Ottawa’s AI strategy includes more than $2.3-billion for training, adoption and startups

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The federal government will spend more than $2.3-billion through its new national artificial intelligence strategy, which lays out plans to increase business adoption, provide free training and literacy skills to Canadians and boost funding options for start-ups.

The government is billing the highly anticipated, long-delayed strategy as a pragmatic approach to a technology that could have profound implications for society and the economy. Ottawa aims to instill trust in AI among Canadians, without falling into an overly positive or negative view of the technology. It describes its strategy as “AI for All.”

The plan, originally targeted for release at the end of last year, was formally unveiled Thursday morning in Toronto.

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Ottawa’s strategy covers the six pillars defined in the government’s spring economic update: protecting Canadians from harm, AI skills training, business adoption, digital sovereignty, helping AI companies scale and forging relationships with like-minded allies.

While protecting Canadians is the first pillar, the document does not propose new regulatory measures for AI. Instead, it reiterates Ottawa’s intention to introduce new privacy and online harms laws, neither of which has been tabled yet.

The strategy provides no timeline for doing so. It says forthcoming bills will enshrine a fundamental right to privacy – a topic of much discussion during the last effort to update legislation under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – while strengthening citizens’ control over data, and updating online safety rules.

“You’ve got to approach something of the size and scope of the AI transformation with a sense of humility. We know that we can’t solve every issue here in one strategy,” AI Minister Evan Solomon said in an interview. “It’s designed to evolve with new challenges and new opportunities.”

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The strategy also sets a number of goals, such as helping to create 250,000 jobs through AI adoption by 2031. But the impact of AI on the labour market is highly uncertain, with many economists debating the categories of jobs that will be affected and how, as well as what new roles will be created.

Mr. Solomon said the government used modelling from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development based on high AI adoption rates to arrive at that number, but did not do a similar projection for job loss, saying it was hard to predict. “The most important thing we’re doing, to mitigate against any kind of disruption with any new technology, is to invest in workers and invest in training,” he said.

There are new spending initiatives, though not all of the items are accounted for in the plan yet. The government will establish a $500-million Canadian Tech Growth Fund to provide capital to the country’s most promising AI companies and, at times, take equity stakes in them. The strategy says this additional source of investment could encourage start-ups to remain in Canada, which has been a consistent challenge. A study last year found that Canadian tech founders are leaving the country at an accelerating rate.

“The government’s focus on the growth-stage financing gap reflects a challenge many of our members know well,” said Benjamin Bergen, chief executive of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association. “Done right, these measures can crowd in domestic private investment and help more of Canada’s best companies scale.”

Also, the government will enable the Canada Strong Fund, a $25-billion sovereign wealth fund announced in April, to make investments to support “national champions.”

The largest single expenditure listed is an additional $700-million for an existing program called the AI Compute Access Fund, which helps small- and medium-sized businesses cover the computer processing costs associated with AI.

The fund was announced in April, 2024, with $300-million. It was flooded with applications when it opened the following year, and companies said the process was moving too slowly, especially given the rapid pace of AI development. The fund only announced its first disbursements last month, when the government allotted $66-million for 44 companies.

“We learned a lot from the first iteration, and we are aiming to be much more efficient and much quicker this time,” Mr. Solomon said.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has called AI the “defining technology of our era,” and last year appointed Mr. Solomon, a fellow rookie politician, to serve as the country’s first-ever minister of AI. While Canada has historically been strong in AI research, the commercial gains have mostly gone to U.S. tech companies such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Canadians, meanwhile, have mixed feelings about a technology that could bring about benefits in health care, scientific discovery and productivity, but also eliminate jobs, spread misinformation and erode critical thinking skills. (The strategy notes that half of Canadians think AI is a threat to humanity.)

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The strategy is an attempt to address those concerns while pushing ahead with adoption for both businesses and citizens. Ottawa says it will create a national AI literacy initiative to offer entry-level training to Canadians, including students and educators, for example, and invest $30-million into CanCode, a federal program that funds non-profits providing digital skills training to youth. Post-secondary students will have access to unspecified but “trusted AI agents.”

Ottawa calls its strategy “pro-worker,” and says it will give Canadians the opportunity to “thrive in an AI-enabled economy.”

The government aims to create up to 90,000 AI-related job opportunities, including for students, through existing initiatives. It also says Ottawa will “assess training and upskill offerings” for workers to “scale-up employer-led training,” with a focus on AI.

At a roundtable consultation with Mr. Solomon last month, union leaders advocated for the federal government to pass laws that require employers to retrain workers who have lost their jobs because of AI, and inform unions and workers before the implementation of AI systems. In a submission document to the government, the Canadian Union of Public Employees said that it was also critical that companies that obtain public funding for AI development be barred from cutting jobs.

Those recommendations are not present in strategy.

For businesses, it allots $500-million through the country’s regional development agencies to boost adoption and commercialization of AI. The strategy sets a goal of increasing business use of AI from 12 per cent today to 60 per cent by 2034. Ottawa has identified “priority sectors” where it says strategic investment can build commercial success, including life sciences, energy, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and robotics.

As for government AI use, Ottawa will create the Prime Minister’s Innovation Fellows program to recruit technical talent to help procure and deploy new AI applications within the public sector.

A new $50-million effort called the Creative Technology Program will support “Canadian creators in using AI on their own terms,” the strategy document says. But it does not provide further detail.

The government will also create an AI Missions Program, described as a way to back “high-impact projects that deliver significant public good.” The first $200-million will go to health care initiatives, with other priority sectors to follow.

Ottawa will provide $100-million to the Canadian Institute for Health Information for a project to securely connect data sets for clinical trials and health research. As the Globe and Mail previously reported, the strategy will expand a project called Vital to share health data so that researchers can mine it and use AI to improve patient outcomes and ease strain on the system.

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Sovereign infrastructure, meanwhile, has been a priority for the government. The term generally refers to Canadian control over data and the facilities powering cloud computing and AI applications, a field dominated by U.S. tech companies.

The strategy references previously announced initiatives, such as building public-sector computing infrastructure and striking deals with the private sector to get data centres built. Ottawa’s support will vary depending on the project. These deals are being finalized, according to the strategy document, and will provide 850 megawatts of computing capacity by 2030, and scale up to 2.3 gigawatts.

The government is building on Canada’s AI research ecosystem, too. It will increase the number of CIFAR chairs, a program to recruit talent to Canada, to nearly 200 researchers from 130, while expanding an existing program called the Global Talent Stream to speed the entry of AI talent from abroad.

The Canadian AI Safety Institute, which launched in 2024, will get another $50-million to study risks and evaluate models, while the strategy says that Canada will “work on” transparency issues, including watermarking AI-generated content.

Funding for the Standards Council of Canada’s AI program, which involves growing a quality assurance ecosystem, will be renewed. Ottawa will create a certification program for Canadians to identify trustworthy AI products, too.

The three national AI institutes, meanwhile, will receive an additional $130-million for commercialization programs.

Finally, the strategy says that Canada will work with “aligned democracies” to pool research, talent, compute and procurement power to offer a “credible alternative” to those who dominate the AI landscape. (The U.S. and China are seen as the world’s leaders on AI.) This effort includes work on open-source AI development and adoption, which generally refers to systems that are cheaper to use and modify, and provide an alternative to private-sector offerings.

The strategy has been a long time coming. Mr. Solomon said last September that it would be released by the end of 2025. He appointed a task force to provide recommendations within 30 days, and launched a public consultation.

But Mr. Solomon faced criticism for the lack of Black experts on the panel and the tight timelines for public consultation. Some civil society groups refused to participate in the government’s process and set up their own public consultation.

The government’s public consultation received more than 11,300 submissions, and regulation and oversight of AI was a running theme. “Many expressed strong skepticism toward generative AI, demanding strict regulation, penalties for noncompliance and frameworks that uphold Canadian values,” according to a summary published by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.

The strategy is the latest large AI spending package from the federal government in the past decade. In 2017, Ottawa launched the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, which helped establish the three national research institutes. This was followed by a $2.4-billion package in 2024 that mostly contained money to attract and build data centres and subsidize computing costs for businesses.

With a report from Vanmala Subramaniam