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The public is right to be concerned about AI. But Carney and his ministers have framed our reluctance as ignorance.
Paris Marx 11 Jun 2026 The Tyee
Paris Marx is a tech journalist and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. His next book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires comes out in October.
In late May protesters marched through Vancouver in an attempt to halt two AI data centres that Telus is planning for the city.
They called out the massive energy demands to power all the computers inside the centres and the vast quantities of water that would be used to keep them cool, especially as the region faces water restrictions. The demonstration came just weeks after the federal government threw its support behind the project.
Of course, they were focused on not just data centres, but the chatbots and generative AI tools they were being built to power.
By early June, the Vancouver School Board started rolling out chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and over, despite the research suggesting it could affect students’ critical thinking skills and cognition , not to mention ongoing media reports about the effects chatbots have had on teens’ mental health.
Those details should have been red flags for administrators; they certainly were for some parents .
A group called Parents for AI Caution in Education Spaces is now seeking signatures to demand a two-year pause on the rollout of chatbots in Vancouver schools until there’s better data on the technology’s effects on students. Those ideas are spreading, not just in British Columbia but across Canada. But you might not get that impression if you listen to the federal government.
On June 4, Prime Minister Mark Carney rolled out his long-awaited AI strategy. Called “AI for All,” it laid out an ambition to invest in domestic AI infrastructure such as data centres, significantly increase the adoption of AI by Canadian businesses and begin to address some of the concerns with generative AI that are stymying what the government described as people’s trust in the technology.
The centrepiece of the strategy revolved around the concept of AI literacy. Carney acknowledged that trust needs to be established, which at this point is an understatement. Recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute suggests 68 per cent of Canadians want to see strict regulation of artificial intelligence, even if it slows development. But the prime minister is not seriously trying to address the concerns of those in the streets who oppose data centres, or of parents concerned about what chatbots might mean for their children.
Instead, the government is positioning the disconnect over the exuberance of industry — not to mention Carney himself and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon — and the public’s skepticism as the product of a knowledge gap. The plan seeks to invest millions to educate Canadians on how to use AI, in effect increasing their “literacy” of the technology. They will give chatbots to every university student, train 90,000 young people to be advocates of the technology in small and medium-sized businesses, and equip more than 3,000 educators to provide AI training accessible by all Canadians.
The government acknowledges that the sector will need to be regulated, but the changes to privacy legislation, measures to protect children and their data, and restrictions on the production of deepfake images are only the tip of the iceberg of the concerns that civil society groups and many ordinary people have with generative AI.
Canadians are seeing their own social media feeds filled with AI slop and misinformation. They’re reading stories of people taking their lives after forming dependencies on chatbots. People who live in quiet small towns fear that proposed data centres will threaten their quality of life. Artists are seeing their work ripped off by AI companies. And who can forget how OpenAI refused to report the troubled 18-year-old shooter in Tumbler Ridge months before that devastating tragedy took place?
There’s so much more than a literacy gap leading Canadians to push back against having generative AI forced on them in so many areas of their lives. The government itself should know better. It has already tried to roll out a chatbot to give Canadians tax advice, only for the auditor general to find it provided incorrect information 66 per cent of the time. More recently, its use of generative AI in immigration was found to have denied a woman’s permanent residency application after the system made up parts of her submission .
Just weeks before Carney stood in front of medical workers from the University Health Network in Toronto to announce his strategy and talk about how beneficial AI will be in health care, the auditor general of Ontario had released a scathing report on AI scribes. Those chatbots, used to transcribe conversations between doctors and patients, are currently used by ove…
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