This article was first published by the Toronto Star.
AI and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon recently launched a national AI Strategy Task Force with a bold 30-day mandate to deliver recommendations.
He laid out an ambitious agenda: light-touch regulation to build trust, capital for startups and scale-ups, procurement for Canadian AI products and services, accessible compute power, and talent development.
It was a refreshingly broad vision, but risks overlooking the element that matters most: empowering every Canadian to use AI. Canada’s economic backdrop makes the stakes clear.
For half a century, our labour productivity growth has been the weakest in the G7. In recent years, real GDP per capita has actually fallen, leaving Canadians poorer than they were just a few years ago.
Declining productivity threatens not only household prosperity but also the public services, from health care to education, that define our national identity. Decades of conventional innovation policies have failed to reverse the trend. If we want different results, we need a different approach.
Artificial intelligence offers such an approach and minister Solomon’s five pillars — trust, capital, customers, compute, and talent — are all essential to building a functioning AI ecosystem.
We must stop thinking of AI as an industry and instead understand it as a general-purpose tool.
The mix of voices around the Task Force table, with representation from policy, academia and business, shows recognition of the breadth of the challenge. The 30-day timeline is a reflection of the urgency. These are positive signs that Ottawa is treating AI as the central economic priority that it is.
But to seize the opportunity we must stop thinking of AI as an industry and instead understand it as a general-purpose tool. Like electricity or the computer, it has the potential to transform every sector and every job.
Canada must focus less on building foundational models and more on using them to transform our economy. Our future lies in services and applications where adoption and entrepreneurship will create Canada’s next economic champions.
The conditions are ripe for broad adoption: free open-weight models are now widely available, and the cost of running them is plummeting thanks to advances in algorithms and chips.
But to truly capture these opportunities, Canada must focus on its people.
Large language models have already made AI accessible to all in plain language, and the real question is not whether Canada can nurture a few AI champions, but whether farmers, teachers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs in every corner of the country can put AI to work for them.
Other countries have realized that the most decisive factor in AI adoption is not infrastructure or even capital, but people. Singapore has embedded AI literacy as a civic skill in its “whole-of-nation” strategy. The U.K. has committed to providing essential AI skills to millions of workers. Taiwan is educating hundreds of thousands of teachers and students. Each is building an AI culture that empowers their citizens.
A Canadian AI strategy must put people at the centre.
That starts with a national literacy campaign to build awareness and trust. Libraries should host public lectures. Communities should hold interactive town halls. Public and private media must demystify the technology.
These grassroots efforts should be matched by bigger initiatives: AI in school curricula, tax credits and micro-credentials for workers, and open learning opportunities nationwide.
These steps would accelerate adoption in small and medium-sized businesses, where many of the most immediate productivity gains lie. They would foster entrepreneurship, as ordinary Canadians begin to reimagine existing industries around AI. They would also ensure that the benefits of this transformation are shared broadly, rather than captured by a narrow elite of AI owners and experts.
We must stop treating AI as an industry and instead recognize it as the transformative tool that can empower all Canadians.
The creation of the AI Strategy Task Force is an encouraging step. The breadth of expertise represented on the panel, even if weighted toward industry, offers hope that literacy and education will become central pillars of the national strategy.
Canada’s success will hinge on whether we can build an AI nation, where AI becomes embedded in our economy and our culture.
After all, Canada invented modern AI. Now, it must become as much a part of our national identity as maple syrup and hockey.
