Draft federal AI strategy aims to scale up adoption, offer literacy training by 2031

A outline variant of Canada's subject AI strategy outlines a ride to surmount up business adoption and provide all Canadians access to free AI literacy training, but is short on specifics regarding how the federal government will protect Canadians from the technology's potentially harmful effects.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said last Wednesday that the strategy would be released this week, after several months of delays. 

The draft strategy includes six pillars — first revealed in the federal government's spring economic update — that touch upon protecting and empowering Canadians, AI adoption, building a sovereign AI foundation, scaling up champions and building global alliances.

By 2031, the draft strategy seeks to do the following, among other goals:

The document says Canada has a major AI adoption gap, particularly among Canadian SMEs, which lag behind Nordic leaders, Germany and France.

It cites a KPMG–University of Melbourne global trust study which found Canada ranked very low among 47 countries on AI training and literacy as well as trust in AI systems.

To overcome that gap, the federal government proposes a national AI literacy initiative that will offer entry-level AI training for all Canadians, which includes empowering libraries and community organizations to bring AI literacy into every community.

It also sets a goal of training more than 3,000 educators with AI learning kits to be used in their classrooms.

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The federal government intends to work with AI providers to help Canadian post-secondary students access AI agents from trusted providers.

Ottawa also promises to create up to 90,000 AI-related job opportunities through the Student Work Placement Program and Canada Summer Jobs, plus other initiatives like the Skills for Success Program, Mitacs ADOPT and AI+X programs.

The strategy projects more than 250,000 new AI-relevant jobs will be created across the Canadian economy by 2031.

For mid-career workers, the draft strategy says Ottawa will assess training and upskill offerings, including in the skilled trades, to scale up employer-led training across the country with a priority on AI-related skills.

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The document says the federal government will track and assess the societal, labour market and economic impacts of AI to guide policy, and leverage Statistics Canada's Artificial Intelligence and Technology Measurement Program.

That program, previously referred to as "TechStat," was allocated $25 million over six years in the last federal budget.

Canada will ground its AI future in "responsible governance" and that trust between citizens and their government is "strengthened by AI, not strained by it," according to the safety pillar in the draft strategy.

To achieve that goal, the document says Canada will modernize online safety laws to protect Canadians in the digital age — ensuring children and customers are safeguarded.

However, it doesn't specify what those modernizations will look like. The federal government has previously said it's "very seriously" considering age restrictions for social media and AI chatbots, but no official decision has been made.

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"No decisions have been made and we will have more details to share in due course," the spokesperson said.

The draft national strategy includes other measures to protect Canadians, including a commitment to introduce new consumer privacy legislation "to enshrine a fundamental right to privacy" and "safeguard children's information from exploitation and harm."

Additionally, Canada will "advance work" on AI transparency, including watermarking AI-generated content so Canadians are better aware when they interact with the technology.

It does not say how the government plans to get AI companies to watermark the content.

Other items include investing tens of millions to expand the capabilities of the Canadian AI Safety Institute, alongside creating a Canada Trusted AI Certification program to help Canadians identify trustworthy products.

There is also a broader commitment to protect elections from AI-enabled misinformation and foreign interference, and an acknowledgement that Ottawa will continue to review the Privacy Act to meet the needs of people in the digital age.

There are several measures in the draft strategy aimed at helping Canadian SMEs adopt AI tools, plus advancing new projects and scaling up Canadian champions.

The draft strategy says Canada will support the development of an AI Literacy and Adoption Assessment tool, among other online resources, to help SMEs and entrepreneurs assess AI readiness and understand potential business impacts.

Ottawa plans to add hundreds of millions of dollars to the AI Compute Access Fund, according to the document, which notes Canadian SMEs "have no affordable domestic option."

The draft strategy also says Canadian SMEs train and deploy models on foreign cloud platforms, which sends Canadian money abroad and places sensitive data and intellectual property outside the country.

The fund, which currently has a total budget of $300 million, supports projects with compute costs ranging from $100,000 up to $5 million. AI Minister Evan Solomon announced the first round of winners earlier this month at Web Summit Vancouver.

The fund covers two-thirds of eligible costs for Canadian cloud-based AI compute services, or half of eligible costs for non-Canadian cloud-based AI compute services. Solomon mentioned a significant volume of applications for the fund at the summit.

The draft strategy also proposes establishing a Canadian Tech Growth Fund so Canada can take equity stakes in top AI firms to help them meet global markets.

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Canada will also leverage its recently announced sovereign wealth fund to invest in emerging "national champions," the draft strategy says. The details of how the sovereign wealth fund will work have still not been released by the federal government. 

Plus, Canada will establish the federal government as a "strategic anchor customer" and leverage its Buy Canadian policy to help domestic scale-ups with revenue and references needed to export their products worldwide.

Regarding the public service, the document says Canada will "accelerate the procurement and delivery of AI solutions" through its Office of Digital Transformation and launch a fellowship program to build internal expertise needed to procure, evaluate and deploy AI systems effectively within government.

Finally, the document says Canada will try to solve national challenges through AI missions — the first being in health care, then other priority sectors like energy and natural resources, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing and robotics and government services.

In that vein, the federal government says it will launch a funded AI Missions Program to push targeted, high-impact projects that deliver significant public good and improve Canadians' lives.

The Carney government has consistently highlighted the need for a sovereign AI foundation, which includes data centres but also measures to protect Canadians' data.

The draft strategy says Canada's current AI data centre and cloud offerings are largely foreign-owned and controlled, but Canadian players are entering the market.

Moreover, the strategy notes Canada's sovereign compute capacity is "nascent, particularly in cloud, and significant investment will be required to overcome reliance on foreign providers."

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Some solutions in the strategy include building a world-leading public supercomputer. Ottawa will also leverage government and industrial AI workloads and crowd-in private capital to "significantly expand sovereign compute and cloud infrastructure," according to the draft.

That initiative will support constructing AI data centres that can scale to at least 100 megawatts, and would be designed to serve a spectrum of Canadian clients. 

The draft strategy also proposes Canada expand its Sovereign Technology Alliance, which it launched in February with Germany, to "enable secure and interoperable AI capabilities and open procurement opportunities for domestic champions."

Data, which is described in the draft strategy as a "strategic national asset," is also given attention and resources.

The official said Canada's data sovereignty is expected to be on a spectrum, with some data being completely controlled by Canada, and with "hyperscalers" including large American companies being able to operate in Canada as well. 

Key actions on data include building a new secure national data platform as a public resource for Canadian innovators and launch a Health Sector Data Space, which will "link secure, private and standardized datasets to strengthen clinical trials, health services research and performance measurements."

Under the sovereignty pillar is also Canada's plan to attract and retain talent. The document says the federal government will invest hundreds of millions to strengthen Canada's network of national AI institutes and increase the number of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs from 130 to nearly 200 researchers.

Ottawa also plans to expand its Global Talent Stream permit program to accelerate entry of highly skilled AI workers and "align measures for permanent residency to retain the talent Canada recruits."

Associate Producer

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