The long-delayed federal artificial intelligence strategy is here, and the federal government wants the youngest Canadians to get familiar with the new technology early on in life.
Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday unveiled Canada’s new AI strategy. The document lists six “pillars” of Canada’s AI strategy; the second pillar has to do with building AI skills among Canadians.
The federal AI strategy lays out the objective of building “foundational AI literacy” as a key priority for the Canadian government, with schools playing an important role.
The vehicle for school training will be the CanCode program, which funds initiatives for not-for-profit organizations to train both students and teachers from kindergarten to Grade 12 in digital skills.
“Canada will invest $30 million in CanCode to fund not-for-profit organizations to deliver free digital skills training — including coding, AI, and emerging technologies — to youth from kindergarten to grade 12 and their educators, with emphasis on reaching underrepresented groups,” the document says.
There’s little specific detail on what that AI training could look like in kindergarten in the strategy, and educational curriculums are under provincial — not federal — jurisdiction.
Global News reached out to AI Minister Evan Solomon’s office asking for more information on what types of uses the government envisions children learning in kindergarten.
This article will be updated when a response is received.
The proposals in the AI strategy were more a “message” to provinces rather than concrete policy proposals, said Elizabeth Dhuey, professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
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“It’s not about bringing AI bots into the K through 12, at least I hope not. That would be a bad choice. It’s more about teaching kids about safety, why there’s bias in AI, more overarching, broad kind of issues,” Dhuey said.
“It’s a little less scary than the actual headlines might tell you.”
While AI is already being adopted in some Canadian classrooms, teachers are generally playing catch-up with a rapidly evolving technology, she said.
“We’re more worried about reacting and trying to catch cheaters and look for academic dishonesty versus trying to figure out how to actually implement it in our classrooms,” Dhuey said.
The government will provide free AI literacy training, including “doubling K-12 teacher training to more than 3,000 educators.”
However, she added that using chatbots in early classrooms could lead to a “bad situation” for learning outcomes since it takes out intellectual friction from the learning process.
“You really need to actually suffer with the problem. You need to iterate and learn and struggle while you’re learning. And that’s where the learning process comes in,” she said.
The use of AI in classrooms has been associated with worsening social interactions and development among K-12 students.
According to a report by the Center for Democracy and Technology released in October 2025, more than half of students agreed that using AI in classrooms led them to feel less connected with their teachers and around half of teachers were worried about a decrease in peer-to-peer connections among students.
Three in four teachers were also worried that AI weakens critical thinking and research skills, while 71 per cent said AI use had increased their burden as they tried to ascertain whether a student’s work was their own.
An MIT study published in November 2025 found that using AI chatbots like ChatGPT erodes critical thinking skills, even among adults.
“Writing without assistance increased brain network interactions,” the study said.
“Writing with AI assistance, in contrast, reduces overall neural connectivity.”
The brain of someone using ChatGPT “might not go as deeply into the rich associative processes that unassisted creative writing entails,” the study said.
The consequences could be worse for kids, Dhuey warned.
“If these young kids are using it to do their coursework and they’re not learning how to do reading and writing, all that kind of stuff on their own, we’re going to be in bad shape,” she said.
A 2024 study published in Springer Nature journal found that children are “particularly susceptible to attributing human-like properties to AI, undermining their expectations of these technologies.”
The use of these technologies may hamper kids’ interpersonal and social interactions, the study found.
“When children engage in learning activities with AI, they may encounter inappropriate, inaccurate, or biased content,” it added.
As the negative impacts of social media use on kids become a topic of conversation, several jurisdictions are now looking to ban social media for minors. Dhuey said she hopes Canada has conversations on how to safely engage with AI sooner rather than later.
“What I think we need to do is have a reasonable conversation that we didn’t have about social media, about AI, saying, ‘OK, we’re here, we are doing it. Kids are going to be using it. How do we steer children and young adults appropriately so that they learn what they need to learn while having access to the tool?’” she said.
Having more in-person learning and assignments and regulating the use of privately owned, for-profit AI can be a start, particularly since parents are worried about their kids being used like a data mining resource by big tech.
“It’s bad enough that we get tracked with our cellphones and they know exactly what I’m buying, but they don’t know a ton about my children. And they will, as soon as we start letting this stuff in,” Dhuey said.
