The University of Calgary will lead Canada’s first quantum defence hub under a $20.3-million federal award, the Department of National Defence (DND) announced earlier this month. The money runs two years and pays for a secure site in Calgary where DND, companies and academics can develop and test quantum technology behind a security clearance.
What the hub has been asked to work on should interest anyone who follows satellite navigation. Its priority list includes navigation that works without satellites, detection of GPS spoofing, and quantum-secure communications and timing. Spoofing means broadcasting a false satellite signal to push an aircraft or a ship off its true position. The department says the hub will help the Canadian Armed Forces reduce vulnerabilities “in contested environments, including threats such as GPS spoofing.”
The work splits four ways: quantum sensing, quantum communications, quantum algorithms, and quantum hardware assurance, which means testing that a quantum device does what its maker says it does. Sensing carries the navigation promise, because instruments built around the behaviour of individual atoms can in principle hold a position fix with no signal from orbit at all.
“Quantum will shape the next generation of defence capabilities, and Canada must be prepared to lead—not follow,” Defence Minister David McGuinty said in the release.
Funding mechanism
The award is a non-repayable contribution rather than a contract. Ottawa is funding activities under a contribution agreement, not buying deliverables. It runs for two years, and the program documents require the work to finish no later than the end of March 2028.
It was competed. National Defence ran a call for proposals from Feb. 18 to April 2 under the Innovation in Defence Excellence and Security program, known as IDEaS, with about $50 million on offer across two streams, quantum and uncrewed systems.
Quantum is one of the sovereign capabilities named in Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy, the February policy that put space among its 10 key sovereign capabilities. The hubs are the research side of it.
The 13 partners
The federal release names no partner other than the university. The university however names most of them: 13 organizations in all, with the hub to be run by Quantum City, a partnership of the university, the Government of Alberta and the technology firm Mphasis.
At least 10 have been identified publicly. From industry: Lockheed Martin Canada, General Dynamics Mission Systems-Canada, CAE, Dell Canada, Calian Group, and Datsa Dynamics, a joint venture of the Calgary drone operator Canadian UAVs and Des Nedhe Group, the Saskatoon-based business arm of English River First Nation. The academic partners are the universities of Alberta, Lethbridge and Saskatchewan. The rest have not been named.
Calian is the one SpaceQ readers will know best, an Ottawa company that builds satellite ground systems and trains soldiers, and that won more British Army training work earlier this month as a subcontractor to Raytheon UK.
CAE turns up twice. The Montreal simulation and training company is also a partner in the Uncrewed Systems hub announced at Mirabel, Que., in July, making it the only organization named in both consortia.
Grant Oliver, vice-president of Des Nedhe Group Defence, put the consortium’s case in the strategy’s own terms: “This award reflects the direction Canada has set through its Defence Industrial Strategy: build critical capabilities at home, partner where it strengthens our position and increase Canadian participation in defence procurement.”
The envelope is spent
Mirabel is the other half of this. On July 14 the government put $29.6 million behind a consortium led by Aéro Montréal through its Espace Aéro initiative to build the uncrewed systems hub. Add that to Calgary’s award and the call has committed all but a sliver of the roughly $50 million it advertised.
A third hub came earlier. The Maritime pilot at COVE in Dartmouth, N.S., got $29.4 million in November 2025, before the call opened, and remains the template the others are built on.
None of that is from the money that stood up the bureau running them. The Bureau of Research, Engineering and Advanced Leadership in Innovation and Science, or BOREALIS, was given $68.2 million over three years in Budget 2025, shared among National Defence, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the National Research Council and the Communications Security Establishment. That pays for the staff and the plumbing, not the labs.
The same budget carried a much larger quantum line, $334.3 million over five years, for measures the budget says will help anchor quantum companies in Canada and open pathways into defence-related industries. Against that, Calgary’s award is an opening instalment.
The consortium has set its own test. The university says it aims to put validated prototypes in the hands of the Canadian Armed Forces and the Communications Security Establishment within two years, meaning hardware and software tried against a real requirement rather than papers describing one.
The two-year clock belongs to the funding instrument, not to the hub. Up to half of an award under this call may go to fitting out secure space, which is capital, and the call told bidders to identify the capabilities that ought to have value beyond the funding period and to describe how they would sustain them once it ends. National Defence’s case for building the hubs at all is that promising quantum work stalls for want of “trusted conditions for development, integration, and demonstration.” That problem does not expire in 2028.
What has not been settled is the terms. The contribution agreements run out at the end of March 2028, and BOREALIS’s own establishment money covers three years from 2025-26, so the hubs and the bureau above them come up for renewal at close to the same moment, in a budget rather than a news release. Whatever Calgary has put in a soldier’s hands by then is the argument it will have to make.
More SpaceQ coverage: Defence Innovation Secure Hubs · Positioning Navigation and Timing · Quantum and drone tech dominate first DISH Industry Day.