Evan Solomon now has a year under his belt as Canada’s first minister of artificial intelligence.
The former TV journalist had to build this new cabinet portfolio from scratch, with no time to lose as AI moves into every corner of business, the home and our personal lives.
How is he doing so far? For starters, earlier this month, he stood with Prime Minister Mark Carney to release the government’s strategy, ‘AI for All.’
In a country that has been talking about AI leadership since 2017, getting a national strategy across the finish line is a genuine accomplishment. Now comes the hard work — turning a document into a vision that will make a difference to Canadians.
AI for All is a serious commitment. It allocates $2 billion, anchored by a $1 billion AI Compute Access Fund — serious funding that can help address one of the most important structural gaps in Canadian AI capacity — our dependence on American hyper-scalers to power our own economy with computer technology.
An additional $500 million is explicitly designed to push AI capacity beyond the Toronto–Montreal–Edmonton research triangle and into smaller provinces and cities. The strategy also commits to workforce training, deploying AI in health care, support for small business and data sovereignty.
That’s a lot. The strategy has practical measures and some vision. But will it be enough to make Canadians’ lives and our economy better through AI?
AI for All is implicitly a response to a bigger problem that Canadians now face. Call it what it is: the slow-motion decline of middle-class security.
The cost of housing, groceries, energy and basic services has outpaced wage growth for nearly two decades. Canadians who did everything right, got educated, worked hard and built what they thought were solid careers are finding that the math no longer works.
Our new AI strategy will only work if it does more than put chatbots and better search engines within everyone’s reach. It needs to do more than subsidize training and equipment. It needs to point the way to improve Canadians’ productivity.
To be fair, in his year on the job, Solomon has spoken often about the possibilities of AI and Canada’s potential to become a global leader.
But Canada has been speaking about AI leadership since 2017. Tech company founders have heard lots of promising speeches. Today Canada needs procurement decisions, regulatory clarity and capital programs that move at the speed of the technology, not the speed of government consultations.
As an accomplished journalist, Solomon understands a good story. The politician in Solomon is still learning that governing is a story with different timelines and requirements. Solomon was skilled and effective at holding government accountable for slow progress and vague answers, so he must know what he has to do.
He’ll know that government’s job in this picture is not to subsidize outcomes. It is to build the conditions in which Canadians can earn their own. Investing in infrastructure, high-level computing, achieving data governance and building research capacity are achievements that no single company can build alone. So Canada’s AI strategy must be to build the training pipeline that gives every Canadian a real path to AI competency regardless of where they live.
We need to make Canada the easiest country in the world to build an AI company in. A workforce that is subsidized is fragile. A workforce that is capable is resilient.
Canada has everything the AI economy needs: clean and abundant energy, vast land for data infrastructure, world-class universities, a multicultural workforce that can build for global markets and a political environment that serious investors trust.
If we do this right, through AI we can make Canada a country where a middle-class income is genuinely comfortable again. Our goal should not be just trying to keep up; we should be striving to lead.
This year, Solomon has the chance to make a difference.
