Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney Announces Questionable National AI Strategy

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a new AI strategy that will guide Canada’s next five years of legislation and infrastructure investment. While the new “AI for All” plan is slightly more focused on the impact the technology will have on normal people than President Donald Trump’s similar framework for the US, it’s just as concerned with growing his country’s domestic AI industry, while ignoring the growing backlash.

“With the global AI market projected to reach US $4.8 trillion by 2033,” the announcement claims, “Canada has a limited but real opportunity to ensure AI works for all Canadians — to harness this technology to create jobs, protect Canadians and strengthen our prosperity.” The plan aims to achieve those goals by building Canadians’ trust in AI, increasing AI adoption and investing in the foundations of AI technology that’s built, hosted and run in Canada.

AI for All calls for legislative frameworks to be updated to “[strengthen] protections for Canadians’ personal information, including against harmful practices such as deepfakes and surveillance pricing” and the creation of an “online safety regime” to protect chatbot and social media users. The strategy also lays out a plan to establish a National AI Literacy Initiative to provide free entry-level AI training, and commits to offering “access to trusted AI agents for every post-secondary student.” Among other benefits, Carney says the strategy will provide “up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and work placement opportunities.”

For Canadian businesses, AI for All also calls for the construction of a “public AI supercomputer” and further investment in sovereign — as in Canadian-owned and operated — compute and cloud infrastructure. These infrastructure investments will be made in line with Canada’s clean energy goals and assisted with access to growth capital through government procurement.

While the full strategy document acknowledges Canadians’ skepticism towards AI, it largely ignores evidence that adopting AI technologies doesn’t necessarily increase productivity and that there’s a growing distaste for the technology in general. More laws regulating AI tools seems necessary, but Carney’s plan to increase AI adoption might be focused on the wrong issue. AI for All suggests these problems are a matter of communication and access, but considering tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude can be used for free, Canadians not using AI enough might be reflective of problems with AI and what it produces, not their understanding of it.