Canada Centre Commentary

Canada’s privacy regulators are restricting the use of public online data for AI training, but this approach could undermine AI innovation. Canada should instead adopt a harm-based framework focused on concrete privacy risks.

The Canada Strong Fund is trying to be a sovereign wealth fund, development bank, commercial investor, industrial policy vehicle, and retail savings product all at once. Until Ottawa clearly defines its purpose, it risks becoming a debt-financed vehicle searching for a rationale.

Ottawa is choosing its next Competition Commissioner, who will decide if firms are allowed to get big by competing or punished for trying. Canada needs competition policy that protects consumers without treating scale, investment, or ambition as suspect.

Canada’s business R&D weakness is not mainly that too few firms do research. It is that too few Canadian firms reach the scale where R&D becomes globally significant, leaving Canada with lots of research activity but too few firms that commercialize and compete at industrial weight.

Opposition to AI automation at the Canada Revenue Agency misses the point. Smarter systems can improve targeting, boost compliance, and deliver better results with fewer resources than a labour-intensive enforcement model.

Canada is considering banning social media for teenagers, but the evidence suggests this approach is misplaced. Harm is not driven by access alone, but by specific online experiences, and a blanket ban would do little to address them.

Canada’s path to lasting competitiveness lies in strategic indispensability: specializing in a small number of high value-added goods or services that the world can’t do without. Ottawa must continue making explicit decisions about what gets built and what does not; otherwise, it risks spending heavily with little to show for it.

Treating cars like canola is not strategy. Using industrial platforms as bargaining chips for commodity access risks locking Canada into a permanently resource-heavy economic structure, one in which manufacturing capacity cannot be easily rebuilt and its absence reshapes the economy for decades.

Canada’s first major test of its reformed competition law centers on Amazon’s pricing rules, but the Competition Bureau’s case risks punishing a policy that lowers prices for consumers and mistaking competition on the merits for anticompetitive conduct.

Canada has zero entries among the world’s top 50 science and tech clusters. Waterloo is the best candidate for elevation. To make that happen, the federal and Ontario governments should create an incentive: Tech start-ups based in Waterloo, as well as firms outside Canada that relocate meaningful R&D and innovation production to the region, will pay no tax for a decade.