The Current - Canada's AI strategy

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

We dig into what the federal government's plan is for Artificial Intelligence in Canada.

Imagine you've been charged with a crime, and the only witness pointing the finger at you isn't even human. I remember thinking, are you serious? What is this thing? It's something artificial, created by a mysterious Canadian. And it's coming for all of us. A life-defining technology. Crime as we know it will never be the same. I'm like, oh my God, he's lying.

From CBC's Uncover, The Expert Witness. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. The question isn't whether AI will transform our lives, it will. AI is already changing how we work, how we learn, and how we connect. The question is, will it improve the lives of all Canadians or benefit only a few? Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally unveiled his government's strategy on artificial intelligence.

It comes after public consultations that generated some 11,000 submissions as well as an expert task force to advise the government. The Prime Minister says this strategy has three principles. The first is trust. We will protect your data, your privacy, and your children. Second, opportunity. We will empower Canadian workers. Canadian businesses, Canadian students, with the tools to expand their knowledge, their expertise, and their futures. And finally, sovereignty. We will reinforce Canadian sovereignty

so Canadians can make their own choices on how AI is built, governed, and used. Jackson Khan is a senior fellow at the Monk School of Global Affairs. He's the CEO of AAPAURA and a former senior policy advisor to the Federal Minister of Innovation, Science, and Technology. joins me in our Toronto studio. Good morning. Matt, thanks so much. for having me. The Prime Minister says that AI will transform our lives. Is he right? It's already transforming our lives. It's transforming our workplaces. It's transforming education.

So yeah, I mean, this is the moment we're in it. And I was happy to be there with the Prime Minister and Minister Solomon yesterday morning. It was actually Toronto General Hospital where they were talking a lot about how AI is already reshaping health care. And so from your perspective, he says in part this is about AI being for everyone and that everyone needs to benefit, not just a select few. How is the strategy going to do that? The strategy is trying to cover a lot of bases at the same time, right? They're trying to educate Canadians across the country. They're trying to protect Canadians online with online safety bills, digital privacy rules.

They're also trying to simultaneously increase adoption from small businesses and grow Canadian champions and form international alliances. That's a lot of things to try and do. I think that the government has, again, tried to make a number of bets here. I think that's a good thing. Again, they got a lot of inputs. So I think we're going to see a lot of outputs. One of the questions for me is, are they making any big bets, right? When you try to do a lot of, we're trying to water everything evenly.

Do you grow anything to scale? And so, again, I see a strategy that's trying to do a lot, but I definitely want to dive deeper into the details. The big bets are interesting. You wear a number of different hats, but one of them is from the industry itself. And so what are people in the industry? There's been concern that this technology is being developed here, but then it's being scaled up and exploited elsewhere. What do people in the industry here want to see from that? Canadians have largely developed a lot of the key tech behind AI, including deep learning, neural networks, but we haven't commercialized it, right? it's largely being commercialized by American and Chinese companies. And so one of the key questions for Canadian business, I think were people generally favorable to

this new funding being announced? Yeah, great. This is $500 million, this tech growth fund. $500 million is correct. But again, if you look at the global amount of capital, that's a rounding error, right? And the question is the devil's in the details. Is this going to be government-led investment? If you look at the UK, what they've done and said is they did indeed put about 500 million pounds,

probably about 800 million Canadian into a similar fund, but they did hire professional investors to actually invest it because sometimes these AI deals are coming together in the matter of weeks. And so, again, if we're just putting a bunch of money in this, but not building the speed that we need to in global markets, this is a global competition. And Canadians often have been sometimes losing out in that global competition. So should Canadians and should the Canadian government have an equity stake in something like this? I think an equity stake is a good thing. It actually does serve this goal of AI for all because right now, again, we're seeing a lot of private capital being the drivers of this, even though a lot of this AI research was publicly funded. And so if there

are sensible investments that do come from the Canadian government, all Canadians then have an equity stake and will benefit from these technologies if they do grow. What about this idea of digital sovereignty? This is the sense that you control the tech and you control your country's own digital future. What are the details that's, I mean, it's a big idea, but what are the details that stand out to you in this? Absolutely. So at the University of Toronto, we published a report called Sovereign by Design, where we tried to dive deeper into this concept. We talked about a few different dimensions of digital sovereignty. Can't go through all them, but I'll mention a couple.

One is jurisdictional sovereignty. So do Canadians own laws? Are they the ones that actually apply or are we being governed under foreign jurisdiction? Sometimes that can happen if, let's say, we don't actually own the data infrastructure that is empowering the services that we use. And so I think about, again, the infrastructure. But then I also think about the laws.

And so right now Canada has 22-year-old privacy laws. We actually haven't updated this for AI, let alone before social media and iPhones. I think that's a huge gap for Parliament to try and solve. and so hopefully the government does try to address this through the strategy. But that's, again, that's actually protecting our data sovereignty, which is health and financial data. Again, in the long list of things that the strategy is trying to do, the government wants to boost the percentage of Canadian businesses that are adopting AI from 12% right now up to what, 60% by 2034. There was a survey that came out this week from the management consulting firm Bain Company.

It said the companies are broadly finding that the cost savings from adopting AR are failing to really meet the expectations that people had, that according to the report, the technology works, but the value hasn't arrived. What's going on there? Why aren't those companies that initially saw this as a way, perhaps through reducing headcount and being, as they say, more efficient? Why aren't they seeing those savings? Why aren't they seeing the juice come out of the squeeze?

Absolutely. It's similar to an MIT study that came out last year. It was something like 95% of pilots are failing in AI. We're still early in the adoption curve. I've heard, you know, and I looked at lots of data where there are successes, but I think a lot of big companies in particular they might make these layoffs and suddenly, you know, there's a lot of hype, right? Again, there's a lot of money. Trillions of dollars has been funneled into these enterprises. So sometimes I think that that sale, that hype can can overreach, you know, what's

actually possible. I'll just say one thing quickly is we are seeing this change right now from AI chatbots. So again, you can talk to them, you can try and do research. They can write for you to AI agents, so things that I can actually do things, perform tasks. Exactly. And so we're still in middle of that transformation map. So two final things on this just briefly. One is the promise and then the peril. You were again at this hospital yesterday where AI is already being used, right? What is the promise of this technology for this country? If we get this right, Matt, what the outcome of that looks like is actual gains in, again, reducing health care wait times, saving lives, improving transportation, reducing traffic. And so what I want to call out was the vital platform developed here at St.

Mike's. They've actually built a platform that's analyzed three billion data points and helped reduce mortality rates and improve hospital allocation of resources. That's a good thing. And AI makes that possible. But again, what they've built is a nonprofit organization that leverages that data, knits together different hospital networks that were formally disconnected. And that's how they can do that analysis. That's a great use of AI.

So the peril is that people are worried about job losses, worried about data centers hoovering up their water and their electricity. They're worried about it making us not as smart as we could possibly. be, right? That it's dumbing down society in some ways people are concerned about. How do you create this sense of trust? This is one of the things that the prime minister has been talking about, building trust. A lot of people believe that this technology is harmful. So how do you build that sense of trust in this technology? It's a huge challenge, especially in Canada. So they looked at 47 different countries. We were actually 44 in adoption at 47 number 42 on trust. So we have a particular

problem in Canada. We've got a lot of work to do. This national AI literacy program to try and train a million Canadians, I think that's a great start. Passing some laws. that actually try to regulate the hard parts of this technology. So online safety for our kids and privacy. But do you understand why people don't trust the technology? Absolutely. It's new. It's a little bit scary, sometimes very scary.

And I also think for data centers, companies and both governments and companies have to really sell, why is this value? What is your community actually getting back from it? There's a huge environmental load that can be an energy load. And so I think one of the pushes around companies actually bring their own investments in the energy grid and production, that's a start. But there's a lot more trust building to do. no doubt. Jackson,

thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Jackson Codd is the CEO of AAPTCHAO Senior Fellow at the Monk School of Global Affairs and a former senior policy advisor to the Federal Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry. Imagine you've been charged with a crime and the only witness pointing the finger at you isn't even human.

I remember thinking, are you serious? What is this thing? It's something artificial, created by a mysterious Canadian. and it's coming for all of us. A life-defining technology. Crime as we know it will never be the same. I'm like, oh my God, he's lying.

From CBC's Uncover, The Expert Witness. Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. Taylor Owen was a member of the task force that advised the federal government on this new AI strategy. He is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media Ethics and Communication at McGill University and founding director of the Central. for media, technology, and democracy. Taylor, good morning to you. You told our colleague David Cochran yesterday

that these are your words. I think they got the moment right to a certain degree. This is a big strategy, but what did the government get right? So I think they are right that AI is a transformative technology that is being developed at a pace and scale that is almost unprecedented.

and that that demands a pretty comprehensive governance and government approach to how to manage this change. And I think the core proposition at the start of this strategy is right that we both need to build and adopt AI in Canada. And on that, there's a lot of detail, as we just heard in this proposal, a lot of initiatives to adopt and build and build. teach and use AI, all of which needs to be done. But the other side of the proposition they made is that adoption demands trust. And right now, as Jackson just said, Canadians don't trust AI to a remarkable degree compared to other countries. And on that, there is almost no detail in this strategy. It's left for future legislation. for future initiatives. So I think the proposition is right. Trust and adoption are not mutually

exclusive. They demand one another. But on one, there's far more details in this strategy than on the other. You and I spoke about this before. When he first became the AI minister, Evan Solomon, talked about moving away from what he called over-indexing on warnings and regulation. But lately, he has acknowledged that, to your point, there are real concerns about this technology, about data privacy, misinformation, the safety of chatbots, to say nothing about the environmental sledgehammer that many people think this will bring to their communities. Do you think the government struck the balance right on those concerns

while also trying to foster a homegrown AI industry that doesn't create the technology and then just take it south of the border? I think balance is the right word here. I mean, I think they stated those two needs in Canada, but they provided details or far more details for one than the other. So just take the missing disinformation piece and the challenge of deepfakes and election integrity.

Huge problem. The Prime Minister mentioned it in his remarks yesterday. The integrity of the information flowing through society is a core challenge to AI. And it gets one sentence in the entire strategy that we will do things, they say, to address that problem. Doesn't say what, doesn't say when, doesn't say how. So I think there's a statement.

of that side of the challenge, of the trust side and the safety side of the challenge, it's far short, short, short, on details on that side. And ultimately, part of that is because those details are really hard. It's not easy to regulate this stuff, as we've talked about before. But I don't want to undersell the fact that they stated that these are real challenges. Because as you, as you just mentioned, there's, it's been a process for this government over the last year, as AI has evolved very quickly and affected our lives over the last year in a pretty dramatic way, I think their view that we have over-indexed for regulation has changed quite dramatically. And they are working on big pieces of legislation to regulate AI right now.

They just don't detail it in this strategy, which I think is sort of a lost opportunity to demonstrate how they are going to do it alongside the adoption details. So there's a whole generation that will inherit this technology. They will grow up with this technology around them. And I want to bring in somebody who can speak to that. This is from the Gen Z. AI project, which is an initiative that was run jointly out of your center at McGill, as well as Simon Fraser University. We brought together young people across the country to talk about their priorities when it comes to AI. Nunso Mora was one of the project's youth fellows and is in Edmonton this morning. Nonso, good morning to you.

Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. You helped facilitate, as I said, these citizen assemblies with young people from across the country. What did you hear from them about their hopes and their fears when it comes to AI? Yes, so I had the pleasure of working with our project leads, Helen Hayes and Ferguson Limo, along with my team, Alec, Julian, and Maddie. And yet, we traveled across Canada for Canada's first of our National Youth Assembly. And there were some really poignant points that came forward from participants who were between the ages of 17th. to 23. The first worries were really about this conversation of transparency. I think when you're

looking at AI, there is a lack of understanding of who has control, who has access, and what are these companies actually gaining when they are taking and using your information? And then you kind of brought this forward a bit earlier, but we had this conversation about cognitive offloading. And young people are feeling incredibly stressed by the presence of AI within their lives, especially in education, but also on how they think and how they engage with their communities. Is that the phrase that people use cognitive offloading? Essentially that you don't have to do the work, the machine will do it for you. Well, yeah, I think when AI was first brought forward and you had these big conversations

by these, you know, AI leaders, it was that the technologies would do kind of the menial work. And then young people and, you know, Canadians or citizens would be able to kind of do the creative, heavy lifting and to kind of curate. But there has been a flip where a lot of young people feel as though the meal work has been taken by them in many ways, that labor and, and And all of this creation process, the creative process, the ideating process has been given to AI to do. And it's affecting how they think and work in schools. Is your sense that if you take a look at the strategy and what the prime minister said yesterday, that that trust piece is at the center of that strategy, that the concerns that you heard from people are being actually recognized and incorporated into how they build trust, how the government builds trust in this technology?

I mean, based on what participants had said, I do not think so, if I must be honest. I think the expectation that young people should trust AI without the proper regulatory infrastructures or compliance mechanisms in Canada already. It kind of feels like the car is becoming before the horse. In many ways, when it comes to trust, I feel like if everyone, young people know exactly how AI works, and it's not a literacy issue that they're dealing with. It's not that young people don't understand what these tools are. It's that they understand so much.

and they're scared of what they can do if they don't have proper regulation to protect them. So pick up on that. How do you build that trust? Because there was a literacy program that was part of this, right, to teach AI literacy, particularly to young people. But your suggestion is that young people already know how this technology works. Yeah, they knew so well that, like, the main worry, and that was kind of highlighted at the forum in Vancouver, which was on privacy, is that we understand how much information we're giving up. We understand how certain tools like generative AI work. But the worry is that by understanding it, we also know that there is nothing that can kind of support the new information that's coming out,

worries about how certain deepfakes or digital infrastructures are made. And for them, what they're really interested in seeing is Canadian infrastructures and even on the question of digital sovereignty, certain aspects in Canada that are made to protect not only themselves because they were 17 to 23, but also children as well. And there was a few lines that really talked about protecting Canadians besides that first pillar, and it was quite light there. Taylor, Owen, the word trust appears something like 42 times in this strategy document. So as you listen to Nunso talk about the concerns that her generation has about AI, how do you build that trust? So I think trust is both a governance imperative. You can't just tell people to trust things.

you have to make these systems accountable and make them trustworthy. So that is a set of policy actions around online safety and data protections and so on and so forth that need to be implemented. But trust is also about the governance of the technology itself. And I think the project, non-so is a part of leading, is it tells us so much about the hunger I think people have to be actively engaged in the governance of this technology. This is not something that people want to leave just to governments to decide. It's so profoundly transformative to our own lives that we need legitimate mechanisms of getting citizens engaged in the governance process itself. And so I think trust has both sides of this. We need to ensure safety, and there's no question about it, and we need to govern this technology democratically.

And ensuring that that is also part of the strategy is really critical, I think. None so, as I said at the beginning of the conversation, yours is the generation that's going to live your life in a world filled with AI. Just finally, how optimistic are you feeling about that future right now? I mean, I had the pleasure of working with so many young Canadians over the past eight, nine months. And I'm quite optimistic about how they're going to be moving within society, especially with AI. But I do want us to look at the question of urgency, right? there is this push for urgency within Canada that a lot of young people are not as interested in because with urgency comes a relinquishing of some safeguards that are really important to put forward.

Many young people understand how AI can work. I don't think it's necessary to enforce it in every single jurisdiction of Canadian businesses and Canadian infrastructure. There are a lot of aspects of being human and engaging on a human relationship basis that should be put forward. And that's what young people value. It was actually the participation within the program. that really supported how they engaged and thought around things.

And if there's a bit more care with how we go about enforcing AI as not just an innovation tool, but also something that leads to a bigger regulatory gap that will need to be filled, I think young people feel safer. And Canadians will also have a lot more trust in the government's role within creating these innovative tools while also pushing forward their safety too. This is really interesting. So it's great to talk to you about it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And Taylor, good to talk to you as always. Likewise. Nunso Mora is a graduate student and the Faculty of Education of McGill and a Youth Fellow with the Gen Z-A-I project. And Taylor Owen is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media Ethics and Communication at McGill University and founding director of the Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy. You've been listening to the current podcast.

My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.