Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney officially launched the country's national AI strategy on June 4, committing over $2.3 billion across training, infrastructure, startup funding, and new laws. The plan, called 'AI for All,' sets a target of raising business AI adoption from just over 12% today to 60% by 2034, and projects this will generate $200 billion in additional economic output and 250,000 new jobs over the next five years.
Those numbers come with a context problem. The government's own job creation modelling was based on high AI adoption scenarios from the OECD, but officials declined to produce a matching estimate of how many jobs AI might displace. When asked directly, they could not provide one.
For businesses operating in or with Canada, several parts of the plan are concrete enough to pay attention to. The strategy establishes a National AI Literacy Initiative with free training for citizens and commits to giving every post-secondary student access to AI tools. It also adds $700 million to an existing fund that helps small and medium-sized businesses pay for the computing power needed to run AI systems, bringing that fund's total to $1 billion.
On the legal side, the plan updates personal data protection laws, introduces an online safety framework for chatbots and social media, and includes legislation to criminalize non-consensual AI-generated intimate images. A national certification program for 'trusted AI' products is also planned, which could affect procurement decisions for any company selling software into Canada.
The infrastructure ambitions are significant. Canada plans to build a publicly owned supercomputer, back data centre projects of at least 100 megawatts, and position government itself as an anchor customer to make those projects financially viable for private investors. The goal is to reduce Canada's heavy dependence on US-owned cloud infrastructure for storing and processing sensitive data.
A $500 million Canadian Tech Growth Fund is new and notable. Unlike Canada's past approach of grants and loans, this fund can take direct equity stakes in Canadian AI companies. The stated aim is to stop promising firms from relocating to the US by giving them a reason to scale at home.
But the credibility question hangs over all of it. A previous AI compute fund announced in 2024 with $300 million was flooded with applications, moved slowly, and only announced its first $66 million in grants last month, two years later. Canada's brain drain problem is also accelerating precisely as this strategy is being built around domestic talent. A TD Economics report found Canada is losing top-skilled workers to the US at nearly double pre-pandemic rates, and tech workers in the US earn about 46% more than their Canadian counterparts before tax.
The 12% business adoption rate the strategy is trying to fix is real, but the causes are debated. A KPMG survey found 93% of Canadian business leaders say their organizations are already using AI, yet only 2% say they are seeing a financial return on those investments. That is not an access problem. It suggests businesses are trying AI and finding the results underwhelming, which training programs and subsidies do not directly solve.
For non-Canadian businesses, this plan matters in two ways. First, Canada is trying to build its own AI infrastructure and enforce its own data rules, which affects any company handling Canadian customer data or operating Canadian-facing software. Second, the international partnerships Canada has signed with twelve countries, including the EU, UK, Germany, and India, are designed to create an alternative AI supply chain to the US-China duopoly. That coalition, if it holds, could shape which AI standards become global defaults over the next decade.