Canada publishes new national AI strategy with focus on trust and sovereignty
The Government of Canada has released its latest national AI strategy, setting out how it will work to drive artificial intelligence across the economy over the next 10 years, with a particular focus on tech sovereignty and public trust.
‘Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All’, released on 4 June, includes more than C$2bn (US$1.4bn) in spending for programmes to scale up AI use across the public and private sectors and to increase AI literacy, and includes a range of both already-announced and new measures.
In the foreword of the strategy, Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, wrote that Canadians want “safe, reliable, and sovereign AI” and the “best tools to build a prosperous future guided by [the country’s] values”.
“This is Canada’s AI for All moment,” he said. “Let’s seize it.”
The strategy focuses on six pillars including safeguarding democracy; powering shared national prosperity; building a sovereign AI foundation; and fostering trusted partnerships and global alliances.
It also covers five areas in which the government plans to concentrate investment in AI, comprising health and life sciences; energy and natural resources; transportation; agriculture; and manufacturing and robotics.
AI in the public sector
The strategy includes a section on ‘transforming public service delivery with AI’, and notes that “AI offers an opportunity to improve how governments operate – from processing applications faster to better understanding public needs – while keeping people at the centre of decision-making”.
It says Canada hopes to lead by example in responsible AI use within the public sector and that it will modernise how government identifies, procures, and deploys AI tools – “while ensuring they meet high standards for transparency, privacy, and accountability” – to reduce administrative burden and improve service delivery.
The strategy says the procurement and delivery of AI solutions will be accelerated across the federal government through the Office of Digital Transformation, and that it will “invest in people by reforming how government recruits and supports technical talent to build the internal expertise needed to use AI responsibly”.
One of the action points set out in the strategy is the planned launch of the Prime Minister’s Innovation Fellows Program “to recruit and deploy technical talent that rapidly builds the internal muscle, operational capacity, and commercial fluency required to procure, evaluate, and deploy AI systems effectively within government”.
Read more: Canada launches first AI strategy for federal public service
AI in the Canadian economy: adoption lagging
The strategy underscores the role that AI could play in Canada’s prosperity. The country’s digital sector employs around 800,000 workers, contributing more than C$140bn (US$100bn) to GDP, with 150,000 jobs “directly associated with AI”.
However, it adds that Canada has yet to fill “real and exploitable gaps” that would allow it to become a world leader in AI.
Though the strategy notes that Canada “helped invent modern AI” and has a strong track record in AI research, it highlights that the country’s potential to innovate has “not yet translated into broad use”.
“Only 12% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or services between mid-2024 and mid-2025”, it says, though it adds that 14.5% planned to do so by mid-2026.
Adoption is lower among small and medium-sized enterprises. “Only about 8% of Canadian SMEs have adopted AI, well behind Nordic leaders (29-42%), Germany (26%), and France (18%),” the strategy states.
The strategy outlines the creation of a C$500m (US$359m) Canadian Tech Growth Fund to help close the gap in scale-up capital that it says hinders Canada’s “most promising” AI firms, and sets out that the federal government intends to act as a “strategic anchor customer”, leveraging its Buy Canadian policy to scale-up domestic businesses and support the global export of AI solutions.
Read more: Canada aims to integrate digital sovereignty into government decision-making
Public trust in AI – and a greater need for AI literacy
“Trust is the north star of this strategy,” it states.
The strategy emphasises that for Canada to “thrive in the era of AI”, its citizens need to “trust in its promise”, and cites a study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne that ranked Canada 42nd of 47 countries on trust in AI systems.
It describes public sentiment on AI as “cautious to sceptical” and says that “Canadians are roughly evenly split on whether AI is good for society (34%) or harmful (36%), and half regard AI as a threat to humanity”.
While “initial adoption has happened; deeper, confident integration has not, and low literacy and low trust are the binding constraints,” it says.
In the KPMG-University of Melbourne study ranked Canada 44th of 47 countries on AI training and literacy. Just under a quarter of Canadians (24%) report having received any form of AI training, while fewer than four in ten say they have “moderate or high knowledge of AI”, and less than half believe they can use AI tools effectively.
The government plans to help citizens to become “informed participants in an AI-enabled society”, rather than “passive users” of the technology, through the provision of practical skills that will enable them to “identify bias, misinformation, privacy risks, and unsafe uses” and to use AI to “solve problems, start businesses, improve services [and] participate in the economy”.
Key actions in this area include the creation of a national AI literacy initiative that will make entry-level AI training accessible to all Canadians, and the investment of C$30m (US$2m) through CanCode to enable not-for-profit organisations to deliver free digital skills training to children.
This training will include coding, AI, and emerging technologies, and will have an “emphasis on reaching underrepresented groups”.
Read more: Trusting the process, trusting the product: how governments can win over the public on AI
AI sovereignty
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney noted that “AI could be weaponised against us”, if the country continues to depend on technologies that it does not own.
The strategy warns that much of Canada’s “compute, cloud, and connectivity” sit “beyond Canadian borders”, noting in particular that its “researchers train models on foreign cloud platforms” and that sensitive data is often stored in foreign jurisdictions.
The government announced in April that it plans to build “a world-leading public supercomputer”, that would give Canadian researchers and SMEs “access to secure, sovereign, high-performance compute for cutting-edge public and industry-driven innovation”.
The government also intends to support the construction of “large-scale AI data centres” to significantly scale up computing capacity by 2030.
“Prosperity and sovereignty in this era belong to nations that can leverage trust to adopt, build, and govern AI on their own terms,” the strategy says.
Read more: Governments of UK and Canada announce plans to secure AI sovereignty
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
