? And if any one of those legs breaks, the stool ticks over. And so we’re really grappling with the velocity part of the equation. And so our vision at the moment really sees kind of three phases, I would say, John, to data center powering in Canada.

The first one would be to utilizing existing underutilized generation. Probably more with a natural gas fired feel to it. Replacing that generation in the 2030s with more efficient generation would be the second phase. And then in my view, the greening of that generation would then follow shortly thereafter in kind of a third phase as we develop solutions for data centers in the country.

And our bet is that it is in fact, you know, hyperscalers, the tech companies, they’re gonna drive, I would say generation. Breakthroughs, sort of the technological evolution in our space that will see the eventual, you know, greening of the solutions that they [00:09:00] need to be able to provide, but with the ability to provide that reliability which they need, which is super hot to be able to see it through.

John Stackhouse: That’s a great point about velocity. I haven’t heard it added to the trilemma as it’s often, uh, referred to with energy. I guess someone will call that a quad lema or something, uh, like that. But give us a sense of how fast the velocity is. How, how fast is this coming at us?

John Kousinioris: So speed to power is important.

And when you look at the parts of the world that I think have done well, places like PJM, and you look at North Virginia and all the locations that have occurred, you know, all the data center locations that have occurred there. I mean, in part that’s because they have the ability to be able to power them.

I think a lot of the proponents of, of data centers wanna be able to see that if, is it a two year time horizon, two and a half year time horizon. Be able to see their project developed, built on the ground within our processing units installed and and being [00:10:00] up and running and being able to scale out.

That’s a good point To maybe pivot to the Key Hills Project, and I’m hoping you can tell us more about what your vision and ambition is there. For those who don’t know. Key Hills used to be a big coal plant, right? Coal plant. That’s right. And now you’re looking to develop it into a natural gas facility to power AI data centers.

That’s

John Kousinioris: exactly right. And so it is a facility which is about 60, 70 kilometers west of the city of Edmonton, and you are right, it used to be a series of three interconnected power plants. Each one of which just to, to keep it simple, is about 400 megawatts in generating capacity. So it’s, I tend to think of it as about 1.2 gigawatts of generation.

We have. In that broader area and our Sundance facility is just west of there, about 40,000 acres of land that we own and, and these plants were built on top of a coal mine. So in many respects, it’s a reclamation operation where [00:11:00] all of the plants are off of coal. They’ve been converted to. Natural gas.

Gas or shut down or mothball over time. And so when we look at key hills, we see, um, reasonably efficient gas, fire generation. Our transmission interconnection is there, the workhorse is there. We have clinical natural gas supply, we have water rights and the ability to cool the data centers, which is critically important from all the existing infrastructure that we have there.

It’s a temperate. Climate. We have existing pooling ponds, for example. The land is there, we’ve re permitted the land. So it’s been zoned in an appropriate way for data center development. So we’re excited about all of the attributes that we have and the ability to actually permit our customers to locate and approximately to our, uh, generating facilities and be able to.

Meet their needs directly from those facilities there. Now, in the initial phase, they would be grid connected, so they’d be able [00:12:00] to get that reliability by being able to extract power from the grid. But it would be our facilities that would be powering the grid in that area to permit that to occur. And the other thing that we’re excited about the opportunity, excited about being able to repurpose existing.

Facilities to meet the need of a new industry and do it relatively quickly as we develop kind of new, more longer term generating solutions for the customers.

John Stackhouse: As I understand it, the electricity that you’ll produce out of your plants goes into the grid, and then the data centers draw from the grid. Pull from the grid, right?

Why then do they need to be located by the power facility?

John Kousinioris: Yeah, in this case. So I think what you’ll actually see in the future is they could, in theory, locate in Calgary as long as they procured power that was being provided to the grid to ensure that the grid maintained that level of reliability.

It’s just that where we are right now, you know, we were exploring potentially a behind [00:13:00] the fence solution we, where we would power them directly, for example. And it turned out that just having the land, because it can chew up quite a bit of land to be able to do the set at scale, potentially hundreds of acres of land, was good.

It’s proximate to the city of Edmonton, which is and, and U of A in particular is a bit of a hotbed for AI development. So locationally it is good, but to get the kind of reliability that they need, let’s say it’s a 99 point, you know, 9, 9, 9, 9, doing that behind the fence is challenging. I think.

Realistically, you need to be grid connected to get that level of reliability.

John Stackhouse: All of this is gonna require a lot of investment and confidence, uh, certainly in policy as well as in markets. And that was part of the thinking behind the memorandum of understanding between the federal government and province of Alberta that uh, we saw a Danielle Smith and Mark Carney sign.

A fair bit. In fact, pretty much all of the attention and debate around the [00:14:00] MOU has been around pipelines and having read the MOUA couple of times I was struck of how much other stuff is in there. Yeah. Including around electricity and specific mentions about. Ai. Yeah. You were involved in the conversations.

John, I wonder if you can give us a deeper sense of the strategic thinking behind that and how that matters to a company like TransAlta and also to the investors who you’re trying to draw more capital from For what we’ve been talking about.

John Kousinioris: I think to your point, John, a lot of kind of attention in the media has gone towards, you know, pipelines and just sort of more the up oil and gas flavor associated with it.

But, uh, certainly from our sector, the electricity sector in Alberta, the MOU is a monumental opportunity and shift for us in terms of our ability to be able to meet the needs of data centers. So what the MOU does is it recognizes the. The challenge [00:15:00] to being able to get reliable generation built in real time in a manner that is environmentally responsible, but also meets the needs of the AI data center opportunity.

And I think imperative that the country has, I think is critical. You can’t have one without the other. In our view. And I think the initial location for this industry pillar is, my expectation is the province of Alberta. And so it is a real enabler and then associated with that will be an appropriate pathway to net zero, which I think, as you would’ve seen in the MOU remains an element of the target that everybody is looking at a really robust carbon pricing regime and, and I think all of that is gonna result in a continual greening of the grid, certainly from an emissions intensity perspective, but it was so lucky in Canada, so blessed to have.

The natural resources that we have where you see a relatively [00:16:00] decarbonized grid, like 80, 84% of our electricity generation in Canada is emissions free. Whether it’s, you know, the nuclear that you see in Ontario to the hydro blessings that the province of British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec have, I think that the country has really great green publicity generation credentials.

We’re talking about other jurisdictions that don’t have those resources like Alberta, Saskatchewan, and maybe some of the Atlantic provinces to be able to use natural gas to be able to, to meet the opportunity. So I, it, it was a really, um, I think, important piece of cooperation and candidly shows a lot, at least from our perspective, great vision and cooperation on the part of the province of, and the government of Canada.

Very impressed with what they’re doing to get our country going. It’s gonna be very important.

John Stackhouse: Tell us a bit more about how the extra natural gas production fits in with a pathway to net zero by 2050.

John Kousinioris: That’s a [00:17:00] great question. And look, in our company in many respects has been in the vanguard of decarbonization in Canada, if you go back 15 years or so, you know, TransAlta would’ve emitted probably in the range of 40 megatons of CO2 a year.

So think of that as 5% of Canada CO2 emissions. We’ve gone from 40 down to about eight. So just our company alone has contributed about 10% of Canada’s Paris commitment. From a decarbonization perspective, what we are focused on now, given you know, how much we’ve lowered emissions over overall the country in our sector, I think there’s other sectors that that still have work to do from a decarbonization perspective.

We think that feathering in. A responsible way, natural gas fire generation that is hyper efficient, like the new plants that we would be looking to build would replace or less efficient, more highly emitting plants. So I think that trajectory of emissions intensity would [00:18:00] continue to go down with time, and it would be our expectation that we would add renewables as well.

But we would need that natural gas fire generation from an affordability perspective today to provide that level of reliability that we need. Our team studies carbon capture, our team study storage. We continue to look at kind of all the technological work that is being done and do expect with time. As I said earlier in, in our discussion, we do expect the tech sector itself to continue to drive kind of innovation and decarbonization over time.

So we, we see the gas as having a role to enable the build out of the sector. We don’t think. Overall, it’ll end up changing the emissions profile of the credit overall that much. And over time we’ll continue to work on partner. Well,

John Stackhouse: you call the MOU monumental. What do we need to do now to not only ensure it’s affected, but to take advantage of this moment?

Bearing in mind the velocity challenge that you [00:19:00] keep mentioning.

John Kousinioris: I think what it’s gonna require is, um, the MOU kind of sets forth a vision. And it requires a bit of work to be done around carbon policy in the province of Alberta, which which has a short time frame. It’ll be sort of in q2, uh, 2026 kinda landing the existing carbon pricing and tier regime that we have in a way that would be acceptable to move things forward.

I mean, making sure that we’re clear about phase two of data center development in the province of Alberta, which we think will have a similar, if not quicker timeframe, to see how that will be played out will also be something. I think that will be important to see through and then it’s all go gonna be about execution.

Like it’s making sure that companies like ours begin riving with our customers, the kind of investment decisions that are necessary. Because I, you know, sometimes I think in Canada we tend to point fingers at the government, why don’t they do this? Or why don’t they fix this? I think this is rightly, I think, a [00:20:00] call by most levels of government to now look at industry and say, look, we will do our part.

Well, you kind of talks about directionally what we need to do from a regulatory perspective. We need you guys to step up too, and I think that’s something that we take pretty seriously in our company and will be a focus for us going forward.

John Stackhouse: TransAlta has been around for more than a century and has lived and succeeded through multiple generations of energy development in this country. John, as we move to close, I’m not gonna ask you to look out a hundred years, but maybe look out 10 years and give us a sense of what success looks like for TransAlta, for Alberta and for Canada.

John Kousinioris: You know, it’s funny you say that ’cause I, I almost sort of, you know, to surface swept and people ask me to kind of make that forecast and I’m, I’m reminded, I joined the company here in 2012 and in 2011 we commissioned our last coal plant, which was a billion and a half dollar investment people three.

[00:21:00] Expecting it to run on coal. I think it was until 2063. That plant is now on natural gas. It’s amazing how disruptive that has been and is gonna probably, you know, I’m not sure it’ll be running in its current trajectory past 2040. So it’s amazing how quickly it ends. What I see our company, if I were to look forward sort of 20 years, I see a company that continues to have a mixture of generation.

Natural gas fire generation, including new natural gas fire generation in the province of Alberta, will be in a place where it is beginning to evaluate and bringing on more renewables to be able to reduce the emissions profile of that generation as we go forward. We often talk about our convictions as a company when we look sort of long term.

Maybe that’s the best way to answer the question. So it is our belief that the demand for renewables generation will continue and accelerate over time. [00:22:00] It is our belief that the technological progress being made around storage and renewables will continue and they will become increasingly affordable over time.

We’ve had a bit of a hiatus in that. Costs have gone up pretty significantly, and I hope they, they start to, to come down again. It is our belief that carbon will become more expensive over time, but it’s also our belief that natural gas fire generation will have a critical role to play in electricity generation, certainly in our part of the world for many, many years to come as well.

So it’s sort of directionally, I think that gives you a bit of a sense on how we see things developing and kind of the way we think about making long-term investments.

John Stackhouse: And for Alberta and for Canada, what, what does success look like 10 plus years out,

John Kousinioris: I think success would look like having our country be considered one of the, you know, continuing on our path to decarbonization over time.

But at the same time, having [00:23:00] a vibrant data center, AI industry that centered initially in the province of Alberta, but also migrates to other parts of the country. And Canada is considered a leader. In that entire industry space, which is kind of nascent. And although we’re doing great in terms of kind of some of the primary work, I worry that we’ve slipped behind in the actual locations of the excellent process.

But I’m optimistic. I think we’ll get there

John Stackhouse: and if anyone can get the quad lema, if we’re gonna call it that, right? Uh, it’s gotta be the people of Alberta and the people of Canada. John, thank you for being on disruptors. Thanks so much, John. Be well. Canada is in the midst again of an important even existential debate about the role of energy in our economy and in our country.

And much of the debate has been focused on what many have called the energy trimmer of reliability, affordability, and sustainability. But as John stressed, [00:24:00] there’s a fourth variable that we need to pay more attention to, and that’s velocity speed. We all know how fast AI is growing in our lives and in our work, and we have to ensure that we have energy systems that grow and adapt at the same speed.

Otherwise, we’ll see our data and all the opportunities that go with it move to other countries. That’s the bet TransAlta is making at Key Hills and Sundance, that it can be one of the engines of Canada’s AI ambitions. It’s about energy security and energy sovereignty, because without those, we’ll continue to struggle for true economic sovereignty.

Even more so in the transnational world of AI and data on so many counts, Alberta already has a headstart. It’s got the land, the transmission systems, the cooling water, and the people who know how to build and run sophisticated energy systems. Those assets and that talent is ready to be scaled for the next wave of demand.

The challenges won’t be [00:25:00] easy. There are huge supply chain constraints for anyone trying to build a new power plant, whether it’s to get in queue for a gas turbine or find the steel and copper and other materials to build out a grid. We’ll also have to continue to get better and better at producing all this energy more sustainably.

If we’re gonna use more natural gas to power, more data centers will want to continue to find ways to capture the methane and other greenhouse gases that come with all that production. Alberta has long been a global leader in that. And by harnessing all these potential new investments, it can continue to be a technology leader for sustainable energy production.

And then there’s the talent challenge. Alberta, like so many other parts of Canada, is going to need more people and more skills to be a global leader in the data center economy. So the next time you use chat, GPT or perplexity, think about where all your data’s going. Where all the energy is coming from for the massive compute that is enabling this new information age.[00:26:00]

We can build most of that right here in Canada if we make the smart investments. Now

you’ve been listening to Disruptors, the Canada Project. Thanks for joining us on this journey across the country. And there’s more ahead. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow rate and leave us a review. It helps others discover the show. And if you wanna gain deeper insights into the ideas shaping Canadian business and the economy, visit rbc.com/thought leadership.

Join us next time as we meet more of the innovators and leaders helping Canada meet this moment boldly and on our terms. I’m John Stackhouse. Thanks for listening.

The Trust Advantage: How OpenText is Securing Canada’s Information Layer

Janice Stein: Sovereignty would guarantee Canadians that their core services and core data that are essential to the functioning of Canadian society are free from coercion by outside powers that matters in a world where great. Power competition is back and even more surprising, our neighbor to the South, which has been a trusted partner for so long, is no longer our cyber protections inside government are among the best in the world.

The. Encryption that protects the most fundamental government data, which other governments would like to access. The core health data that is so important to people in this country, as well as the data that is [00:01:00] embedded in core financial services. These are all things that affect Canadians every day of their life.

And we cannot take the risk that any outside power could use access to that data to coerce us.

John Stackhouse: That’s Janice Stein of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She’s a leading Canadian voice on security and tech governance. You just heard her define tech sovereignty plainly.

Keep core services and data free from coercion.

Janice Stein: We have to bring the private sector to the table with our government to work together and make decisions. What are the core things that we need to protect from coercion, and then we need to fund some infrastructure that will be ring-fenced with the consensus of Canadians and with the active participation.[00:02:00]

Uh, the people who make the tools that’s in the private sector, the people who use the tools, those are Canadian companies and Canadians and those who ensure the tools, and that’s our government. We all have to share a sense of urgency in a world that is just not friendly to Canada in the way

that it was.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors the Canada

Project. This season, we’re crisscrossing the country to meet the builders using technology to tackle Canada’s toughest problems. And along the way, sketch a blueprint

for a stronger, more competitive nation.

Today’s destination, Waterloo, Ontario.

For decades, this region helped Canada wire the world for secure mobile communications. Think back [00:03:00] to research in motion, AKA Blackberry setting the bar for enterprise grade trust on a global scale. Back then, most of us pushed far less data as a sense of scale. In 2003, global internet traffic was about 0.8 exabytes per month.

Today, estimates suggest roughly 0.4 zettabytes of data are created every day. I’ll save you the math. That’s about 500 times more every day than a whole month in 2003, and a lot of that flood is because of ai. Different measures, same signal. We’re operating at a completely new scale. Now, most people hear AI and think chatbots and productivity.

They also know it takes a lot of data centers to power up, and Canada is building them backed by clean power and billions in investment. But that’s not the whole story. Here’s something we all might take for granted. The real stakes are one layer down our information layer, who can see our [00:04:00] data, where it lives, and whether the rules are enforced in code.

Under Canadian law, our peers are already baking sovereignty into their tech stacks. Governed data residency, auditability as standard practice. Now we’re catching up, but we can leapfrog. Our guides today are Tom Jenkins and Shannon Bell of OpenText, a Waterloo born, globally deployed tech champion for 35 years.

Their teams have helped enterprises and governments govern data in code policy and keep critical systems running even on bad days in their world. The product is trust. Keys we hold, rules we encode and proof we can show. So Canadian organizations can scale AI under Canadian rules and export that standard to allies.

Tom and Shannon, welcome to Disruptors.

Shannon Bell: Thank you.

Tom Jenkins: Great to be here.

John Stackhouse: Tom, I wanna start with this question of tech sovereignty. You are one of Canada’s leading thinkers and voices on [00:05:00] this have been for many years. What does tech sovereignty mean to you?

Tom Jenkins: Tech sovereignty just simply means your ability to control your environment.

So in the case of sovereignty, in the analog world, that would mean control of your borders, control of the oceans that we live adjacent to. So in tech, it just simply means control of your technology environment.

John Stackhouse: I think we used to call it resilience, and we all had backup clouds, backup systems because things break.

But now there’s kind of a new challenge to resilience, which is foreign interference and wanting to have our own tech infrastructure while also working with and integrating with other tech infrastructures.

Tom Jenkins: That is the downside of globalization. We’ve all benefited throughout the world with globalization, but with globalization comes the ability.

To communicate things, whether it’s COVID or SARS or [00:06:00] whatever. The reality is when we’re part of the global community, we have to exist with both the good and the bad.

John Stackhouse: Shannon, you build a lot of this stuff. How hard is it for Canada and for Canadian companies to build our own tech stacks versus working with those global platforms that were in some ways an extension of that globalization era?

Shannon Bell: It’s a little bit like back to the future. So for years and years, for decades, we had to build data centers and infrastructure to run applications, and that was part of how every company ran. And with the advent of cloud services, it became very easy to leverage those services to drive faster paths to market.

And in the discussions around sovereignty, it’s really what do you need to control and why? How do you protect your data? And increasingly, data is becoming a differentiator for companies and for businesses. And so what are the pieces in the technology stack that are going to enable a business to [00:07:00] differentiate themselves, and therefore those are the pieces that you need to control.

John Stackhouse: And data is the essential input to ai. So as everyone thinks about ai, how it’s transforming our lives, but every business as well, take us further into that

Shannon Bell: For sure, so data is really, as you said, the power or the fuel for ai. And if you think about an enterprise, 90% of their data is sitting behind their firewalls, not in the public domain.

And so with the advent of ai, it’s been trained on everything that’s publicly available, and that’s being leveraged today through tools like Chat, GPT, and otherwise in the consumer domain. From an enterprise business perspective, it really is all of that data that they’ve accumulated over decades that is enabling them to identify and pinpoint trends, train AI models to drive intelligent agentic behavior that is helping them differentiate their business in the global markets.

So it’s really about that data [00:08:00] set, how businesses are using it to leverage, and what amount of that data they’re comfortable having in the public domain. Versus wanting to control it in a sovereign cloud type of environment. And so that’s really the discussion point.

John Stackhouse: I might’ve thought of data as kind of a global phenomenon.

My data lives, it transcends borders. But listening to you and others, I’m getting the sense that there are perhaps national boundaries around data and there may be more of that. Is that how we’re gonna think of the future of a bit more nationalistic or data within borders approach?

Tom Jenkins: Well, we’ve actually already thought that way.

There’s something called GDPR, which is the General Data Protection Regulation. At first arose, oh, about 15 years ago. As people started to realize, eh, it might not be a good idea to put somebody’s health results on the public web or to put their bank account or their tax form, people started to realize that even things [00:09:00] like open government, which on one hand sounds like a really good idea.

It’s actually not such a good idea if you can figure out which patient is for which doctor, you know, in Sault Saint Marie. And so data and data sets became a big point of focus for public policy about 15 years ago. And so this idea of GDPR basically started to say, if you have somebody’s information.

Then within that legal jurisdiction, so say in the case of Canada, that information’s gotta stay in Canada, can’t go outside of Canada. It has to be run on Canadian servers, and it has to be monitored, managed, governed, controlled, secured by Canadians. It allows a government within their jurisdiction to assure their citizens that the data is being protected, that there is good governance, it’s orderly, [00:10:00] and you know, some international player is not gonna run off with your data.

Data is sort of the stuff you put up in your attic in a box. And you go get your records when you need it, or you go get your photo album when you need it, and that sort of thing. Ai, well, that’s like being broadcast in the middle of a movie theater, in a shopping mall. You know that it’s highly, highly public.

And so GDPR is now starting to be adapted to deal with things like artificial intelligence.

John Stackhouse: But Tom, do those rules transcend easily into the age of generative ai? Isn’t our data now moving in all sorts of new directions that may be good, but were not the directions that we were thinking about 15 years ago.

Tom Jenkins: So the simple answer is absolutely, you’re right, John. That what we thought about in terms of, uh, fixed data, [00:11:00] think of the, the box of files up in your attic is very different from broadcasting that data through a generative ai. And, and you see the dilemma with generative ai. It’s a fantastic innovation.

AI was never intended to forget something. It can forget, by the way, but you have to start all over again. And that’s enormous cost, enormous time,

Shannon Bell: And I think it’s also important to differentiate consumer and enterprise. And so it’s amazing what consumers are willing to say on the internet or share on the internet and accept, but they hold enterprise and government to a much higher standard.

And so when you think about generative ai, what’s in the public domain? Yes. One piece of the puzzle and what people are willing to share with chat. GPT. Or exposed through their email or whatever. Facebook, other applications is one thing, but from an enterprise perspective, they’re much more cautious about what they [00:12:00] share because a lot of the data in the enterprise is what differentiates the business.

And so, you know, think of a simple example. Your, uh, technology company and your source code is your intellectual property. Are you going to put that on the internet? No, of course not. And so those are the types of things that there’s a higher degree of protection around. And so I think you always have to think about it in that domain.

What’s consumer is one vein and enterprise is a, is a different story.

John Stackhouse: Tom and Shannon, you’ve just written a book on some of these challenges.

Maybe tell us a bit about it.

Shannon Bell: Yeah, absolutely. I was privileged enough to work with, uh, Tom and David Fraser as well.

John Stackhouse: David Fraser being a former military leader in Canada and has spent a number of years now with OpenText and others.

Shannon Bell: Yeah. And an incredible leader, uh, that just brings great insights into the enterprise world as well. We worked on a book on enterprise AI and how you can leverage data to drive that from a sovereign cloud [00:13:00] perspective. So very much that enterprise angle and looking at all of the pieces of the puzzle that need to come together to drive agentic AI for enterprise.

Tom Jenkins: Perhaps the way to think of this term, enterprise ai, most, uh, of our listeners have played with chat BT or they’ve. Played with a variety of other chatbots, code, et cetera. What they may or may not realize is that all answers that they’re getting, let’s say, are from the public domain. So famously Chat, GBT was trained on Reddit and trained on Wiki and trained on various things that were part of the digital commons, if you will.

And as Shannon had mentioned earlier. That’s, uh, you know, roughly speaking between five and 10% of the world’s information. Most of it is behind the firewall or, and therefore enterprise. So an AI built from the [00:14:00] enterprise is using different information than you would’ve had in Reddit.

Shannon Bell: Yeah, absolutely. I think a great example where you’ve got information in the public domain and information in the private domain, and how the two intersect is think about when you’re going to file for a passport application.

You’re providing a lot of confidential sensitive data, and you’re providing that into the government and they’re processing it and they’re providing information back to you. And if you think about public domain information, some of your information lives in the public domain and they’ll use that to validate certain things about you.

And much of your data resides in the private domain. And so when we think about applying agentic AI to an example like that, we think about. What’s public information, what’s private information? So I might go on the government website and start the process of my passport application, validate certain things, but then my information is going to get handed over into that private domain where they’re going to run my, [00:15:00] maybe a criminal record, check my background, check my address, check all the verifications required.

References and so on in order to then correspond with me back in the public domain where all of that information needs to be stripped of anything that’s private or confidential. And so you get into this domain where you have agentic AI working across public and private domains, and that’s really where the magic happens.

As you start to think of the evolution of enterprise ai.

John Stackhouse: That’s a really great framing for where I hope we can take the conversation now in terms of what this means for Canada, but for Canadian enterprises, uh, be they public sector or private, we all know data is essential to every firm’s competitiveness, also essential to the efficiency and well-functioning of, uh, public sector operations as well.

But all of that needs to be seen anew in light of this new focus on sovereignty. So how do we think about these data challenges through the prism [00:16:00] of tech sovereignty?

Shannon Bell: I think there’s multiple pieces to sovereignty that you need to think about. So data sovereignty’s, one piece, operational sovereignty’s, another.

As an enterprise is looking at leveraging AI into specific use cases. The most critical piece that’s required to enable or build those use cases is subject matter expertise around the business. The business processes, the data itself, and so that is something you know that the business uniquely has and can build on and build as a differentiator, the ability to train and model those use cases.

And so we talk a lot about AI and. Its ability to potentially displace certain roles. I actually think it’s a phenomenal opportunity in Canada for us to be able to leverage the domain expertise that we have across different industries and use that to train and build a agentic AI use cases. We can do that here in Canada, which solves one of the sovereignty pieces.

The data is resident here in Canada, so you’re building use [00:17:00] cases and deploying and operating those inside of, and building out an expertise that’s not common across the industry today. And so those unique skills to build on top of business processes and data sets, the ENT frameworks are things that I think we can uniquely do here in Canada and build as a capability to differentiate across different industries.

Tom Jenkins: There’s also, uh, when it comes to sovereignty, John, a darker side to this, that we should be all very, very aware of. The simplest way to think of this, it, it’s a bit trite, but what is the difference between shutting off a power plant and bombing a power plant? There really is no difference because you’re depriving someone of the use of that plant.

This is part and parcel of what we talked about before with globalization. You get the good with the bad because, uh, on the one hand we get all this automation, we get efficiency, we get innovation, but now we’ve [00:18:00] got different governance problems. We have to make sure that citizens are protected, that the utilities that they count on are there and they’re properly controlled and governed, and that they’re safe.

It’s everything around us. We know if there’s a power outage, it’s very difficult to check out your groceries at the grocery store. It’s very difficult to get gas from the gas station. Electricity has permeated our lives and that electricity is run by tech, and so we have to think of sovereignty in in a completely new way now.

John Stackhouse: That’s a very good warning, Tom.

For years, those cyber threats have largely been malicious. They’ve been rooted in criminal gangs and maybe in some, uh, malicious state actors. But now we’re also into a new age where even friendly states and the United States might be among them. Might use [00:19:00] its reach through technology to influence or affect others, uh, including economic partners.

There is that expression, the Trump kill switch, which sounds alarming, but it does illustrate a challenge that we need to think ahead to that a superpower or even a power might be able to flip a switch and shut down parts of our economy or enterprises. How as Canadians should we be thinking about this rapidly evolving security paradigm?

Tom Jenkins: You have to take a hard noses approach to capacity versus intent. And, uh, you know, in the case of the Americans, we couldn’t have had and have a better ally anywhere in the world, but we as Canadians, we should be concerned when someone has the capacity to control things inside our country, that’s a different issue.

And, and it’s not about the Americans, [00:20:00] it’s about anyone, any third party actor. We shouldn’t allow anyone that is not elected. Buy our citizens to have control over our life because that’s the whole point of a democracy in a sovereign country.

John Stackhouse: So how do we build that invisible border? Do we need a Canadian cloud and is that even possible?

Shannon Bell: I think there’s a combination of approaches and I, I think we need to understand that the future of technology with respect to sovereign cloud is, is a hybrid approach. It starts with the foundation of understanding your data, where it is, where it resides, how it’s being moved, and that’s so critical because AI is transforming economies and because data is the fuel to the ai, it becomes really that piece of the puzzle that you must have control over.

Now that being said, a lot of the data that’s going to be critical for enterprise sits in their own domain. In order to build AI [00:21:00] models that make sense and can drive that economic advantage, we need to unlock that data that’s sitting in the enterprise. And that’s really where Sovereign Cloud becomes so critical.

And I think the important piece of it is being able to classify the data and know what is the truly protected data and having a solution to manage that versus the data that you can leverage in the public cloud and leverage the economies and efficiencies of scale in the cloud. That is why we think it’s so critical to really know and understand and build out that hybrid architecture so that you can protect the data that is truly business differentiating and protect the AI that you build from that data, and also leverage the benefit and economies of scale of the public cloud.

It’s hybrid,

Tom Jenkins: And the good news about this is the parts that have to be protected are actually really small. Think of your own daily life. Most of what we do is in the public domain. It’s really when you [00:22:00] go get a health checkup or you go to the hospital or you file your tax forms. These are important private things.

They’re actually a very, very small part of the overall picture, and so when we speak about hybrid, we’re actually only talking about a small fraction, might be less than 10% of what we do in the day, and the data that we keep and the interactions that we have, it’s actually a very small amount, but it’s a vital part.

Of our lives. It’s a vital part of who we are as people and as a country.

John Stackhouse: Tom, you’ve been a leader for years in terms of taking Canadian tech to the world. You get to travel the world and talk to tech thinkers and leaders. What are some of the leading countries thinking about now in this new security paradigm in terms of [00:23:00] tech sovereignty?

Tom Jenkins: Many of them have come to Canada and asked us for help as as a sort of third party, if you will.

And this so long tradition that Canada has had, many people don’t realize whether it’s the Canadian Mint, even the Canadian Post Office, for decades and decades, we provided the infrastructure to many other countries for their currency, for their mail service, simply because. We’re big enough that we can build our own and yet a middle power.

We’re not very threatening to anyone. We’ve had dozens of countries approach us and say, can you build us a sovereign cloud that has an independent stack that would not be subject to things like the United States Cloud Act and things like that. So many, many countries are on the same journey. They’re not as fast as we are in Canada [00:24:00] because we have so much of that infrastructure already.

They’re all asking the question, what does it mean to be sovereign in a digital world? And those are pretty profound questions for societies all over the world. The great benefit Canada has is because we’re right beside the United States, we have a huge technology community and an ability to build an entire sovereign cloud stack.

We have all the component pieces over many decades of development. Many other countries do not benefit from that. They do not have that deep technological heritage that we do.

Shannon Bell: And I would say that it’s not just a government question. And so there’s some interesting Gartner research out that actually talks about the fact that 50% of multinationals will have a sovereign cloud strategy in the next few years.

And I think that’s really important because when we talk about sovereignty and data [00:25:00] protection and AI sovereignty and so on. Yes, some of the discussion has started with governments, but it actually is a broader discussion across enterprise, and so we hear it from governments and we hear it equally from many of our largest customers around the world.

John Stackhouse: Tom, when you mentioned the history and positive legacy of the Mint and the uh, and Canada Post, I also thought of the role Canada’s played in decades past as a store of gold and many countries literally stored their gold in Canada because it was considered a safe place for that. Very different age today.

Are other countries and companies in those countries looking to use Canada as the place where they store their data or use as a critical base of infrastructure?

Tom Jenkins: Yeah, we’ve been heavy into those discussions over the last oh two quarters, like about last six months. And I have to say, John, it’s a combination of the two because this situation [00:26:00] specific.

If you are a large middle power, such as a Japan or a career, you already have a pretty substantial technology stack, and so you’re really looking to fill gaps. But if you’re a smaller country. Ireland, or you know Romania, small countries in the eu, small countries in Africa, south America, they have very little stack from which to draw upon.

So in that case, they’re looking for a complete set of capabilities from one country. But it all begins with the domestic telecom. Whatever is the domestic telecom it, it could be cable and wireless in the uk. It could be NTT in Japan. It could be France Telecom, Deutsche Telecom. You know, ev, everyone’s got a domestic telecom for the very same reason.

They wanted to be able to have sovereign control over their communications on behalf of their [00:27:00] citizens. I think you’ll find all of those stacks will begin. With that. So in our case in Canada, whether it’s Bell Canada or Telus or some of the other telecoms, I think you’ll see those sovereign clouds begin with the, let’s say, the part of the stack that a government regulates and society has control over.

John Stackhouse: You’ve both mentioned the competitive advantage of skills of talent, as well as a range of companies, including OpenText, including Cohere, which we’ve had on the podcast in the past. There’s also the intangible of trust. How much is trust a factor and an attribute for Canada?

Tom Jenkins: Oh, it’s the number one thing. No one should ever think that trust does not matter. It matters to all of us in our daily lives. Why do you use one bank instead of another? It’s based on your personal [00:28:00] experiences and how you trust that bank. Trust is absolutely paramount on this topic because it, it really goes to the heart of what you’re trying to protect.

I know that having done this for 35 years at OpenText, the number one thing that we sell is trust. They, our customers have to trust that we keep up in cybersecurity, that we keep up in a whole variety of different ways, and so trust is paramount. It’s more important than anything else.

Shannon Bell: And when you think of the size and scale of the networks, we operate, you know, over 80 data centers around the world, over 75 cloud landing zones.

You know, we deal with over 300 billion cyber events a month. I mean, we are managing 15 trillion annually in supply chain. Like trust is at the core of everything we do, and that is something that’s synonymous with being a Canadian company. [00:29:00]

John Stackhouse: We’ve talked through this series that we’re calling the Canada Project on all the opportunities for Canada, from defense and space to AgriFood to critical minerals, what we can provide to the world.

I’m so glad that we’re also talking about tech capabilities, about data and that, uh, competitive advantage of trust. As we move towards close in our conversation, what does Canada and what should Canadians be thinking about over the next couple of critical years to both maintain our sovereignty and build it, but also be more competitive and relevant in a rapidly changing world?

Tom Jenkins: Well, I’ve lived this world for pretty much my entire professional career, and I can tell you as a firsthand observer. Canadians are great at this. The reality is we have a fantastic heritage of doing this. OpenText is a good example. More than 50% of our revenues come from [00:30:00] outside of North America and we’re well received all throughout the world.

We were talking about trust. But it’s also quality. We’re competitive. We’re very good Canadians. We’re really tough on each other, and that’s good. That’s a good part of a democracy. But make no mistake, when we go abroad, we’re the very best in the world. We’re very good at many, many things. I think that the reexamination of our role in the world is a good thing for Canada, and I think Canada has a tremendous set of advantages.

It’s just that, uh, maybe we got a little complacent. Maybe we got a little too used to a single market. So I’m actually quite bullish on this. I think Canadians will do very well in the world. They just have to get out there and prove it to themselves.

Shannon Bell: And I think here at Home technology is an enabler for helping us solve some of the challenges.

You know, we talk a lot about workplace productivity and [00:31:00] efficiency in the market, and I think that leveraging ai, adopting and embracing ai, we’ve been a little slow as a country to do that, but I think that will be an unlock for our own economy as well. And it’s an area where we can develop differentiating skills in our workforce, uh, differentiators for our enterprise and for our government that then we can take globally.

So I, I think the two go hand in hand and we are very well positioned as long as we embrace technology to enable that.

John Stackhouse: So a new age with all sorts of opportunities as far not to be excited. Shannon, for those listening who run enterprises, who run organizations who are thinking about ai, what are a few of the critical things they can and should come to grips with?

Shannon Bell: I think for enterprises starting the journey, the most important thing is to start. Oftentimes we get overwhelmed by the. Magnitude of potential and don’t know where to start. And really starting the journey is key to actually starting to see some results. [00:32:00] And I always advise our teams internally and our customers start with the simplest use cases, the simplest use cases to start to understand, build literacy in the organization around AI and its potential.

Remove some of the fear and allow you to embrace change management. And once you start with those simple use cases, you can grow in complexity and start to see better outcomes. And understanding the baseline and don’t underestimate the change management as a part of that. It’s not just a technology problem, it’s a people in process problem.

John Stackhouse: Shannon, great advice for any team leader, any organizational leader. Tom, what does the country need to think about? When we look at the next few

Tom Jenkins: years, we are in a very, very competitive world and we shouldn’t make any apology for sticking up for ourselves. I think we should be buying Canadian, but we should be buying Canadian in a very competitive environment.

We, Canadians should demand the very best in the world [00:33:00] and demand that our Canadian suppliers do that, and that we create a competitive environment. In which we purchase Canadian goods and services and then use those goods and services to export to the world and to be able to turn around and export it.

We have to get out there. We have to change our attitude. We have to take more risk, put more capital to work and export. We used to do this, we used to do this in the 1950s. In the 1960s, after World War II Canada had a very strong place in the world and it executed all throughout the world. We can return to do that and be very welcome in the world, but it does require effort.

It does require a strong domestic base from which to do that. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

John Stackhouse: What great messages for everyone get going. Embrace. Don’t be afraid. Help culture change [00:34:00] within your organization and get out there in the world. There’s nothing but opportunity ahead when you think like that.

Shannon and Tom, thank you for all your building with Open Text and for all your building for Canada. Thank you for being on disruptors.

Shannon Bell: Thank you, John.

Tom Jenkins: Thanks for having us.

John Stackhouse: What’s happening in Waterloo and across Canada’s data centre buildout isn’t just about racks and models. It’s about the information layer that keeps daily life running for decades. Secure communications help define this region to the world. The next chapter is bigger tech, sovereignty and proof that people can trust.

So personal data stays personal, and the switches for critical systems don’t sit in another country’s jurisdiction. Canada is in the midst of building a very different economy, new tools, new companies, new jobs. We need to safeguard it by setting the foundations here, run the rules in Canada, keep information in Canada, and keep a clear, [00:35:00] verifiable record of what our systems do across all the services that we rely on.

Build it here and we’ll hold the advantage that keeps on compounding trust. You’ve been listening to Disruptors, the Canada Project. Thanks for joining us on this journey across the country. And there’s more ahead. A link to Shannon and Tom’s new book, enterprise Artificial Intelligence Building: Trusted AI with Secure Data is in the show notes.

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow rate and leave us a review. It helps others discover the show. And if you wanna gain deeper insights into the ideas shaping Canadian business and the economy, visit rbc.com/thoughtleadership Join us next time as we meet more of the innovators and leaders helping Canada meet this moment boldly and on our terms.

I’m John Stackhouse. Thanks for [00:36:00] listen.

Beyond the Battery: Inside Quebec’s Mine-to-Refine Transformation

Jean Charest: For generations, Quebec has a helped to build Canada, whether it be through the forestry industry, lumber, agriculture, hydro, aluminum, aerospace, and culture. We’ve never been just a a resource economy. In fact, Canada’s very much a knowledge based economy, blessed with natural resources. But our challenge is to be actually more than that.

There’s a lot of demand for our natural resources. Now, critical minerals is probably top of the list, and the real challenge is, are we going to be just supplying them as a raw product or will we be building and making the finished products that the world needs?

John Stackhouse: That’s Jean Charest, former Premier of Quebec, and a longtime champion of building value added industries around this province’s natural resources.

He’s watched Quebec move from aluminum and hydro into a new chapter, critical minerals like graphite, lithium, and nickel. They’re the building blocks of a whole new economy centered around electric vehicles, grid batteries, and a lot of defense systems that Canada and our allies are going to rely on.

Jean Charest: The countries that will prosper in the future are the ones that are going to commit themselves to these added value products.

And that’s exactly where Canada is going. Not just as the builder, but also as a trusted partner for every one of our partners elsewhere in the world. And for Quebec, this is the choice that we have in front of us.

John Stackhouse: The opportunity here is enormous. As the world electrifies from cars and buses to data centers and defense, demand for battery materials is exploding.

The real danger is that we remain content to mine, rock and ship it overseas while other countries capture the jobs, the technology, and the leverage that come from refining.

I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors: The Canada Project. This season, we’re taking you on a journey across the country to meet some of the visionaries who are using technology to tackle our most urgent challenges. And in the process, sketch out a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive Canada.

Today’s destination, Quebec from the forest near Saint-Michel-des-Saints to the industrial hub of Bécancour. This is where Canada is trying to build something we’ve never really had before in graphite. A complete mind to anode supply chain at home. Now, if you’re not up on your battery terminology, the anode is the negative side of a battery, the part that stores and releases energy, and in most lithium ion batteries.

Today, that anode is made from highly processed graphite, whether it’s EV factories in Ontario and the US Midwest grid batteries that backup up clean power or high-end applications in defense and aerospace. All of them depend on secure supplies, a battery grade graphite. Yet for all the talk of energy transition, here’s something that may surprise you.

China currently refines more than 90% of the world’s graphite into battery anode material, export controls or political shocks there can ripple through automakers and grid operators everywhere. If Canada wants to be more resilient at home and more reliable abroad, we can’t just be the quarry. We have to be part of the refining backbone too.

In this episode, we meet Eric Desaulniers, founder and CEO of Nouveau Monde Graphite, or NMG. His company is trying to do something truly ambitious. Develop a new mine at Matawinie just north of Montreal, and link it to a refining plant at  Bécancour, down the St. Lawrence near Trois-Rivières. For customers looking for reliable supply outside of China.

The Federal government’s major projects office has now designated NMG’s phase two as a major project and plugged it into a new G7 critical minerals push. Canada is also backing it up with innovative offtake agreements designed to de-risk private investment. If all this works, Quebec won’t just get a mine, it will get to occupy the cornerstone of a more resilient allied supply chain and provide a new kind of economic engine.

Eric, you’ve, uh, been in the news of late Ottawa, has put  Matawinie and  Bécancour on the major projects list and tied you into a G7 critical minerals push with government trying to aggregate demand there. What exactly did you say yes to with all that?

Eric Desaulniers: I’m super fortunate to have the word  Matawinie and the word graphite being, uh, now very important in Canada.

Basically, we accepted the invitation of the Canadian government to be part of this major project office. We already started some construction activities, and in our case, in critical minerals. The important next big step is project financing, and we are collaborating with many different governmental bodies.

We have already the some investment from Canada Growth Fund that are a shareholder. We have letter of interest from Export Development Canada, letter of interest from Indian Infrastructure Bank on the debt side. And now the Canadian government becomes our customers with this strategic, uh, stockpiling. So we’re interacting with the public service, we’re interacting with NRCan.

So as you can understand, all those organization, and I’m not talking about the provincial level, uh, Investissement Québec, who’s a great shoulders since a long time. So having somebody like Dawn Farrell and their team who knows exactly the needs of a major project to get it to the finish line is very helpful.

John Stackhouse: That’s probably helpful for a lot of listeners who have heard about the Major Projects Office, but don’t know exactly what it does.

Sounds like in this case, it’s a bit of a concierge for you, helping you expedite working with different layers of government.

Eric Desaulniers: That’s how I see it personally. It’s a concierge for whatever the major project needs to get it across the line. In our case, it’s more about financing and other project, probably it’ll be more about regulation or or permitting.

But we also have an angle of discussing with all other J seven countries and allied countries because our production will go also to those countries. So there’s also this higher level of coordination that, you know, we need a government. To have a credible body alongside us to, to discuss with all those parties.

John Stackhouse: Eric, let’s step back and walk through this moment for critical minerals. Mining, of course, has been part of Canada since Canada was created. We’re pretty good at it, but suddenly there’s this intense focus, if I can put it that way, on critical minerals. What’s so critical about these minerals in terms of that redirection of our economy?

Eric Desaulniers: So we all know graphite these days for lithium ion battery, uh, being a huge market growing and it’s a market that historically was only in Asia, and now we wanna do those battery here. So we need to make big mines for lithium ion battery. So that’s one aspect of it. But in specifically graphite, there’s about 15 different applications.

A lot of those applications, it’s not big volumes that are justifying a mine by themselves. So critical minerals are minerals that are most of the time are used in small quantities. And there’s countries in Asia that can have the scale to accumulate the demand for those minerals to justify mines Here we are market driven, so we, we need to have enough of an economic, enough of a attractive project for capital markets to get it going.

So there’s a lot of those minerals, graphite, one of them, where the demand of the western world is big. But it’s not big enough to justify making mines to compete at the pricing level that the, uh, Chinese country are doing it, you know, so this is really for graphite specifically, it’s different. We have one mine since 36 years now, and before that mine, there was another one in Quebec, Canada.

So since a hundred years Canada is the only supplier of graphite of the G7 countries, and, uh, currently 80% of the market for concentrate of graphite comes from China and a hundred percent of the converted product led active and on material for batteries. Now the demand has grown at 106,000 ton per annum to fulfill the needs of the Western world, not only for lithium ion battery, but also for all the smaller volumes.

Application like polys, like thermoplastic, like foil for e-dissipation. A lot of defense application in their dual uses. But all markets that may be buy 10 tons a year, 25 tons a year, and we need to bundle all those 150 different customers who really need it, and if it doesn’t flow, there’s huge impact on our economy.

So that’s how I see critical minerals. It’s minerals that maybe won’t be financed by themself there, but need governmental intervention because if those minerals are not flowing, there’s a huge impact on our economy.

John Stackhouse: And it’s critical that you are doing the refining as well, is that correct?

Eric Desaulniers: Yeah, and that’s the second I would say big reason for working with the government is we have demonstrated we can build those verticals. We build the full vertical to Panasonic energy, a very, uh, sophisticated and, uh, company who know exactly the respect. So we have demonstrated that we can do that. Our goal is to work with the large defense contractor of the world. We wanna work with Canadian government and we want to be there proposing them carbon solution more than just a concentrate. It’s not a concentrate that goes in the submarine. It’s a, it’s a transform, uh, material for sure.

John Stackhouse: We’ve talked about why graphite is critical. The next question is how you turn that into real jobs and real assets in Quebec. For NMG, that means linking the mine and the refinery and rethinking how a mine is powered.

At  Matawinie, they’re working with Caterpillar on an innovative all electric mining fleet using Quebec Hydro to run the trucks shovels and crushers that used to run on diesel. So why is power so critical?

Eric Desaulniers: As we know, Quebec is one of the cheapest hydro, uh, and clean as well. In North America, it’s still 25% of our costs.

It’s an energy intensive process. We are developing our mining to be all electric with the solution provided by Caterpillar. So we’re optimizing the usage of this hydro to be carbon neutral. So having I’ll, I call it the four reason to buy in Canada. Great geology to start with, two hours away, we have a great industrial park in big and core with sheep, hydro, and all reagents and all the the right area to develop this safely.

And then we have the right talents and we have the customer now in our backyard who really need graphite and they really need to diversify from a single source in China.

John Stackhouse: And for those who aren’t familiar with  Bécancour, maybe you can put it on a map for us.

Eric Desaulniers: It’s between, uh, Montreal and Quebec City, so maybe Trois-Rivières was the second oldest city, uh, in Canada after Quebec City, I believe, or in Quebec anyway, and it’s, uh, right midway between the two on the South Shore, and that’s a large industrial park that was created around the nuclear plant of Gentilly that is now decommissioned. So there’s a huge industrial park.

There’s a second largest aluminum smelter operated by Alcoa and Rio Tinto, and we are right across the street from, from these guys. So we have already GM POSCO, that are quite active in the, in the area. We have Rio Tinto in the Quebec government through the naca, uh, lithium project, also in the park. And we’re the anode side uh, uh, we have bought our land in 2019 before. It all starts so much, much good entry point, much better entry point at the time. Yeah,

John Stackhouse: So we’ve got the rocks, we’ve got the electricity, uh, we’ve got the processing facility and ecosystem, and we’ve got the markets through the G7. We also have talent and that’s, uh, that’s critical as well. What kind of skills do you need today and what will you need going forward?

Eric Desaulniers: There are skills that we have and there’s skill that we need to build on and, and develop. So as I’ve mentioned, since a hundred years, Quebec is mining graphite. So to start with, we have hired a lot of people from that other mine that has experience in graphite.

So our CFO, our main, uh, processing people know upside down. Now to run this, the processing for graphite only is happening in China. We cannot build a commercial plant before having one. So now we are very active working thanks to our friend at Panasonic introducing us the right suppliers who build plant for them in Asia before going there, understanding how it works, and make sure our engineers that are learning the right way to operate at scale, active annual material plant.

We have a lot of expertise in leaching, we, the purification is a leaching plant, so Rio Tin two has a, has a similar thing in sore. So there’s an ecosystem we need to go take advantage of the smart people there, but not be, uh, too much arrogant. And we need to be humble. We have stuff to learn from Asia. We need to be there, have the right partner like Panasonic, who will guide us through that and make sure we, we make a success on everything we do.

Everybody at NMG, we’re 120. We have maybe 35 engineers. Everybody’s super happy to work close to home. You don’t need to do fly in, fly out, go work in Africa or something like that. So we are very fortunate. Me the first that I can go at Christmas at the mine site and all my kids are super happy and I can bring all my family. It’s fun to develop a project in Canada. So we need to take advantage of that.

John Stackhouse: If you stop the story there, it would be a great Quebec industrial play, but this isn’t just about one province. It’s about how Canada fits into an allied supply chain at a time when export controls and geopolitics are reshaping who gets what. So how does a hundred thousand ton mine in Quebec stack up against what China can offer?

Eric Desaulniers: Yeah, in China there’s many, many operations. So in flight graphite today, maybe it’s 1.5 million ton, uh, a year in the world. But if you, you follow the growth they have in China, even though they are 80% of the market today for concentrate, they are a net

importer of graphite, they import everything they can from Africa for their big refining machines. So they are, they are building so much capacity for, uh, active anode material that they need more graphite that they can produce inside the country. So that’s really the, the situation out there. So here our market, like two years ago, I sold twice the production of the mine.

Two years ago, it was all dedicated for lithium ion battery because we had customer like Panasonic Energy, General Motors that were quite aggressive securing, uh, locally, uh, graphite. Now, more recently, we, uh, revised this strategy before getting to FID and that’s where 55% of our production will go in lithium ion battery

now, allowing us to diversify in those very strategic and other markets, like I’ve mentioned before, uh, refractory bricks, like the bricks you put in the steel foundry that are, are, it’s still today the biggest market for natural graphite. And then all the other, uh, 15 application I was talking about secured by the Canadian government and G7 countries to make sure we have the time to develop those verticals to support, uh, very important things in our economy.

John Stackhouse: That’s gotta change the way you build and manage a company to be working so deeply with governments, not just the Canadian government, but as you say, allied governments across the, uh, the G7.

Walk us through how your marketing and distribution strategy changes now that you’re so, uh, connected through the G7.

Eric Desaulniers: When you work with the credible shareholder to start with, from the private sector, it helps a lot. So, for instance, we have Mitsui as a shareholder, uh, since, uh, working with us since 2018.

So that’s a good example. Uh, you know, we have Panasonic now, but we are a pre-revenue company. We don’t have a long history like Rio Tinto of building mines and a big, big cash flow. So we need to bring partners on board to be very effective at the, at selling our message to the government. I think that’s the first step for, for Rio.

John Stackhouse: Longer term, when you think about allocating supply, you’ve got some pretty powerful, uh, and I’m assuming competing interests there. How are you thinking through whether your graphite goes to, uh, defense procure, the Pentagon being the biggest or an electronics manufacturer like Panasonic?

Eric Desaulniers: Yeah, so we have two things.

Uh, I would say three different things In our marketing strategy, we have long term offtake agreement. That’s what we have with Panasonic Energy. We need to deliver those 13,000 ton of active and old material. They require 25,000 ton of concentrate. So that’s about a quarter of the mine that is long-term full vertical that we do with Panasonic.

We have, uh, another off takes like, uh, with Traxxis. Traxxis is um, an established trading house who will represent us with a list of about 12 exclusive customer in the refractory markets. Then we have the Kenyan government and we built a similar structure with the Kenyan government where we have an offtake for a, for a certain volume at a fixed price for North American, uh, pricing.

And now what the government did is really to make, uh, the right instrument to get us. Going and construction so we can, uh, play ball the same way the market is working today, instead of asking to 150 different people to do long-term agreement. And in exchange of that, they will ask, uh, too much discount.

So it’s not good for a company so. The government is bridging and making an instrument that, quite frankly, at the end of the day, I think they will make money on because we will share 50 50 the upside, if we sell at a higher price in the, in the future, the company need to reimburse the loss before, uh, before getting a 50% of, uh, of profit.

So I think it’s a fair deal where taxpayer, at the end of the day, will most likely make, uh, a little bit of money.

John Stackhouse: So just to clarify that point, ’cause it’s really important, the taxpayer still has a risk on the downside, and that’s fine. You’re investing in a venture and an economic opportunity if you’re the government of Canada, but it’s mitigated by the company’s share of the losses.

Is that correct?

Eric Desaulniers: Yes, that’s one mitigation point. And the other mitigation point is the fact that since, uh, as I’ve mentioned 36 years, we have history for pricing. We have, uh, we know very well the customers, so there’s also this, we are not the, the fixed price given, it’s the current market price that is very much depleted by our friend in China.

So it’s a good starting point to start this instrument. So, the downside is protected by, uh, the government, otherwise, we would not be able to get going into construction. The bank won’t borrow us the money. However, as long as there’s no accumulated loss on the instrument, we will share 50 50 the upside.

John Stackhouse: This is a really good illustration of the new age that Canada and others are in. Uh, as you’ve been indicating, China has market dominance globally, both on the supply and in some ways on the demand side. So it can drive the market, it can flood the market if it wants, not just in, uh, graphite or lithium, but, uh, lots of other critical minerals, which has made it really hard for free market.

Mining operators around the world because it takes years or decades to get a payoff for the millions that it takes to build a a mine. And if you’ve got that price volatility, it gets pretty queasy. Uh, or it makes investors pretty, uh, pretty, pretty queasy. Now you’ve got this security of demand and pricing through these off takes and government supports that gives your investors, that kind of security so they can make these, uh, commitments. Exactly. Kind of a new, a new way of mining and mining finance in Canada.

Eric Desaulniers: I’m dreaming of a Canadian critical mineral exchange. Uh, that’s something in the future that could be very, uh, very interesting.

John Stackhouse: Take us deeper there. What’s needed for a Canadian critical minerals exchange?

Eric Desaulniers: How mining is financed, usually it’s true hedgings true futures. Because there is a, a liquid market given by the London Metal Exchange. Basically, you know, you have a gold price, everybody knows gold, that people play gold and in critical minerals, that’s a challenge. It’s all opaque. Driving, more visibility on pricing for everyone, we’ll help finance those critical minerals. This is what we asked the government said, gentlemen, you can finance all the project, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to attract private capitals in this and to attract private capitals, we need to have certainty on pricing and the right instrument. That not only, uh, the, the capital market will like, but also the debtor and also the, the taxpayer.

So not an instrument that, uh, government will lose money and subsidize to lead this process. So I think we found the right spot.

John Stackhouse: The G7, as you’ve referenced, is a really important and powerful counterweight to China in global markets, particularly for that security of demand. So the G7 is Canada, the US, some key Europeans, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and of course Japan.

You’ve got deep ties with Japan that sounds like they are continuing to be constructive. The big question obviously in the G7 right now is the G1. It’s the United States and how cooperative it will be if it will do what’s in its interest, and then maybe take a different path if it’s not in its interest.

How are you thinking through that strategic uncertainty within the G7.

Eric Desaulniers: I think you, you raised a valid challenge. You know, we need to make sure we have instruments and we have dedication that will survive election, you know, and, and survive momentum in, in each of these democracy. We see the US government being very active now, very supportive.

They understand that they are in trouble if those critical minerals are not coming. So we have very positive discussion with the US government now that we have, under the leadership of Canada, made this instrument. US government made other deals. I think it’ll be very beneficial for both side of the the border to do a deal on critical minerals.

We’re neighbor at the end of the day. This is something that we’re looking forward to do in the near future. Continue our conversation with the US government alongside Japan and European countries.

John Stackhouse: As you said earlier, graphite is also essential to a lot of, uh, defense products, maybe aerospace stationary storage for batteries as well.

It’s not just EVs No. But over the next decade, how much is graphite an EV story still, or when will it become a non EV story?

Eric Desaulniers: Two years ago, we were 90% plus going in either EV or power storage, but anything lithium ion battery related, now we’re more going 55% of our production and that that I think will be the firm deal getting into construction.

So I think it’s a good ratio, 55 in batteries. 20 in refractory bricks and 25 in other strategic markets that are providing the best return. But those strategic market will require us to develop a value added product, as we will announce shortly. But there’s, not only concentrate, you can do expandable graphite, expanded graphite, graphene, all those different product because it’s, uh, as I’ve mentioned, 15 different strategic application, a lot of it defense related, that you need to work hard with your customer to do the right transformation.

So we will need this 25% remaining. A lot of work, a lot of value is there, and now the instrument from the government give us the time to develop these verticals. We are in Canada, we’re lucky, we have the, the, the smart engineers, the smart PhD, the right laboratory, the, the right, uh, security of supply. So the, the defense contractor need to buy locally.

It’s not like an option. They need to come and, and buy here. So we need to take advantage of that, but we need to work with them to do the, a useful product, not only concentrate, and we can do it. That’s the Canadian advantage. In Quebec, uh, we are fortunate with the geology, so I like to say we have the right geology, the right tools, like cheap hydroelectricity and the right talents to be very cost effective in this market.

We have the best graphite in the world in the ground. Probably the five best deposit in North America are located in Quebec, thanks to the Greenville Province, and we’re fortunate to have that.

John Stackhouse: What a great picture you’re painting of today and the, uh, the horizon that we’re looking at. Maybe Eric, as we wrap up, I can ask you to take us over the horizon.

It is, let’s say 2035, what’s the opportunity for Quebec and for Canada if we get all this right?

Eric Desaulniers: I thought when I started the company 2011 was, uh, was very far. It’s not that far away. So for a mining project, uh, 2035, in 10 years, we will be fully operating. And we will be like, the meta mine will be in the phase of probably of growth, potentially thinking about, uh, increasing capacity.

Because the goal is really to develop a lot of different verticals. So for our specific project, the main thing we need to develop is the, the growth in r and d, making sure we, uh, work with our customer developing new materials and explore all possibilities of graphene, for instance. That is at the end of the day, graphite transform product.

So this is really something that captivate our r and d team and myself to not only, uh, stay in the current market of active anode material and concentrate in what we know, but keep developing solutions using carbon that are useful for a lot of different things in our economy.

John Stackhouse: Wonderful. Well, Eric, congratulations on all that you’ve got going. It’s, uh, impressive and exciting for the company and for Quebec, but really important to where Canada is going.

Eric Desaulniers: Thank you for having me, John. Looking forward to keeping in touch and we’re super proud to

develop this project for Canada.

John Stackhouse: To build a more resilient economy and meet the demands of our allies. We’re going to need more people like Eric. Leaders who are willing to rethink old systems and take Canada beyond mining and shipping. But as Jean Charest reminds us, this isn’t just about one project or one province. It’s about building the industrial backbone, the power lines, refineries skills, and financing mechanisms that turn critical minerals into long-term prosperity.

We simply can’t keep planning our resource strategy, one mine at a time or one export deal at a time. We need to think like builders, not just exporters. Because the next frontier for Canada isn’t only in the rock under our feet, it’s in the systems that refine it here and connect us to a fast changing and increasingly uncertain world.

The opportunity for NMG and frankly for Canada isn’t just mining and technology, it’s global strategy. Canada has a unique advantage, clean power, trusted institutions, engineering talent, and a resource base that the world needs. The challenge. And yes, that opportunity is to turn all this into a durable edge.

So when our partners look for a reliable and critical supply, they think Canada. I’m John Stackhouse and you’ve been listening to Disruptors, the Canada Project, an RBC podcast. If you wanna hear the whole series, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five star rating that will help others find these stories and share them.

And if you wanna learn more about the Canada Project, head over to rbc.com/thought leadership. Join us next time as we continue our journey across the country in search of the innovators and leaders who’re helping Canada meet this moment boldly with their eyes fixed on the future and their feet firmly on Canadian ground.

Powering the North: How the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link Will Build A Stronger Canada

P.J. Akeeagok: When Canadians think about growth, we don’t always think about the Arctic, but we should. Nunavut has a place in this world and certainty is right here. Opportunity is right here. Nation building in Canada has never been completed. We built highways from the east coast all the way to the west coast, but now is our time to do the same in the Arctic.

P.J. Akeeagok: The Arctic is where sovereignty is tested and where the next gains in critical minerals could be unlocked. Nunavut is ready and Nunavut is ripe. A productive, a resilient Arctic is a national project. It means dependable energy, connectivity, and transportation delivered in ways that truly reflect Inuit rights, knowledges, as well as priorities.

John Stackhouse: That’s P.J. Akeeagok, the sixth premier of Nunavut, or as he’s known to pretty much everyone in the north PJ.

P.J. Akeeagok: With the announcement of the Iqaluit Hydro Project, we see the first of four nation-building pillars, taking shape: clean, reliable energy for our capital, anchoring sovereignty, resilience, and opportunity.

P.J. Akeeagok: Canada is starting to recognize the Arctic is essential to sovereignty and to our prosperity. Alongside the Kivalliq Hydro Fibre Link, Northern Transportation Corridors and Arctic Digital Backbone. These projects complete Canada’s unfinished work of nation-building. Our peers across the Arctic have invested steadily and acted with clear timelines.

P.J. Akeeagok: Canada could do the same. We need Canada to join us to treat the Arctic, not as a pilot, but truly as a pillar. Plan with indigenous leadership, financed with certainty and built to last. This is our moment to complete nation-building together. I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to

John Stackhouse: Disruptors the Canada Project. This season we’re crisscrossing the country to meet the builders who are using technology to tackle our toughest problems. Along the way, sketch a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive nation. Today’s destination, Nunavut’s Kivalliq region.

John Stackhouse: The Arctic isn’t a postcard, it’s a pillar of Canada. For generations, our sovereignty has rested on a real presence in the north.

People living there, working there, raising families there. And beneath that land lies some of the world’s most important reserves of critical minerals, the inputs for batteries, grids, and the cleaner economy we keep talking about. Here’s something you might not know. Canada’s Arctic still runs on imported diesel and connects to the world through satellite networks that we don’t control.

John Stackhouse: That means high volatile power costs for families and businesses, and an internet that freezes when the bandwidth does. Meanwhile, across the Nordic Arctic in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark, remote communities are tied into national grids and fiber backbones. In other words, they’ve wired their north and we haven’t, at least not yet and that matters.

John Stackhouse: When we don’t control the energy and connectivity that keep communities running, we create national vulnerabilities, economic, social, and strategic. That is no longer acceptable for a G7 country. An Inuit owned project aims to change that equation. The Kivalliq Hydro-Fiber Link, a 1200 kilometer corridor delivering clean electricity and true high-speed internet from Manitoba to none of it.

John Stackhouse: It can cut diesel, use and emissions and give families, schools, and businesses a line they can trust no matter the weather. And it does something bigger. It powers Canada’s next economy in the north critical minerals projects that need steady low carbon energy and real connectivity to hire locally, automate and compete globally.

John Stackhouse: Built for permafrost and 40 below. A nation building test we can actually pass. Our guest today is Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin CEO of the Nukik Corporation, the Inuit owned developer leading the Kivalliq energy and fiber build. With more than 15 years in major projects and indigenous partnerships, Anne Raphael focused on a simple goal, reliable power, and real connectivity that work in 40 below and that work for people who live there.

John Stackhouse: We started by asking Anne-Raphaëlle, what’s the pitch for this project?

Anne Raphaele: The project is called the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link. It’s an ambitious Arctic project that intends to connect the Canadian Arctic to Southern electrical grid and fiber-optic network by connecting around the Churchill area, crossing the border into Nunavut, taking five communities off of diesel, plus active operating mines, and bringing full broadband connectivity into the territory.

Anne Raphaele: It’s important to know that Nunavut is very much relying on antiquated systems because a hundred percent of all the energy needs in the territory have to be met by burning diesel. So everyday life, everyday business, everyday government operations, everything functions by burning diesel. And most of the diesel we burn in the Arctic comes from foreign countries most years.

Anne Raphaele: It’s actually a hundred percent that all the diesel that is imported into the territory that comes from foreign countries, mostly the United States. And then on the connectivity piece, to give you the full picture. We rely mostly now on Starlink, which is amazing technology, but it’s not domestic technology..

Anne Raphaele: It’s number one driven by the people who have to really live under third world conditions in the north, which is unacceptable. And B, it’s really about national security because the Canadian Arctic in Nunavut is a real Achilles heel at this time. We’re heading into a wall with no energy or connectivity optionality whatsoever.

Anne Raphaele: When you look at the map of Sweden, Finland, Russia, Norway, they’ve built roads, they’ve built networks, they’ve built high voltage transmission lines, and they did that decades ago. Name me, one nation around the world that is powering a modern society solely on diesel. It just doesn’t exist.

John Stackhouse: Before we dive into the engineering behind this new project, let’s get our bearings. The Fibre-Link Corridor runs up the west coast of Hudson Bay from northern Manitoba. Near Churchill then follows the Kivalliq communities north before turning inland to Baker Lake or Qamani’tuaq, as it’s known in Inuktitut. The goal is simple. Connect household schools and clinics first, while giving local employers the reliability they need to plan and grow.

John Stackhouse: We asked Anne-Raphaëlle to walk us along the path from Churchill through places like Arviat, Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet, and on to Baker Lake, and explain who gets connected first.

Anne Raphaele: The line would connect around Churchill, and so we would take that line, take it 1000 kilometers north, and address all the different hamlets along the way, which are five of them.

Anne Raphaele: Then take it inland West towards Baker Lake, which is the only inland community in the Kivalliq region and power existing mining operations, mostly Agnico Eagle mines mining operation, which is 20 kilometers off of Rankin Inlet.

John Stackhouse: Let’s ground this in everyday life so it’s easier to picture. Imagine the changes for a family, a school, and a clinic. Once the community can count on steady power and real broadband, rather than diesel and a satellite link.

Anne Raphaele: Day in and day out, you’re burning a diesel that is damaging your health. Those diesel plants weren’t built 50 kilometers out of the hamlets, they are right downtown, near schools, near hospitals, near homes. The diesel you burn in the Arctic is called Arctic grade diesel, and it is much more polluting, much more health affecting than regular diesel that you put in your car in maybe Toronto or Ottawa. Just because it has to resist some pretty harsh climatic conditions in terms of everyday life.

Anne Raphaele: It’s transformative. That’s the beauty of being connected to the grid as well, is now you’re not only connected to the next city, but you’re connected to the North American grid. The real benefit of North America is really a connected web, and the grid unfortunately is more connected north south, as in Canada US than it is north, south, as in, you know, Canadian to Canadian provinces and territories.

Anne Raphaele: We’ve been better neighbors to the US than we have to our own fellow Canadians. When I started working for Nukik Corporation four years ago, I could have never had even just a teams call without the camera on because the connectivity was so spotty. It has gotten much better with Starlink, but again, how resilient are we and how much can we say that we have a sovereign arctic if we rely on non-domestic assets and foreign owned technologies?  It’s just a slogan at that point to talk about arctic sovereignty in Canada.

John Stackhouse: Once Nunavut gets connected to the grid, a number of overdue systemic improvements suddenly become possible.

Anne Raphaele: The fibre it’s gonna power and allow telehealth to happen. Reduce medical evacuation. Now you have the ability to have a doctor online powered and supported by terrestrial fibre, as reliable as we experience anywhere else in the country, and then it’s transformational for education. People won’t have to leave the territory to have access to long-term education.

John Stackhouse: One corridor doing two jobs is part of the efficiency here. The same right of way that carries electricity, can carry the fibre that keeps clinics, classrooms, and local businesses online, while also supporting industrial operations.

Anne Raphaele: You have to run fibre optic anyways in a transmission line of this length. And in modern assets, high voltage, you typically nowadays run fiber optic for the maintenance and operation of your line. We are just going to bring more so that we can serve the communities, serve the businesses, serve the mines, and different, you know, broadband off-takers that, uh, maybe interested in, in the fibre optic.

John Stackhouse: It’s an ambitious and necessary idea, but the challenge lies in how you build efficiently across permafrost and 40 below.

Anne Raphaele: The project will be a technical feat, just, uh, just by its sheer realization because we’re talking of hundreds and hundreds of towers built into the tundra, into Nunavut, and into sections of it, into permafrost.

Anne Raphaele: The way to do it is to anchor it as much as possible and as deep as possible to use a certain type of transmission tower that resists to high winds, and that is designed to withstand those climatic conditions that tend to be quite extreme in the Arctic. It’s really gonna be groundbreaking, and we’ve never done it here in Canada.

Anne Raphaele: Other nations have done it in the seventies, in the eighties, they’ve made it happen. They were innovators of their days. But also it’s a technology that has so much proof of concept, right? The first transmission line commission in North America was commissioned, I think in 1889. There’s an ability to be innovators and to build the next chapter of your country with vision by leveraging the known expertise that is in your country.

Anne Raphaele: And we are builders in Canada. In the 1800’s, we built the Canadian railway, and at the time there were maybe 3 million people in Canada. We didn’t build it for 40 million Canadians, but the founders of Canada knew that the country was gonna grow, knew that this was the vision. And so, the innovation sometimes is not necessarily in the technology itself.

Anne Raphaele: I would say it’s in the leadership, in the vision, in believing in its people and saying, okay, we’re gonna embrace technology that is available now, purpose it to the needs of the terrain of the people, of the purpose, and make it happen over maybe sometimes very ambitious targets and distances. And just go for it.

John Stackhouse: Just go for it, it’s a clear imperative if ever there was one. Ultimately, this is a corridor story. Northern Manitoba and the Port of Churchill are part of the same ecosystem as the Kivalliq. If we do this right, we’ll have people, goods, data, and opportunity moving more reliably in both directions. So the big question then becomes how do Churchill and the Kivalliq rise together, and what does that pairing unlock for the region?

Anne Raphaele: You won’t see a port of Churchill that thrives without a Kivalliq region that thrives. You won’t see a port of Churchill that really taps into the full breadth of the value proposition of new inflow and outflow from the port without a Kivalliq region that becomes developed with, you know, new mines. There’s a modular home factory in Arviat.

Anne Raphaele: Those materials are gonna be barged in from Churchill. You cannot have and realize the full potential of the region without interlocking the two priorities in April of 2025. I was lucky enough to, I think, witness history in the making when Premier Kinew and Premier Akeeagok, together to sign a joint announcement on the creation of a strategic energy and economic corridor between their two jurisdiction.

John Stackhouse: We managed to dig out the CPAC recording of that historic signing. If you’re curious,

P.J. Akeeagok: uh, first off, it’s, uh, an honor to be here. Uh, always, uh, great to, to be able to work with you, uh, really as, as Canadians. Uh, it is. What a historic moment that we’re in. Uh, I just really wanna recognize the incredible leadership. Uh, that has brought us here. Uh, this has been the vision of many Inuit leaders that wanted to connect, uh, Southern Canada to the north and this is nation building, and so we’re very excited to be able to work with such a incredible partner. We already share many of our, uh, common interest from healthcare to education among others, but now to be able to look at what we could do together, uh, really excites me. So I’m very honored to be here and to be welcomed to your beautiful province.

Wab Kinew: So welcome to Manitoba and lets put pen to paper.

Anne Raphaele: And that was done in the context of Premier Kinew repatriating, 500 megawatts of expiring hydro exports to the US and saying we’re gonna do a carve out and we are gonna do that, carve out for the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre link and we’re gonna allocate 50 megawatt of that 500 to Nunavut.

Anne Raphaele: Nothing had ever been done like this before. We have some expiring contracts. We’d rather be good neighbors to our Inuit brothers and sisters rather than, you know, selling it to the US who are turning their back on us at this time during the trade dispute. So there were a lot of things happening, but I think it was really moving to be in that room when the two premiers signed the announcement and took the lead on saying, we are Indigenous leaders and we are gonna stand hand in hand and make history here.

John Stackhouse: I love this idea of close collaboration and sharing of priorities, and for a big infrastructure project like this, when it comes to cost versus value, what should Canadians know about jobs GDP and payback?

Anne Raphaele: Yes, the project capital cost is high, $3 billion, but you know, the benefits are proportionally as high $3.2 billion GDP contribution during construction alone, more than 15,000 person years of employment. Millions and millions of revenues in terms of taxes, payrolls, royalties.

The one thing to understand, at the end of the day, this is not a diesel displacement project. It’s not even a fiber project. It’s a critical and strategic infrastructure project, and it’s, it’s a critical differentiation because it transforms how you’re gonna approach the investment.

Anne Raphaele: It’s not that insurmountable to build infrastructure in the Arctic, and it is important to understand the mining potential, specifically in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut is world class. In that area, we’re sitting on all sorts of critical mineral in one of the largest greenstone belts that exists in North America that is still completely untapped.

Anne Raphaele: The uranium deposit is akin to what we’re seeing in the Athabasca deposits in Saskatchewan and potentially what could redefine what could be the economic engine of Canada.

John Stackhouse: So we need to call it what it is, strategic infrastructure that powers a new economic engine. Our Arctic peers in other northern countries made these bets decades ago. We can still catch up and on our terms. Inuit owned, cleaner, smarter commissioning is targeted for 2032. So we asked Ann Raphael to paint us the 10 year picture.

Anne Raphaele: 2032, we are planning on energizing the line, so a 10 year outlook. After commissioning, you’ll see more connected people bring more connected mindsets, more connected businesses. Businesses that start and stay and remain in the Arctic because now they’re connected to the fabric. They have a place to reliably power their operations. Not just mining. I think this will be a critical enabler of a lot of things, and that again, is the defining value of the project is that by investing in a project like the Kivalliq Hydro Fibre-Link, you send a clear message to the people who live there, that it’s not just about planting a Canadian flag and then claiming that we are Arctic sovereign, but it’s about telling those people that they matter.

Anne Raphaele: That they deeply matter, that their future matters. That yes, there are Canadians. They’re not just Canadians when we wanna assert our sovereignty, but that we believe in their future. We believe in their contribution, workwise and in other ways, and that we’re gonna give a future to their children.

John Stackhouse: We’ll give P.J. the last word.

P.J. Akeeagok: You know, it’s incredible to see the unity from coast to coast to coast in terms of our opportunity that we see as a country. The Arctic truly has what the world needs. We’ve made in true partnership with, in identifying four projects that really mean the criteria of what we could do to build a strong, resilient country.

P.J. Akeeagok: It means training and jobs that stay in the north and public service that works 40 below that open up markets, whether it’s the deep sea port in that can unlock incredible fisheries where we could supply the world. With our resources, whether it’s the Arctic security corridor or the Grays Bay Rode and Port Project that can allow us to become a super power in terms of supplying the world of critical minerals among many, or whether it’s the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link that would connect Southern Canada to the Arctic for the first time and complete true nation building as we move forward.

John Stackhouse: For generations, the North has tested Canada’s resolve and defined our sovereignty. Families from Arviat to Baker Lake have built communities in 40 below, relying on foreign diesel and bandwidth we don’t control. The Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link corridor isn’t just about cleaner power and faster internet. It’s about ending that dependency so schools don’t suffer, clinics don’t close, and local businesses can plan for growth. This is strategic infrastructure. It unlocks world-class critical minerals under the Kivalliq.  Metals for batteries, grids, and industry on terms that keep more value in Canada and in the north. It strengthens a northern corridor anchored by Churchill, tying people goods and data to a future we build, not one we rent, and it moves us towards parity with other Arctic nations that wired their North years ago. The question isn’t whether Canada needs Arctic capability. It’s whether we’ll choose to build it at home with Inuit leadership and the certainty that turns plans into projects from the west shore of Hudson Bay to the rest of the country.

John Stackhouse: You can see how much opportunity there is for Canada if we wire it. You’ve been listening to Disruptors: The Canada Project. Thanks for joining us on this incredible journey across Canada. There’s much more ahead. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review and five star rating.

John Stackhouse: It helps others discover the show and you can learn much more about this project and other RBC thought leadership initiatives at rbc.com/thought leadership. Join us next time. As we continue our journey across the country, in search of the innovators and leaders who are helping Canada meet this moment boldly with their eyes on the future.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse, thanks for listening.

Feeding the Future: How Saskatchewan is Seeding Canada’s Ag-Tech Revolution 

John Stackhouse: Hi, it’s John here. If you’ve ever stood on the prairies, you know there’s a quiet ambition on those endless horizons. Generations of farmers and land keepers have looked at these horizons and also seen endless possibilities. They’ve learned to read the soil and spot opportunity in the earth itself. Now in the data flowing from it.

Murad Al-Katib: The future of agriculture will be those sensors and that data collection put to use to generate billions of dollars of economic output. And you know, there’s a ready market for our product, the emerging markets of the world. Population growth to 10 billion by 2050, and middle incomes rising in Asia to $33 trillion by 2030. Those are the drivers of the Canadian agricultural commercialization opportunity, and I believe it’s a generational opportunity, one that we must seize for the benefit of all Canadians.  So, we’ll feed food security of the world, and we’ll create economic wealth and benefits.

John Stackhouse: That’s Murad Al-Katib President and CEO of a AGT Food and Ingredients. It’s a homegrown Canadian success story and one of the world’s largest suppliers of pulses. If you’ve ever made lentil stew or split pea soup, you’ve probably tasted his work.

John Stackhouse: Murad keeps close tabs on the overall health of Canada’s agribusiness. Today we’re going to show you why we all should do.

Murad Al-Katib: I want Canadians to recognize that food systems are not something to take for granted, and that we have a responsibility to the world to provide quality food. So, we can alleviate 735 million people who are undernourished every day, and at the same time, we create wealth in our communities.

John Stackhouse: The opportunity here is enormous. As global agriculture shifts and new markets open, Canada is competing alongside major players like Brazil, Argentina, and Kazakhstan. The danger isn’t that we can’t meet this moment, it’s that we won’t, if we stop innovating, we’re not just falling behind on feeding the world, we’re leaving money on the table.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors the Canada Project. This season we’re taking you on a journey across the country to meet some of the visionaries who are using technology to tackle our most urgent challenges, and in the process, create a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive Canada.

John Stackhouse: Today’s destination, Saskatchewan. Whether it’s automated elevators or GPS guided tractors or climate-controlled storage facilities, or those incredible three kilometer long trains that you see on the Saskatchewan landscape, this sort of ag tech is what we’re going to need a lot more of in the years ahead. If Canada is going to produce more food for a growing and increasingly divided world. For all the technology that is helping farmers and AgriFood companies do so much more in this age. Here’s something that might shock you. We’re still grading grain the way our great-grandfathers did by hand, sample by sample.

John Stackhouse: As every Saskatchewan farmer knows, the global marketplace for their crops is getting well more rough and tumble. Whether it’s the United States or China or India, our trading partners are becoming more demanding and in some ways less reliable, which means we’re going to have to be more sophisticated and competitive than ever, like in so many other sectors.

John Stackhouse: Canada’s competitive edge in agriculture is going to require even more automation. In this episode, we meet Kyle Folk. He’s the CEO of ground truth Ag. To discover how our province that has helped feed the world for a century or more is building AI powered computer vision that can grade grain in minutes instead of hours.

John Stackhouse: Giving Canada the automated edge, we need to stay competitive in global food markets. I can’t think of anyone better to kick off this conversation than Murad. He’s based in Regina, where over the past two decades, he’s built a AGT from a startup to a global exporter to more than 120 countries. He served on multiple boards as well as the UN World Food Program’s Innovation Advisory Council.

John Stackhouse: Morad is a passionate advocate for AgriFood innovation, value added processing, and sustainability. He grew up in Saskatchewan, so I started by asking him what it’s been like to watch the Saskatchewan farmers of his youth change and innovate.

Murad Al-Katib: The transition and the transformation of agriculture. It’s been a, a very fascinating thing to watch over a lifetime.  Growing up in Davidson, Saskatchewan, a small, uh, rural community of 1200 people, every farmer would grow wheat. If I go back to my childhood in the late seventies and eighties, you know, we were predominantly known as the breadbasket of the world.

John Stackhouse: Of course, that breadbasket looks very different today, more diversity of crops for starters. Also, a lot more automation and technologies, helping farmers maximize yield and get their cross to market more efficiently. I asked Marad if there was a turning point, a moment when farmers began to think about data technology as central to how they work.

Murad Al-Katib: Farmers have been early adopters of technology. You know, I look at the stacking of technologies and that’s where we get to the kind of the precision farming innovation that we’re now implementing. It started with technologies on soil conservation, moisture conservation that really date back 40 and 50 years. I mean, remember, we’re growing these crops in soil conditions that are receiving less than 400 millimeters of annual rainfall and precipitation.

Murad Al-Katib: This is what in the world they would call desert agriculture. The technologies that have been developed over the last 20 and 30 years, leading up to things like precision farming, the use of sensors, data collection, decision support systems, all of that led to a dramatic improvement of the cropping systems and the yield while providing a carbon footprint that’s lower than any broad acre cropping system in the world.

John Stackhouse: Murad is talking about decades of evolution, but the next generation of farmers are taking that data-driven approach even further. I want you to meet Kyle Folk. He’s the CEO of Ground Truth Ag, and he’s here to talk about how Saskatchewan is transforming brain handling, giving Canada the automated edge. We need to stay competitive in global food markets.

John Stackhouse: Kyle, you and I were together a number of years ago, uh, I think before the pandemic in Regina, and I was always fascinated at your transition from, uh, farm kid to Ag Tech. Tell us what got you first interested in digital technology.

Kyle Folk: I left the farm after high school, became an electrician, and then in about 2009 or 10, John, I was back at the farm one weekend visiting and dad needed a hand, he wanted to get help setting up for a truck that was coming to haul, some canola way.  So we went to throw the auger in the bin and this wasn’t, uh, hopper bottom, it was the old flat bottom type and went to slide the auger in and it wouldn’t go in ’cause the grain had spoiled. And so that. Got me down this path of my first venture into Ag Tech and it was, uh, building a system that would be able to show farmers what their temperature moisture was in their bins so they could detect grain spoilage ahead of time.

Kyle Folk: And so that was pre-ground truth days, but that was my first foray into, into Ag Tech.

John Stackhouse: Tell us a bit about ground truth and what the ambition is.

Kyle Folk: Ground truth is really focused on automating the grain grading process. Growing up around the farm, the way that we were sampling grain and having it sent away to be graded was the same way that it is today and the same way it was 115 years ago. It’s a manual process. Grain graders take up to eight years to be fully trained, John. That’s because weather patterns or weather cycles just don’t even show up for up to eight years.

John Stackhouse: Grain grading is something that’s done, uh, around the world. What’s the advantage that you’re developing in Saskatchewan?

Kyle Folk: Grain grading. Yes, you’re right. It is done around the world since the early ninteen hundreds. The only thing that’s really changed when it comes to grain grading is the ability to do some non-visual assessments like protein, moisture, test weight, those kinds of things. There’s machines that can do that, but the large part of grain grading is visual.

Kyle Folk: And so it’s a human that has to make a judgment call on subjective elements. And so, you know, hard Red Spring wheat is one of the hardest, if not the hardest grains to grade in the world. Humans are expected to be able to determine that in a very short time period because as you know, the scale of farming is changing drastically, and the window for being able to make these assessments keeps closing, getting shorter and shorter.

John Stackhouse: Kyle’s story captures what’s happening across the prairies, a quiet revolution where people who grew up on farms are now using sophisticated data systems to solve problems, they’ve seen firsthand. They’re taking gaps in the system like spoiled grain or inconsistent grading and fusing them with capabilities like AI and computer vision. The result, agricultural tradition meets digital precision, and the opportunity isn’t just local, it’s national, and Saskatchewan innovators are already proving they’re up to the challenge.

Murad Al-Katib: When I chaired the national strategy table for agriculture and food for the government of Canada in 2019, we filed our recommendation saying that we believe that the ag sector in Canada can go from 45 billions of exports to 85 billion in exports.

Murad Al-Katib: We met that in the third year of the target. How many sectors of our economy can deliver $65 billion of tangible economic growth in a three year period while agriculture did that?

John Stackhouse: When you look at how quickly those targets were reached, you gotta wonder what’s changed. Was it innovation on the farm, new global demand, or something cultural in how we think about AgriFood as a high tech sector.

Murad Al-Katib: We’re doing more with less, which is ultimately the aim of technology and innovation commercialization. We, you know, are taking the same land base, the same seeded acres, and we’re dramatically increasing the production efficiency of that land. Your increasing competitiveness and productivity. We’ve been always viewed as a sleepy sector, one that is more traditional. Yet when I look at it, it’s leading in tech innovation. Agriculture is no longer the family farm. It is a technology innovation centric industry that is not only steady and reliable, but it’s growing and dynamic. Data and analytics will make us able to make better decisions. What we need to do is ensure that technology and innovation and the applications of those are gonna allow us to meet that consumer demand for clean, safe, reliable, trustworthy food.  So it’s an opportunity for a career. It’s an opportunity that is very, very exciting. And could it be more bullish on the agriculture sector in this country? It’s gonna be exciting over the next couple of decades.

John Stackhouse: Murad is talking about transformation at a national scale. Billions in growth as technology reshapes the entire sector. But that transformation starts with innovations like Kyle’s. Let’s see how ground truth works. Kyle, maybe paint a picture for us of what your technology looks like and how it operates.

Kyle Folk: Yeah, so grain samples we’ve talked about, you can pour ’em into Our bench top unit runs through, we utilize machine vision, so computer vision, and we utilize near infrared spectroscopy.  Combined with machine learning models, deep learning models, to be able to then assess that sample visually and non-visually, to be able to identify 50 plus visual characteristics in a matter of like sub five minutes for a human trained, just to identify what is the worst characteristic in that sample.

Kyle Folk: It takes about eight minutes on average. If you’re going to assess a sample for all the characteristics, it’s going to take you days, if not a week, to do that.

John Stackhouse: You’ve been at this for a while now. What have been the biggest breakthroughs and also what are you most up against right now?

Kyle Folk: Coming from the farm aspect, we always felt that we were subjected to all the risk and nobody else took on any risk in the process.

Kyle Folk: And you know, our grain buyers, although we had good relationships with them, they were doing what was best for them. And really, we’d wear all that risk. The biggest shocker for me was understanding and realization that the grain buyers are just doing the best that they can with all of the shortcomings that are in place.

Kyle Folk: As soon as I started talking to them and exploring this idea of ground truth and automating the grain grading process, it was very exciting to me and how interested they were in having something like this for themselves. Once we started building these models to grade the grain in a comprehensive way, John, not just a handful of characteristics, but all of them, it was a big, exciting milestone for us to hit to see this starting to work.

John Stackhouse: Kyle, maybe we can step back and better understand what this can mean for Canada.

Kyle Folk: The reason we can grow more today, John, is because we understand it. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So with quality aspects, this has been relatively unmeasurable, inconsistent, at the field level, but once this technology becomes mainstream, John and farmers are able to understand in great detail what their quality is.

Kyle Folk: Then they can start to manage it better. The quality of grain that’s going to come out of Canada. Is only going to increase and be better. And so that will only position us better on a world stage. And to be honest, yes, I would say our supply chain is a little fragile from this perspective right now, but we still are one of the best in the world, if not the best.

John Stackhouse: How does that change the economics for, for the farmer?

Kyle Folk: When you harvest, you send one kg samples to two kg samples to your prospective buyers and they grade it. And this is a human making a judgment call. You send three samples to three different prospective buyers and you get three different results.

Kyle Folk: So what do you do with that as a farmer, if you had our unit at your yard and you could grade it immediately, you’d know what you could sell that for. You’d know what contract you could pick up. You’d know what premiums would be available to you. That’s a different mindset.

John Stackhouse: You’ve developed all of this in Saskatchewan, which is frankly one of the world’s leaders in so many aspects of ag tech, but you’re also up against a world that is getting better and better at this. What does Saskatchewan have as an ag tech leader, and what does it need to maintain or improve that position going into the 2030s?

Kyle Folk: You go to Silicon Valley, you go out for a coffee or a tea at a local coffee shop, you’ll see or hear people having conversations about tech startups. That same thing applies to Saskatchewan.

Kyle Folk: I can’t go to a rink without overhearing two farmers talking about the weather or talking about how their crop looks, or talking about pricing, talking about a contract. You are immersed when you’re in Saskatchewan. You’re completely exposed to agriculture, whether you like it or not. We definitely have an advantage when it comes to Ag Tech.

Kyle Folk: You know, five to 10 years down the line that we will be the powerhouse in technology for agriculture as much as we are just for agriculture as a whole. Because there’s no question I could see us being at the top.

John Stackhouse: What a great ambition, Kyle, thanks for being on disruptors.

Kyle Folk: Thanks for having me, John.

John Stackhouse: For these innovations to truly scale, they need to be part of something bigger. A resilient food system that feeds both ourselves and the world. I asked Murad what it’s going to take to keep Canadian Ag Tech at the front of the pack.

Murad Al-Katib: We still have hangovers from what I would call the old Canadian Wheat Board bulk grain handling economy that we had for so many years. We have to be planning for what the trade infrastructure looks like in 2050 and 2060, not in 2026.

Murad Al-Katib: If I was Prime Minister for a day, I would spend a hundred billion on trade infrastructure. It will pay for generations to come. Supply chains are all about connectivity. Each link must be efficient. Data and technology will also make that more efficient. So let’s seize that opportunity.

John Stackhouse: That’s the long game infrastructure that lasts half a century, not half a season. But Murad also sees shifts in global demand that are forcing us to think differently about what we produce. How we add value to it.

Murad Al-Katib: We have an opportunity to have a consumer base that’s completely different than the consumer base we have today. We continue to ship commodities around the world.

Murad Al-Katib: We’re not doing as good of a job on value added. We need to ensure the regulatory system allows, allows and encourages the development of food and food products. We have to remind people you don’t get more prosperity from redistributing the current wealth that you have. You get more prosperity in a nation by creating new wealth.

Murad Al-Katib: And new wealth is largely created by a customer abroad who is willing to purchase our product for a price and economics that make us able to not only compete, but to make a profit.

John Stackhouse: To meet the demands of global markets and complete agriculture’s transformation, we’re going to need more people like Kyle, who are looking at our systems with a critical eye and finding ways to make them more competitive. But as Murad Al-Katib reminds us, this isn’t just about gadgets and growth. It’s about building the infrastructure and intelligence that will feed the world and fuel Canada’s prosperity. We simply can’t keep planning our trade strategy one crop year at a time. We need to think like builders, not just producers, because the next frontier of agriculture isn’t just in the soil, it’s in the systems that connect us with a fast changing and increasingly fragmented world. The question now isn’t whether the technology works. The question is whether we can scale up fast enough to stay ahead. Canada has a unique advantage. A prairie culture that fuses innovation with practical farming experience. That’s what helps global ambition grow straight outta the soil. I’m John Stackhouse and you’ve been listening to Disruptors, the Canada Project, an RBC podcast. If you wanna hear the whole series, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and better yet, give us a five star rating that will help others hear these stories and share them. And if you wanna learn more about The Canada Project. Go to rbc.com/thoughtleadership. Join us next time as we continue our journey across the country in search of the innovators and leaders who are helping Canada meet this moment boldly with their eyes fixed on the future.