Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada’s long-awaited and much-delayed artificial intelligence strategy on Thursday, outlining how his government plans to adopt and control the powerful technology.
The strategy signals the government’s support for large-scale AI adoption. The plan includes a $500-million fund to invest in Canadian AI companies and a commitment to support construction of data centres that will bring at least a combined 850 megawatts of compute capacity by 2030.
The government is already investing more than $2 billion into funding programs that will help Canada grow its AI compute capacity. The new strategy includes a commitment to put $1.75 billion of the federal investments announced in Budget 2025 toward private sector investment in venture capital, which may be used to fund AI companies. And it notes the new $25-billion sovereign wealth fund , established to fund major infrastructure projects, could be used toward further investment in Canadian AI “champion” companies.
Canada estimates the strategy will create 90,000 AI-related jobs and that the industry as a whole will create 250,000.
But critics say the government is ignoring the technology’s effect on workers and is light on regulations for AI companies. Federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis said in an emailed statement the strategy imposes AI on Canada without public debate.
“This is a document that is heavy on hype, but light on the right guardrails that we need to protect people and to ensure that the benefits of the technology don’t just flow to a handful of tech giants and investors,” Lewis said.
“It proposes a massive boost to business adoption of AI, with no concern for the consequences this will have for workers, especially young workers who are already watching careers vanish before their eyes.”
Lewis isn’t the only skeptic. Last month, hundreds of people in Vancouver rallied against data centre construction after the federal government and Telus announced plans to scale AI compute capacity in this province.
Vancouver Granville MP Taleeb Noormohamed says he’s heard these concerns. As parliamentary secretary to the minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, Noormohamed is on the team speaking about the strategy.
“I am looking forward to making sure that we are doing our part to roll it out and sharing how Canadians can see themselves in it,” he said.
Hours after Canada launched the strategy in Toronto, Noormohamed sat down with The Tyee to speak about how the strategy accounts for jobs, AI safety and the pushback against data centre development.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: I'm wondering if you could take a moment and describe what the government's vision for adoption looks like. What might a workplace look like if all of the goals in this strategy came to pass?
Taleeb Noormohamed: There's no single blanket vision of what adoption should look like in every workplace. But I think we have to understand how everyone can see that they benefit from AI, and that they see how AI serves them, and not vice versa.
For me it boils down to a few things. One is making sure that across industries, we are using AI to improve outcomes. And that we are ensuring that workers have the tools that they need to be more successful at the work that they do, and to ensure that through this process we're creating jobs of the future.
For example, the strategy includes 90,000 job placements that we're going to create for young people, so they can understand how best to use AI in the fields that they choose. We're going to make sure that we're working towards further AI literacy, so people understand exactly what the risks are, but also what the benefits are.
And we’re making sure that we take adoption by small-to-medium-sized enterprises in this country way up. Canada has one of the lowest rates of adoption for AI in the world, particularly for small-to-medium-sized enterprises, and making sure that they have what is required to be able to adopt AI in a way that helps their businesses and empowers workers at the same time is hugely important.
A couple of weeks ago in Vancouver, there was a big anti-data-centre rally . I’m curious how you might respond to this kind of pushback?
A big part of this has to come from understanding what we are trying to do, and helping Canadians understand why it is that we're doing what we're doing. That’s our responsibility to do at a time when people are building data centres in other parts of the world that are incredibly harmful to the environment.
We're placing a big bet on a data centre that uses closed-loop cooling , that is going to heat 150,000 homes in the Lower Mainland, that is going to be a green building, that is going to be sustainably built. This should be how we build data centres. It should be the gold standard for how we do things.
Data centres are getting built. They're going to get built in other parts of the country, they're going to g…
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