Joe O’Connor is CEO and co-founder of Work Time Revolution, led the world’s largest four-day workweek trials and is co-author of Do More in Four
Alex Ryan is CEO of Synthetikos, co-founded Alberta CoLab and previously led systems innovation at MaRS.
Canada is spending more than $2-billion to get businesses to adopt artificial intelligence.
Asked how many jobs that might cost, AI Minister Evan Solomon said that part is hard to predict.
That encapsulates Canada’s AI strategy: a confident plan to accelerate and a shrug about where workers land.
The Canadian conversation about AI has mostly separated into two camps shouting past each other – one is certain the jobs apocalypse is here while the other is certain the productivity boom will lift everyone.
Neither provides a clear and compelling vision for who benefits and how. If this vision doesn’t come from government, most citizens can only assume it won’t be them benefiting.
Earlier this month, more than 200 economists (including 17 Nobel laureates) signed a statement warning that AI’s transformation of work could be larger than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into a fraction of the time.
As leading experts express urgency about the need for deliberate, collective choices rather than letting market forces decide the outcome, Ottawa remains agnostic on the question of how and where AI-enabled productivity gains are distributed.
As an adoption plan, AI for All (the name for the national strategy) is credible. Beyond the substantial funding commitment, it sets an ambition to lift business adoption to 60 per cent from 12 per cent by 2034,funds AI literacy at scale and creates Workforce Alliances that bring employers and unions to the same table.
But it sets growth targets with no accountability behind them. There is no displacement modelling. There are no conditions on the billions subsidizing adoption. The framework is largely voluntary.
The strategy asserts AI will augment human expertise rather than displace it, but assertion is not architecture.
It assumes employers will choose the pro-worker path that quarterly market pressure actively punishes.
The strategy names trust as its north star, but trust cannot be declared; it must be designed.
Despite intense public anxiety about the technology (67 per cent of Canadians say AI makes them nervous. According to Ipsos’s annual AI Monitor report and Canada ranks 42nd of 47 countries on trust in AI, according to a KPMG International report), Canadians are being asked for two different kinds of trust – trust in the technology itself and trust in the intentions of employers who adopt it, the preparedness of governments who plan for it and the economic outcomes that follow.
The strategy works hard on the first and says little about the second. For most working people, the fear is less about the risk that the technology will fail and more about what follows for them if it succeeds.
AI generates the potential for substantial time savings and productivity surpluses in every organization, along with a choice about what to do with the gains.
The default is extraction, treating AI as autocomplete for the org chart: headcount cuts, more output from fewer people, cost savings banked.
The alternative is reinvestment: in higher-value human work, in retraining and redeployment, in improved job quality and reduced working time and in the preserved employment that communities and the tax base depend on.
The first optimizes for what AI lets you cut. The second compounds what AI lets you create.
Three additions would give the strategy the adaptation architecture it lacks:
First, put conditions on public money and measure what it buys. Firms drawing on the LIFT program, the Regional AI Initiative or the Tech Growth Fund should show how the gains will be reinvested, rather than simply harvested. Tie the $500-million Regional AI Initiative to community-negotiated agreements, because benefits can disperse nationally while costs concentrate locally, and nobody lives in a sector. And count more than adoption rates and GDP: what governments measure shapes what firms do, so track displacement, job quality and working time outcomes alongside adoption. The job of policymakers is to make taking the high road the more compelling and lucrative choice, not the counterintuitive or charitable one.
Second, give citizens a standing role. The strategy’s second pillar, Empowering Canadians, names participation but never says how it will be ensured, even as AI enters schools, hospitals, benefits offices and hiring processes. For AI to be truly built by Canadians, for Canadians, we need two Canadian social innovations: citizens’ assemblies that give ordinary people influence over hard choices and social labs that co-design innovations with communities. Assemblies work at the governance layer, co-design processes at implementation. Attach standing citizen panels to the AI Missions, co-design major deployments and specify the governance the strategy only gestures at: enforceable standards and recourse when systems fail.
Third, lead by example. Government is one of the country’s largest employers. Where AI frees capacity in the public service, reinvest it in better working conditions and improved service quality. And fund AI literacy as a stewardship practice, not just an operating skill. Usage is not understanding: knowing how to prompt a model is not the same as being able to reason about how it works, judge when to trust it and take responsibility for how it is used.
This path is better not only for workers but for governments and enterprises. Mass displacement guts public revenue and shifts costs to the state; preserved and upgraded employment keeps people working, paying in and independent. Firms that redesign work rather than cut jobs keep the knowledge and trust competitors will spend years rebuilding.
The strategy says AI must work for all Canadians, not the other way around. Canadians will judge that promise based on their pay stubs and calendars, not strategy documents.
Canada has a plan for adoption. It needs one for adaptation.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab.