What Is Canada’s AI Strategy?

We Have A Minister, What’s The Vision?

When Mark Carney put together his cabinet, one of the more controversial inclusions was Evan Solomon. Not solely because of his controversies, losing his Power & Politics hosting gig for a side hustle of art dealing, but because of the seemingly fake job he was given. He is our first Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation, a title vague and amorphous to the point of being almost impossible to know whether he has been a success or a failure. (If I were cynical, I’d say that’s the point, but whatever.)

Carney has talked about AI being a useful tool, and there does seem plausible use cases for it in streamlining in healthcare and in sorting various grant applications to ensure that, say, people applying for female entrepreneurship grants aren’t dudes applying for the Boaty McBoatface Corporation, but that doesn’t seem to need a whole Minister. So, what is our strategy?

We’ve kicked the can down the road on various regulatory efforts in part because it’s an open process, and I don’t need specifics, but I’d like a sense of what the government views success as being. Do they want OpenAI to move to Waterloo? Do they want to help facilitate Canadian companies using existing American generative AI models for their purposes? Do they view it as a jobs opportunity in AI or a productivity rocket booster to the economy? I have no idea, and I don’t think they do. Or, at least, they haven’t told us.

..

My instincts on AI aren’t friendly, a bias that should be made clear. Any approach to generative AI that doesn’t heavily protect Canadian work - be it Canadian music, movies, shows, scripts, or any other cultural product - isn’t good enough. We have to stand up to the flagrant disregard for copyright and ownership of work that so many of these companies are inherently guilty of.

That said, it’s probably happening anyways, and it seems unlikely we can put the genie back in the bottle, so it’s time to get serious about this. There is, genuinely, an opportunity to use AI to solve other problems for the government, if they’re smart and if they’re creatively minded. I just have no sense of what they’re trying to do with it.

If the government is willing to pony up some money for tax credits and incentive programs for job creation in tech and AI spaces, then there could be genuine opportunities to solve national unity issues for Carney. Alberta’s economy is still too reliant on the oil patch, and diversification is needed, and tech is a logical answer. If the government can find private sector partners to invest in generative AI and help turn Calgary into the Waterloo of the West, that would in turn help lower the temperature on Alberta’s discontent and help end the narrative about only Eastern Canada getting anything from Liberals.

The other way we can help is Quebec. Quebec is most concerned with its cultural heritage and its distinct culture output, and protecting that output will be a crucial step in not blowing our position there, but it’s also worth considering the possibility that Quebec could be an economic hub for AI built in and for French. Also, with how expensive power generation is becoming in the US in part because of data centers and AI, the attractiveness of plentiful, cheap energy will be real, and exploitable by us to the advantage of Quebecers and Canadians.

Similarly, revitalizing manufacturing towns and heavily export reliant cities is going to be a priority in a world where Trump controls the levers of tariff power. If there are opportunities stemming from AI, ensuring that our domestic industry doesn’t merely augment Kitchener-Waterloo and Kanata is a crucial opportunity. We need to ensure that Windsor and London and Northern Ontario and parts of BC benefit from those opportunities, so that we’re rebuilding the economy in the places currently experiencing the most pain, as opposed to transferring greater and greater shares of jobs and prosperity to smaller and smaller chunks of the country.

Now, is it possible that I’m an idiot, and there are no opportunities in AI for us to take advantage of or exploit? Maybe, but I’m not the one who made a fucking Minister for it. Clearly this government thinks there is potential here. If my ideas are batty, then great, I’ll gladly sit down and shut up about it. But I’ll only do that if there’s a real plan coming.

The choice to make a separate Minister has raised expectations that there will be concrete results in the next couple of years. I’m not sold there can be, given that I am a hater of this tech and the fact that it still takes time for things to go from concepts to completion, but if there are opportunities it’s time to get moving on them. We need to see what the government wants to do on this front, so we can know whether they’re succeeding or not.

At some point, the government needs to let Ministers off their leash and let them articulate their visions. We need to see what they think their jobs actually are, and what sort of benchmarks can be considered successes. The decision not to send and release unique mandate letters to Ministers has meant that it’s fuzzy - a departure from the standard Carney intermittently suggests he’ll hold people to. He wants good performers, but doesn’t let us judge them.

Solomon, at least in theory, is one of the most important Ministers in the government. Get it right, and we could see an AI boom that can strengthen our national unity, advance economic diversification to struggling communities, and fund the jobs and tax revenues our public services need. Or he could sign away our cultural heritage to American firms and see jobs get stolen with no benefits.

Let’s pray we get this right.