canadian export controls now apply to quantum cryptography

Well. Not like this is going to affect a huge number of companies in Canada, but one of my colleagues brought to my attention at an internal meeting the fact that the Canadian government has updated its export control list – i.e. the list of things that you can’t ship out of Canada without a permit. A brief release from the gov’t summarizes the additions, which now include quantum cryptography goods and technologies. D-Wave might want to be pay attention to this, though they’re not in the area of quantum cryptography per se. That being said, I’m a bit surprised that its only quantum cryptography that’s on the list. Given the potential impact that quantum computing technology may have on standard cryptographic protections (i.e. being able to render it more or less useless, assuming the predictions on its horsepower come to pass) I would have thought quantum computing would have also been added on in some form.