On Thursday, at Toronto General Hospital under a plaque reading "AI for All," Mark Carney called artificial intelligence "the defining technology of our era" and launched Canada's new national AI strategy. The number that made the headlines: $200 billion in projected GDP growth and 250,000 new jobs over five years.

12%. That's how many Canadian businesses currently use AI. This makes us, despite world-class talent and three national AI institutes, among the slowest adopters in the G7. Ottawa wants that at 60% by 2034. The entire strategy is essentially a national project to close that gap before the talent and the value leak south - and it is arguably, already a tad late.

Why it matters for Canada

This is an adoption strategy, not a regulation strategy - and that distinction is the whole story. The money is pointed at getting Canadians and Canadian businesses to use AI: a $500-million Canadian Tech Growth Fund to keep promising startups from selling to American buyers, a $700-million Compute Access Fund for small businesses, a public AI supercomputer, and 850 megawatts of sovereign compute capacity by 2030.

The framing is sovereignty - the word we’re hearing more and more even since the Trump has shared his 51st state dreams with us last year.

Cohere (One of Canada’s leading AI software co’s) CEO Aidan Gomez put it, Canada "constantly lose[s] entrepreneurs and companies to our neighbour to the south". The strategy is an attempt to anchor the next ones here.

Let’s hold our horses, though..

The strategy promises to enshrine "a fundamental right to privacy" into Canadian law. Yet the same government is advancing Bill C-22, the lawful-access bill that has Signal threatening to leave Canada entirely — with NordVPN, Windscribe, and DuckDuckGo saying much the same.

You can't credibly promise a fundamental right to privacy in one document while driving privacy tools out of the country in another. And once you notice that gap, you see it everywhere in the strategy: the language of protection wrapped around what is really a push to adopt.

The plan assumes employers will voluntarily retrain the workers AI displaces. Asked point-blank how many jobs AI might cost, officials declined to give a number at all. Jim Balsillie, BlackBerry's former co-CEO, put it bluntest: a wish list of money and aspiration that never asks why a decade of similar strategies didn't work.

None of this makes the strategy worthless. It just means the optimism and the skepticism are both true at once — and the smart move is to take what's real while watching what's vague.

What it means for you

This is where AI for All gets unusually personal, and what hasn’t been highlighted enough:

• Free AI literacy training for every Canadian: with practical, sector-specific courses.

• Access to a trusted AI agent for every post-secondary student in the country. If you've got a kid in university, that's a real benefit for them.

• Up to 90,000 AI job placements for young Canadians — the most tangible lifeline in a year when Canada has shed a net 112,000 jobs and youth are hit hardest.

• Mid-career and frontline upskilling, aimed at workers worried about being replaced.

The biggest caveat: the programs are named, but not one has a launch date yet.

One thing to do this week

Don't wait for the launch dates. The KPMG & University of Melbourne study ranked Canada 44th of 47 countries on AI literacy — and found 58% of Canadians who have AI skills taught themselves. The people who get fluent now are the ones the 90,000 placements and upskilling dollars will find first. Spend 30 minutes this week using a free AI tool on one real task at work. You'll be ahead of 88% of Canadian businesses by Friday.

Timbits 🍡 

• 🇨🇦 Canada Pride: We didn't start from nothing — Vector Institute (Toronto), Mila (Montréal), and Amii (Edmonton) gave us a real lead in AI, way before most global powers sprung ahead.

• Learn AI for free today: did you know that Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has dozens of FREE courses that teach you fundamentals of how to use Claude, Claude Cowork and Claude Code.

• Sovereignty fact: U.S. tech giants own roughly 85% of Canada's cloud market - effectively storing and controlling personal and business data of millions of Canadians and Canadian businesses. That is why sovereignty shows up nearly on every page of the published AI Strategy document.