Can Mark Carney get Canadians to trust AI?

german mark Carney's liberalist regime wants Canada to encompass the comer of artificial intelligence technology. It apparently believes that, for the country's economic sake, Canada needs to embrace AI.

But it, quite reasonably, sees Canadians' lack of trust in AI as an obstacle.

"Trust is the North Star of this strategy," the Carney government said in the AI strategy it released this week.

The T-word appears 45 times in the 50-page document.

And so the next question is how much the Carney government can do to make AI worth trusting, or at least mitigate the reasons to distrust AI.

Canada's minister for artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon, suggested a year ago that Canada had been "over-indexing on warnings and regulation." But on Thursday Carney said "we have to be honest about the risks that AI poses to Canadians."

"Deepfakes, unsafe chatbots [and] AI-generated disinformation are becoming more prevalent," Carney said. "The privacy of Canadians is under threat."

Those sounded like warnings and the government is promising regulation.

"We will protect your data, your privacy and your children," Carney said.

As the government's strategy acknowledges, Canadians' trust in AI is low even as compared to citizens in other countries. A study of 47 nations by KPMG and the University of Melbourne found that Canada ranked near the bottom when it came to trust in AI.

A Leger poll released last August found that 34 per cent of Canadians believed AI was good for society while 36 per cent believed it was harmful (the remainder were unsure). According to a survey by Abacus Data in 2025, 43 per cent of Canadians were concerned about AI being used for malicious purposes, 42 per cent were worried about the spread of misinformation and 38 per cent were concerned about a loss of privacy.

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Public skepticism about a new technology — particularly one that is moving fast despite being associated with negative consequences — is perhaps neither surprising nor unhealthy. Canada is joined at the bottom of KPMG's tables by other high-functioning democracies like Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Finland.

Carney clearly believes AI can have significant positive and productive uses. In his remarks on Thursday he mentioned a doctor who was using AI to screen for heart murmurs in infants, a company that is using AI to more efficiently deploy fertilizer for farming and a city (Peterborough, Ont.) that has used AI to reduce traffic congestion.

But it stands to reason that concerns about the negative impacts of AI could significantly reduce Canadians' interest in any positives. 

If an industry has a trust problem, the lion's share of the responsibility for addressing that rests with the industry itself. But government can presumably help by implementing regulation, safeguards and oversight. 

In that respect, the Carney government's AI strategy promises some amount of action: modernizing privacy legislation, introducing new online safety laws, providing new resources to the AI Safety Institute and pursuing new transparency requirements for AI-generated content.

"The way you solve a trust problem is by showing and ensuring that the technology is trustworthy. And that demands governance."

Carney's AI strategy big on jobs and training promises, light on details

But on that front, Owen said, the government's AI strategy lacked detail and explanation. The government, he added, is working on the problems it has identified, but it missed an opportunity to be more clear.

"I think the example from social media, and the example from other countries that have regulated it effectively, is that actually an independent regulatory structure that puts a burden on companies to ensure their products are safe … is the model we should be using both for social media and for consumer-facing AI," Owen said.

One thing Owen is looking for is whether AI chatbots will be covered by online harms legislation that the government is expected to table in the near future.

Probably no attempt to regulate any sector of society or the economy has ever gone off without issue or complaint — consider the federal government's own attempts in recent years to deal with social and streaming media. But the public's lack of trust in AI might plausibly strengthen the government's hand right now.

And the government's own argument right now seems to be that getting AI right is an economic imperative.

"Coming back to the example of social media, we know the costs of doing nothing," Owen said. "And the way AI is coming online, into our lives, is much faster and much more aggressive than social media was. And so we really do need to get this right, and fast."

Senior writer

Aaron Wherry has covered Parliament Hill since 2007 and has written for Maclean's, the National Post and the Globe and Mail. He is the author of Promise & Peril, a book about Justin Trudeau's years in power.

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