The future of Canada is contingent on whether we can construct a nation that incorporates AI into almost every aspect of our lives. Evan Solomon, the minister of AI and digital innovation, recently established a national AI Strategy Task Force with a daring 30-day goal to produce proposals. He outlined an ambitious plan that included talent development, affordable computational power, funding for startups and scale-ups, light-touch regulation to foster trust, and procurement for Canadian AI goods and services. It was a welcomely expansive vision, but it runs the risk of missing the most important component: enabling all Canadians to use AI. The stakes are obvious given Canada’s economic situation.
Our labor productivity growth has been the lowest in the G7 for fifty years. Canadians are now poorer than they were a few years ago due to a decline in real GDP per capita in recent years. In addition to household prosperity, declining productivity poses a threat to the public services that constitute our national identity, such as health care and education. The trend has not been reversed by decades of traditional innovation initiatives. A different strategy is required if we desire different outcomes. Such a strategy is provided by artificial intelligence, and developing a successful AI ecosystem requires all five of Minister Solomon’s pillars: trust, capital, customers, compute, and talent.
We must stop thinking of AI as an industry and instead understand it as a general-purpose tool.
The diversity of perspectives around the Task Force table, including representatives from business, academia, and policy, demonstrates an understanding of the scope of the problem. The urgency is reflected in the 30-day timeline. These are encouraging indications that Ottawa is making AI a top economic priority. But in order to take advantage of the opportunity, we need to view AI as a general-purpose tool rather than an industry. It has the power to change every industry and every career, just like electricity or computers. Canada has to concentrate more on applying core models to change our economy than on creating them. Our future is in services and applications, where entrepreneurship and adoption will produce Canada’s next economic titans.
The conditions are ideal for widespread adoption: free open-weight models are now publicly accessible, and advancements in chips and algorithms are driving down the cost of operating them. But Canada needs to prioritize its citizens if it is to fully seize these prospects. The true question is not whether Canada can produce a few AI champions, but rather whether farmers, teachers, small company owners, and entrepreneurs across the nation can use AI to their advantage. Large language models have already made AI accessible to everyone in plain language. Other nations have come to the conclusion that people, not infrastructure or even money, are the most important aspect in the adoption of AI. Singapore’s “whole-of-nation” policy incorporates AI literacy as a civic competence.
The United Kingdom has pledged to equip millions of workers with critical AI skills. Hundreds of thousands of instructors and students are being educated in Taiwan. Each is developing an AI culture that gives its people more authority. People must be at the center of any Canadian AI strategy. To establish knowledge and trust, a nationwide literacy campaign is the first step in that process. Public lectures ought to be held at libraries. Interactive town halls should be held in local communities. The technology has to be demystified by both public and private media. Bigger measures, like as tax credits and micro-credentials for workers, open learning opportunities across the country, and AI in school curricula, should complement these grassroots efforts. Since many of the most immediate productivity advantages occur in small and medium-sized enterprises, these actions would hasten adoption.
As regular Canadians start to rethink established industries around AI, they would encourage entrepreneurship. Additionally, they would make sure that the advantages of this change are distributed widely rather than being concentrated in the hands of a small group of AI specialists and owners. Instead of viewing AI as a business, we must acknowledge it as a revolutionary tool that has the potential to empower every Canadian. The establishment of the AI Strategy Task Force is a positive development. There is hope that literacy and education will become key pillars of the national strategy due to the panel’s wide range of experience, even though it is skewed toward industry.
The prosperity of Canada will depend on our ability to create an AI nation, where AI permeates both our economy and culture. After all, modern AI was invented in Canada. It now needs to become just as integral to our national identity as hockey and maple syrup.