Intellectual Property Is Economic and National Security

CIGI Paper No. 340

November 24, 2025

Canada’s economic and national security depends on how the country manages its intellectual assets and intellectual property (IP). Looking at the concepts of economic warfare and economic security through an IP lens, this paper examines how attacks against IP can exploit fragmented policy regimes, putting economic security and sovereignty at risk. The authors make five recommendations to address these concerns: create an open-source intelligence agency, protect the outputs of Canadian research, strengthen foreign investment controls, invest in sovereign cloud compute and storage, and coordinate federal legal frameworks.

About the Authors

David Durand is the co-founder of MVIP Solutions, Inc., and an intellectual property lawyer and board member of FORPIQ and AIoT Canada.

Kyle Briggs is a physicist, a deep-tech entrepreneur and the Entrepreneur in Residence for the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa.