The Pope prays about it. Companies around the world are betting on it.
And the occupant of a newly created federal ministry with few precedents in the world has been tasked with harnessing it.
“It,” being artificial intelligence, the digital tool and tech buzzword that promises to do more things faster with powerful supercomputers, streamlining and potentially automating costly and time-consuming tasks.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has said the technology will supercharge his fast-and-vast transformation of the Canadian economy, and he has tapped former CBC broadcaster Evan Solomon for the role.
In a mandate letter to new cabinet appointees Wednesday, Carney wrote that Ottawa would lean heavily on the super powers of artificial intelligence to increase government productivity and create new Canadian jobs.
The creation of a dedicated AI ministry is still something of a rarity in the world, but it has been well received by Canada’s tech sector, said Ryan Grant, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Queen’s University.
“It’s good to see that the government is putting an emphasis on AI,” he said in an interview. “It’s going to be a really important thing coming up.”
But what, exactly, Solomon’s approach to the job might be is not entirely clear.
Through a press secretary the MP for Toronto Centre, declined the Star’s interview requests. Canada’s AI ministry is so new it has no website and only the faintest outlines of a Wikipedia page.
Even ChatGPT, that novel question-and-answer tool demonstrating AI’s speedy capabilities, suggested in response to this reporter’s inquiry to stay tuned for more details because Solomon’s public comments on the topic “are not readily available.”
It naturally takes time to settle into a new role, but there is little time to lose.
The pace of recent AI developments and their potential impact on everything from industry to security to health care to the state of a country’s democracy has left even the sector’s leading experts struggling to keep up.
Canada is home to a number of AI superstar researchers, including 2024 Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto, and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio, chair of an international expert panel on the safety risks of AI.
But the country requires urgent investment if it hopes to remain competitive in an international race to develop a technology some have likened to the advent of the steam engine, the automobile or the nuclear bomb.
Queen’s University’s Grant likened the challenge facing the government in developing AI in Canada to the game of hockey.
“You need players, and you need a place to play. Up until now, we’ve been training a whole bunch of players, and we have some of the best in the world, winning Nobel Prizes and doing all that stuff,” he said. “But we haven’t been training anybody to make big arenas.”
Those AI ‘arenas’ are the supercomputers and the data centres that house them. The infrastructure requires vast amounts of energy to conduct the billions of lightning-fast calculations that make the technology so effective.
Canada came 23rd in the world — far behind other G7 nations — in the most recent rankings of supercomputing power, though an updated list is due for release next month.
To put this in perspective, the U.S. leads the world with 6,478 teraflops of computing power (a teraflop is the measurement of a computer’s ability to handle a trillion mathematical operations per second).
Canada, sandwiched between Israel and India, claims 39 teraflops.
That lack of capacity has left most Canadian AI actors reliant on American supercomputers, according to a 2024 report from The Dais, a public policy think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“We’re playing in a high school arena with world-class NHL players,” said Grant, extending the AI-hockey analogy. “And you’re like, ‘Why are we playing at the local rec centre when we should be selling out the Rogers Centre?’”
A $2 billion investment by the Liberal government last December provides a long-overdue boost, promising to build AI infrastructure, support promising companies and help smaller businesses incorporate AI into their operations.
The Liberal party’s election platform acknowledgment that “we used to lead the world but have fallen behind in important ways” builds expectations of a coming intensification of AI activity.
The government has pledged to use the technology to improve government service delivery, speed up work tempos and cut costs. There is also promise of a 20 per cent tax credit for businesses that adopt AI to create jobs or improve operations.
Internationally, the creation of a government ministry specifically focused on artificial intelligence sends a serious signal to the world — and to investors more importantly — about Canada’s commitment.
The United Arab Emirates was the first country to appoint a dedicated AI minister in 2017. The task handed to then-27-year-old Omar al-Olama was to transform the Gulf nation into a world leader in the field by 2031.
The Global AI Index, which ranks countries using variables like talent, infrastructure, government strategy and commercial activity, suggests the UAE is punching well above its weight — having claimed billions in foreign investment — though it still trails larger, more developed nations.
The United Kingdom and France both have created junior ministers responsible for artificial intelligence and have been leaders in the field by hosting annual global AI summits in 2023 at Bletchley Park— the U.K. base of Second World War allied codebreakers that sparked the field of artificial intelligence — and in Paris earlier this year.
But as Canadians have discovered in the tariff and trade war with the United States, the most vital reasons to invest in AI are to assert Canadian sovereignty, values or realities in a world where long-time friends can no longer be trusted.
That could be as simple as using AI meant to more quickly build homes or set up farms that are uniquely suited to Canada’s particular weather patterns, as complex as defending against Canadian-focused online disinformation campaigns or as urgent as building security tools to defend against physical or cyber attacks from foreign nations.
Then there are the persistent concerns about safeguarding personal information, about the use of copyright-protected material or relying on data that is skewed, biased or could have unforeseen harmful impacts.
Grant said he expects Solomon will be focused domestically on boosting artificial intelligence infrastructure, attracting and retaining top talent, inciting business to use these tools and ensuring that Canadians “become knowledge producers, instead of consumers of AI.”
But with such great promise and the most vague of road maps, Solomon will be boldly going where few have gone before.
“It’s such early days with some of this technology that just being there and being present and being a leader in this space will help us have more influence on what we want AI to be globally as well.”
