Good morning. Christian Weedbrook went from film school dropout to leading one of Canada’s most innovative companies. Will going public help him reach his goal of building a quantum computer? If he seems disconcerted about a rocky entry to markets, that’s only because he’s thinking bigger. Weedbrook’s long-term vision is in focus today, along with a window into wildlife genomics.

Oil and gas: Energy prices were whipsawed after intensified attacks on the Persian Gulf targeted oil infrastructure. Meanwhile, allies indicate they are willing to use “appropriate efforts” to reopen Strait of Hormuz

Alberta: Danielle Smith defended her government after the RCMP executed search warrants as part of their criminal investigation into the health care procurement probe

Defence: Ottawa is buying more than 65,000 new assault rifles from Kitchener, Ont.-based Colt Canada through an expedited procurement process

Securities: The OSC’s case against Emerge Canada will test the responsibilities of investment funds’ independent review committees

Good morning. I’m Sean Silcoff, technology reporter with The Globe and Mail. My colleague Ivan Semeniuk, our science reporter, and I have written a profile for this weekend’s Report on Business on one of Canada’s most visionary tech entrepreneurs – a transplanted Australian named Christian Weedbrook whose Toronto-based company, Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., has emerged as one of the leaders in a global race to develop the world’s most powerful computers.

Weedbrook wanted to be a filmmaker, but he failed out of film school – twice. He was 23 and working part-time in a video store and stocking groceries in his native Australia when he decided to give postsecondary education another shot at nearby University of Queensland. He wanted to study math. A dean who met him wasn’t sure what to make of him at that point in his life, and thought he might be a drug addict.

Turns out he was pretty good at math, now he’s determined to be an even better entrepreneur.

From such inauspicious origins, the now 49-year-old Weedbrook has taken a quantum leap. He moved to Canada 16 years ago, and adopted Toronto as his home. Next week, Xanadu is set to debut as a publicly traded company after merging with Nasdaq-listed special purpose acquisition company Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp.

With its subsequent cross-listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Xanadu will become the first Canada-based technology company since 2021 to go public on Canada’s senior exchange. While we report the deal has had a shaky week – market conditions are tough overall – Weedbrook is thinking longer term.

Xanadu has emerged as one of the leaders of the nascent quantum computing sector by taking what was a novel approach when Weedbrook founded the company 10 years ago: using pulses of laser light to generate the effects needed to run his quantum processors. The approach has several advantages over other systems.

Now, after publishing results of several scientific breakthroughs in the journal Nature and qualifying for the second round of a high-profile global quantum computing challenge competition in the United States, Weedbrook’s plan is to build a data centre powered by quantum computers. By 2030. After securing just over US$300-million during the go-public process, he needs to raise another US$700-million to fund his dream.

The monotone-voiced boss is direct, blunt and matter-of-fact in conversation, with a dry sense of humour. He admits that he can be prickly with investors, and he says that building those relationships “has probably been the most challenging part, even more than building a quantum computer.”

But after a decade of building Xanadu, “the drive and fire hasn’t stopped in me,” he told me.

As Ivan and I have written for you before, Canada has emerged as a leader in the global quantum technology space, but the industry is both teeming with opportunity and clouded by doubts. There has been a lot of hype and promise about computers and other breakthrough technologies that will derive their power not from 1s or 0s, but the mind-bending physical properties of subatomic particles.

Quantum computers, many experts believe, will some day be able to solve complex problems that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputers millions of years to crack, unleashing new capabilities such as more powerful risk modelling, tackling dense optimization problems and discovering new drugs and materials.

That day is starting to feel awfully close, as we explored in another Report on Business cover story last September. And Weedbrook is driven to be among the first to succeed. “You can guarantee we’re working the hardest” among quantum computer developers, he told us. “It’s all about getting to this vision.”