OTTAWA — The federal government is working on a master “National Economic Security List” that will itemize everything it wants to protect from hostile countries, from research to data to critical infrastructure, according to briefing materials obtained by The Logic. The document could clear up some of the uncertainty sown by the government’s varied efforts to protect Canada’s economic interests from foreign actors. 

The list will “inform stakeholders with regards to the economic security assets that the government is seeking to protect from foreign threat actors,” says a document prepared in the spring of this year for the minister of public safety—Marco Mendicino at the time—and released through an access-to-information request.

The document is heavily redacted, but it describes consultations with academics and among multiple government agencies to determine what to protect and from whom to protect it.

Over the past two years or so, the government has proposed a raft of laws, regulations and policies meant to build walls around things it considers vital to Canadian interests and at risk of being undermined or stolen by adversaries. Its proposals include an overhaul of the Investment Canada Act, a cybersecurity bill and two waves of restrictions on federal research grants for projects connected to worrisome foreign institutions.

One thing these proposals have in common is uncertainty about what they will cover. The Investment Canada Act amendments (which the House of Commons passed Monday, sending them to the Senate) would give ministers authority to review foreign investments in Canadian companies for national-security reasons, but leaves much to regulations to be set after the law is in place; investors have warned it could obstruct practically any outside capital. The cybersecurity bill would let the government supervise the security arrangements of operators of critical infrastructure, but puts off decisions about who qualifies until after the bill is passed.

The rules on research grants from bodies like the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), most recently toughened in February, have been both strict and vague, leaving researchers to guess whether an overseas partner institution will cause their grant applications to be rejected.

“We’re going to come with a list of institutions and a list of research areas where, if they were to engage in that with entities that will be on these lists, funding would be denied,” Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne told the House of Commons science and research committee Monday afternoon. The committee is studying university research partnerships involving China.

Those lists are coming “very soon,” he said, following work within the government and with Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence allies—the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

A list of banned research partners was reportedly close to being complete this past spring, months after the latest research announcement in February, but hasn’t yet been published. Universities have asked for $200 million a year to compensate them and make sure research isn’t stifled as foreign funds are cut off.

The government also already has a list of “sensitive technology areas”—such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, energy and remote sensing—but it’s explicitly not exhaustive, and the briefing document says it’s being revised.

Besides all the details to be provided later, responsibility and authority are spread across multiple departments, including Public Safety; Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED); and Health. Those with a say include Global Affairs Canada, the Communications Security Establishment (which answers to the defence minister), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and “other science-based departments and agencies,” according to the briefing document, which also says they have been working on a plan to put the February grant restrictions into practice.

Between them, they expected to be ready for “the anticipated operationalization of the research statement in the fall,” though in February, the government told The Logic the restrictions covered applications in granting agencies’ hands at the time.

Professor Tamer Özsu of the University of Waterloo’s computer-science school—and founding director of the short-lived Waterloo-Huawei Joint Innovation Lab—told The Logic he’s had multiple grant applications rejected already, such as for one project called “Novel smartphone application for eye disease diagnosis and therapy for young children.”

“We received no answers as to why this topic was a national-security matter,” Özsu wrote in an email. The researchers had suspected it was the Huawei connection, but couldn’t be certain—the Chinese maker of telecom gear and other electronics is a named target of the federal cybersecurity measures, though not the research ones.

But then in a subsequent round of grant applications, every one connected to Huawei was rejected, Özsu wrote. “And this time they clearly indicated that Huawei was the problem. So what NSERC told us in March 2023, namely that Huawei remained an acceptable partner, and what it is now telling, are quite different.”

(The University of Waterloo, like many other Canadian schools, is pulling out of Huawei partnerships.)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demoted Mendicino out of cabinet in July. The Logic put several specific questions to the spokesperson for his successor as public safety minister, Dominic LeBlanc, about the economic security measures and whether the clarity promised in the briefing document is on schedule.

“Following our request to Canada’s federal research granting councils to enhance their national-security posture, we are working on further measures which will protect our world-class research, safeguard openness and academic freedom and enable Canada’s research sector to continue to thrive. We are taking the time to get this right, and will have more to say in due time,” Jean-Sébastien Comeau said by email.