From Jets to Quantum – Canada's History of Dual Use Technology

For the first time in decades, ordinary Canadians are thinking and talking about defence. Largely thanks to the luck of our geography — so distant from potential adversaries and so close to our long-term ally and protector, the United States — the average Canadian had little need to think about how well our armed forces were prepared to meet new threats. But as our relationship with the Americans becomes more tense, and the global order is fraying, we have all felt thrust into the world of statecraft and strategy, reckoning with threats near and far.

Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, Canada has committed to increase defence spending both to meet potential threats and to make ourselves a more active partner and ally within NATO and other alliances. Part of the promise of this spending is to drive economic opportunity for Canada through the use of defence spending to build strategically essential multi-use infrastructure, using defence procurement to privilege Canadian companies and innovations, and to build up what are known as dual-use technologies that can be used in both military and civilian contexts.

As Canada ramps up spending, industry leaders, politicians, policy experts and ordinary Canadians are developing a broad range of perspectives on how we should proceed. For some, dual-use is a way of justifying more defence spending at the expense of social services at a time of increased austerity. This is partly true. For those concerned with equipping the Canadian Armed Forces and our other defence entities with the tools to meet modern warfare needs, dual-use is seen as, at best, a way for people to talk about defence without thinking about lethality. In other quarters, it’s seen as a way for firms and institutions to siphon-off funds earmarked for defence, to develop technologies without fully meeting the CAF’s defence needs. Essentially it is seen as a ploy to achieve ‘defence’ spending without actually spending on defence priorities.

These perspectives all contain some truth, and how defence funds are spent and who benefits is a complicated matter. But there is a real value to dual-use technology as a category that is rooted in a real goal to support defence while also supporting transformative innovations for society.

Dual-use research and innovation is at the core of Canada’s research and innovation history. It would not be an exaggeration to say that as a “middle power,” Canada’s success in building a world-renowned research ecosystem and our ability to punch above our weight militarily in the past is deeply linked to a long tradition of dual-use innovation and research. This history goes back more than a century, long before the term dual-use was coined after the Second World War.

This history of dual-use research has also come with over a century of policy successes and failures that have enabled and undermined that innovation in different ways. By looking at that history we can learn lessons about how we might better enable such research today, privileging both research and defence needs in the process.

Strategic Value of Dual-Use Tech

In early January 2026, China tightened exports of dual-use goods to Japan amid escalating tensions over Taiwan, restricting rare earths and civilian manufacturing technologies to pressure Tokyo. Export controls like these have become a tool of statecraft — used not to blunt an adversary’s military capability in some imminent conflict, but to constrain rival economies outright.

This is what makes “dual-use” a contested term rather than a technical one. The fight is not over the mundane fact that materials cross between military and civilian life; that has always been true. What is at stake is dominance of a handful of transformative technologies — AI, quantum, advanced manufacturing, medical countermeasures — that nations are racing to control. A definition of “dual use” that is useful for policy therefore has to capture more than whether a technology crosses domains. It has to capture how much value that crossing generates, how foundational the technology is, and how much of the supply chain a nation can actually control.

In that strategic sense, dual-use technologies are best understood as R&D breakthroughs that transfer across multiple application domains — at least one of them defence-relevant — without requiring separate fundamental research or significant retooling. The defining characteristic is convertibility: a single research and manufacturing investment generates value across sectors, whether through direct application, by creating foundational capabilities that unlock progress elsewhere, or by building industrial capacity that transfers between domains. It runs in every direction — defence research with civilian spillover, as with the internet and space technology, and civilian invention that acquires defence value, as the flight-control and autonomy research behind commercial drones has on the modern battlefield.

But convertibility alone doesn’t tell you which technologies deserve investment, because they reach dual-use status by different paths, and each path implies a different policy. Commercial off-the-shelf technology — civilian products that happen to serve a defence need — is best handled through challenge programs and clearly communicated operational requirements, not funded as a research priority. The high-value R&D investment belongs instead with modified off-the-shelf and “exquisite” technology: systems built primarily for defence that throw off real civilian spillovers, such as jet engines for example. 

This is where defence spending can compound into the durable commercial sector Canada has historically failed to build. And strategic value can override portability entirely: a technology with only one civilian and one defence use, costly to convert between them, may still merit major investment if it is foundational enough — quantum-resistant encryption is a clear case of this. This is exactly the distinction that the lazy “everything is dual-use” framing — now everywhere in Canada as firms chase defence money — flattens, and where the need for a sharper Canadian definition emerges. 

The term’s drift explains why this discussion matters now. “Dual-use” is a post-WWII coinage for nuclear technology usable as both energy and weapon, though the underlying idea — controlling materials to deny an adversary a weapon — is older, visible in the wartime contest over tungsten for munitions. The framework built around it targeted chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons of mass destruction, and Canada’s uranium exports and CANDU technology fell squarely under it. Through the 1980s and 90s the term widened to cover information and supporting technologies as cyberwarfare emerged, but controls still aimed at clear, imminent threats rather than at access to technology itself. That changed in the 2020s. 

When U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration restricted semiconductor exports to China in 2022 to preserve the U.S. AI lead, and China answered with controls on rare earth metals in 2023, the term “dual use” broke loose from its non-proliferation origins and became an instrument of open geoeconomic competition. The U.S. effort to limit China’s access to NVIDIA’s most advanced chips only partly worked. Alleged smuggling of chips and adapted training methods to work on less advanced hardware kept firms like DeepSeek competitive. The Trump administration’s later move to let China buy H200 chips for the revenue, while capping volumes and imposing know-your-customer rules on exporters, reflects the same tension between economic opportunity and strategic risk — and because China’s rare-earth leverage hits the very supply chains the U.S. depends on, this is a two-way chokepoint.

Dual-use has thus become an industrial-policy tool in its own right, in the EU and now in Canada. Canada met NATO’s 2% of GDP benchmark in 2026 after years of falling short and has committed to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, and the resulting surge of private-sector interest carries a real risk of over-designation. Letting firms self-identify as “dual-use,” or stamping the label on ordinary goods by default, clutters the investment landscape, makes it harder for DND to find genuinely strategic technology, and can even harm the firms it is meant to help — designation as a controlled good can choke an early-stage company’s access to capital and export markets. 

The Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) already names dual-use capability a priority but supplies no operational definition firm enough to drive procurement or screen R&D — precisely the gap a sharper Canadian definition needs to fill. 

Canada’s 2025 budget, shows how far the label has stretched, reaching past quantum and AI to “dual-use infrastructure” like ports, roads, railways, and air hubs that the Carney government can justify on security or economic grounds as circumstances demand. That elasticity aligns Canada with the same expansive redefinition underway in Washington and Beijing, and the DIS itself can be read as a dual-use plan in this broader sense: economic opportunity and defence capability pursued together to meet NATO commitments in a more hostile world.

Founded in Aerospace

The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) was founded in 1916 to meet the military research needs of Canada and Britain during the First World War. Initially much of their work focused on Canadian strength areas like crop resiliency but it began to expand into specialized aerospace research, especially for exploring aerodynamics in harsh conditions like the far north and coastal areas. Ottawa’s distance from the front also allowed for a raised degree of trust and reliance on Canadian collaborative research which was safely removed from potential bombing (near the end of the war) and the more pressing and ever-present risk of espionage.

The infrastructure built around Ottawa for aerospace research would expand throughout the war and then quickly transitioned to support a budding industry of commercial aircraft design and manufacturing, often focused on northern and Arctic flights, ski and sea planes, and other areas where Canada’s geography provided both a market and a fertile testing ground for development.

In the interwar years much of this work continued and the facilities were modernized to continue advancing Canadian aerospace design and testing for both defence and commercial needs. Wind tunnel facilities, engine and combustion facilities, and other advanced laboratories continued to serve military and commercial needs for testing and prototyping through to the Second World War. A dual-use aerospace ecosystem was born.

This existing environment positioned Canada to take on a greater role in R&D cooperation with Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War. The existing infrastructure and expertise made Canada a strong partner for such research and its distance from the front came in even more handy now that German strategic bombing in England was even more prominent and devastating than in the First World War. 

Partly geographical luck, but also expertise and infrastructure were responsible for Canada taking on an outsized role in military aerospace R&D throughout the war, and excess capacity in labs continued to be used by commercial aerospace inventors and companies well into the post-war era. 

This strength was due in part to the strong union of military and scientific research expertise combined in this open and free-flowing research ecosystem the NRC built. While part of this was a result of the unique infrastructure and community that developed out of necessity between the two world wars, it was also a result of hard-fought and contested policy. From as early as 1917, the first NRC director, Archibald B. Macallum, was advocating against policymakers’ efforts to make the NRC more “practical,” arguing that instead the NRC must preserve its role as fundamentally a scientific organization, tasked in part with training well-rounded scientists which can also deliver on specific military projects rather than shifting to applied science entirely. 

This philosophy of fundamental science serving practical outcomes is summarized best by American Mathematician and NRC associate Warren Weaver in 1959: “The most far-reaching discoveries and the most widespread useful applications flow regularly out of ideas that initially seem abstract, even esoteric. These ideas arise out of the unguided and free activity of men who are motivated by curiosity.” The balance between the NRC being a hub of scientists doing open-ended research, and a space for practical, goal-oriented engineering was wrestled over from the institution’s inception and finding this balance also seems central to its successes in dual-use technology development.

With the new DIS and the institutions it has created, like BOREALIS and the Defence Investment Agency, renewed discussions have emerged around whether this investment and infrastructure should serve purely defence-related needs or more general research needs. Many valid critiques of Canada’s history with funding research to little positive return can be balanced with the persistent assertions from researchers that fundamental science is essential to enable any defence research we might wish to see. As recently as June 1, 2026,  at the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research, a representative from the Université de Sherbrooke argued that funding fundamental science is essential to any positive dual-use outcomes.

That dual-use aerospace ecosystem reached its peak and its breaking point with the Avro Arrow. Developed by Avro Canada through the 1950s, the CF-105 Arrow was a supersonic interceptor that drew directly on the wartime aerospace infrastructure and talent base built up around Ottawa and Toronto, and by the time of its first flight in 1958 it was, by most technical accounts, among the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world — a genuine vindication of the decades of sustained investment in dual-use research capacity. 

Yet on February 20, 1959, the Diefenbaker government cancelled the program outright, citing spiralling costs, the rise of intercontinental ballistic missiles as a perceived substitute for manned interceptors, and pressure from Washington to instead purchase American systems and integrate more closely into continental air defence under NORAD. The cancellation did not simply end a single aircraft program; existing prototypes and tooling were destroyed, and a generation of Canadian aerospace engineers and scientists, many of whom went on to senior roles at NASA and major U.S. aerospace firms, left the country for lack of comparable work. 

Unlike the slow attrition that would befall the Canadarm program decades later, the Arrow’s end was abrupt. It could be argued that the Arrow was an outdated aircraft designed for a kind of warfare that no longer existed––fast interceptor fighters to combat nuclear bombers were being replaced by strategic ICBMs to deliver nuclear payloads globally––but the complete failure and collapse of the ecosystem after such extensive investment still speaks to a pattern of failure. The government was unwilling to sustain investment in dual-use capacity at the exact moment it had proven its world-class value, choosing instead to rely on an ally’s “off-the-shelf” alternative rather than build on an already developed domestic capacity.

Canada Enters the Atomic Age

Canada’s prominent involvement in all aspects of the war effort, especially R&D, meant that we became one of the three partners ––with the U.S. and U.K.––in the atomic energy side of the Manhattan Project. Canada’s scientific skill but even more so its abundance of nuclear materials like uranium, made it a junior partner in this scientific alliance during the Second World War, and secured our continued connection to U.S. energy programs following the war.

This is a clear case where Canada not wanting to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” would be a misplaced ambition. Our raw materials were leveraged as a tool to secure access to advanced research including support and funding for the Chalk River nuclear research facility which would become the foundations of our nuclear energy R&D ecosystem, a centre for talent and expertise, and the birthplace of the successful CANDU reactors.

However, despite the successes of the atomic energy program in Canada, this also shows the dark side of dual-use technologies. Canada did not only provide uranium to the U.S. through various nuclear energy research collaborations, we also provided nuclear fissile materials created in Chalk River reactors to the U.S. in the early years of the Cold War, a practice that was later abandoned but potentially played a role in nuclear proliferation. 

Another example of this dark side is Defence Research and Development Canada’s Suffield Base in Alberta, which was created during the Second World War as a chemical and biological weapons testing and countermeasures training facility and continues to function for allied operations testing to this day. While the research at Suffield has led to significant advancement in medical countermeasures and understanding the risks of chemical and biological weapons, such facilities also serve a clear dual-use purpose. They can help with gain of function research which means the effort to essentially understand and potentially prototype how to weaponize a pathogen or make it more viral or deadly in order to understand how to better counter it or create better vaccines. While Canada has committed internationally to the non-proliferation of all CBRN weapons, such dual-use facilities and capacities continue to pose risks and leave potential for misuse.

Space Cadets

Canada’s entry into space technology followed a familiar pattern: a small economy finding outsized influence by attaching itself to the ambitions of larger allies. The Canadarm, developed by Spar Aerospace and first flown on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1981, emerged from a 1969 NASA invitation for Canada to contribute a remote manipulator system to the shuttle program. 

Canada’s expertise drew on decades of NRC-supported robotics and remote-sensing research, much of it originally developed for resource surveying and Arctic operations, the same geographic necessity that had shaped Canadian aerospace research since the First World War. 

NASA’s interest in a non-American supplier for a mission-critical system also reflected a degree of trust Canada had built as a reliable, technically capable partner. It also helped that we were without independent strategic ambitions of our own in space. Again, sometimes accepting limitations can be leveraged as a strength.

The success of the Canadarm secured Canada a seat at the table for the International Space Station program in the 1990s, where the Mobile Servicing System, including Canadarm2 and the Dextre robotic handler, deepened Canadian involvement in an inherently dual-use environment. The ISS partnership was scientific and civilian in its public framing, but built on Cold War-era military space competition and continues to serve significant defence-adjacent functions for partner nations, including surveillance and satellite servicing capabilities with clear strategic value. Canadian firms and research institutions used this sustained federal investment to build a globally respected robotics sector, generating commercial spinoffs in medical robotics and remote surgery, mining automation, and underwater robotics. It also led to significant space capabilities and companies in the private sector like MDA Space (previously Spar), and other satellite and aerospace systems firms.

But as with the Avro Arrow, the lesson of Canadarm is as much about decline as success. As the Shuttle program wound down and ISS construction reached completion in the early 2010s, Canadian investment in space robotics did not pivot toward the next frontier — autonomous systems, lunar robotics, or commercial satellite servicing — at the moment competitors like the U.S. and increasingly private firms like SpaceX were making exactly that pivot. Federal funding for the Canadian Space Agency stagnated through the 2010s even as the robotics expertise built around Canadarm could have been redirected toward the emerging field of applied AI and autonomous systems. Instead that expertise dispersed. Much of Canada’s later AI investment started essentially from scratch in deep learning theory, rather than building on the applied robotics and autonomy research the country had already paid to develop.

AI Failures

Canada’s role in the foundations of modern artificial intelligence is, in the abstract, a continuation of the NRC’s century-old formula: government-funded fundamental research, conducted with real intellectual freedom, producing breakthroughs with massive downstream application. Geoffrey Hinton’s work on neural networks and backpropagation at the University of Toronto, much of it supported by federal research funding and later the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), along with parallel work by Yoshua Bengio at the Université de Montréal’s MILA institute, laid the theoretical groundwork for the deep learning revolution that now underpins everything from large language models to military targeting and autonomous systems. AI is a dual-use technology in the fullest sense, with profound civilian and defence applications alike, and in many ways it is the unique nature of AI that has led to a need for reappraisal of what dual-use technology actually means.

Where AI departs from the earlier dual-use successes is in what happened after the discovery stage. Unlike the CANDU reactor, where Canadian institutions retained ownership of the resulting IP, or the Canadarm, where Spar Aerospace held the manufacturing and commercial rights to the technology it built, the foundational AI research conducted in Canadian universities carried no equivalent requirement for domestic IP retention or commercialization. Hinton himself was hired by Google in 2013; Bengio has remained in Montreal but the companies and platforms built on the research he helped pioneer are overwhelmingly American. 

Canada funded the open-ended, curiosity-driven research, but built none of the connective institutional architecture — IP retention requirements, domestic commercialization pathways, sovereign compute infrastructure. And then,Canada predictably failed to capture value from the breakthrough the way it had with nuclear energy a half-century earlier. 

The result is that Canada is now a net importer of a technology it did much of the foundational work to invent, paying licensing fees and import costs for AI capability built substantially on Canadian publicly funded science.

Quantum Promises

Quantum computing represents Canada’s most recent attempt to apply the dual-use formula deliberately rather than discover it by accident, and it is currently an open question whether the lessons of the prior century have been learned. Federal investment through the National Quantum Strategy, alongside private and academic hubs like the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo and Vancouver-based D-Wave Systems (the first company to sell commercial quantum computers), has built a research base widely regarded as among the world’s most advanced, sustained in part by the same kind of open fundamental research environment that built the NRC’s aerospace and nuclear programs.

It is important to note however, that D-Wave has since shifted much of its centre to Silicon Valley and it is less of a Canadian company than it once was.

The strategic stakes here are higher and more explicit than they were for AI. Quantum computing has direct and well-understood applications to cryptography and signals intelligence — a future fault-tolerant quantum computer could break much of the encryption that currently secures both civilian and military communications — meaning the technology’s dual-use character is foreseeable, closer in kind to the nuclear case than the AI case. 

This has prompted earlier attention to questions of sovereignty and control than Canada extended to AI, including growing discussion of export controls and security screening for quantum talent and IP, mirroring the broader global shift toward treating computational technologies as strategic assets requiring active control.

Yet the same structural risk that undid the Canadarm program and nearly squandered the AI breakthrough is visible again. National Quantum Strategy funding is time-limited, and as it approaches renewal with no clear consensus on what comes next, Canada risks repeating the familiar pattern: building genuine capability through patient public investment, then allowing funding and institutional attention to lapse at precisely the moment — fault-tolerant quantum computing now plausibly years rather than decades away — when sustained investment would compound into lasting commercial and strategic advantage. 

Canada has multiple areas where quantum research and quantum-related manufacturing capacity is world-leading. Perhaps in some ways this is quite different from other cases. But it still does not mean that poor policy and funding lapses cannot destroy this advantage within a generation. The lessons from our long dual-use tech history, arguably the foundation of our defence and research sectors, suggest it is precisely now when we need to be paying the most attention and giving the most care to ensure we preserve and expand the sector and other strategic dual-use technology sectors.

Quantum is the standout example of the kind of dual use technology that Canada wants to be investing in. Technologies like highly precise quantum sensors have the potential to provide a decisive advantage in defence but will also revolutionize civilian industries like resource exploration. A successful Canadian dual use technology policy would continue to foster our strengths in both specific use cases of quantum and in the fundamental science so that this truly cross-domain technology can continue to develop in ways that benefit Canadians.