Canada Centre Commentary

Canada may reach its AI adoption target and still miss its promised productivity gains. Delivering those gains will require deep adoption by large firms, supported by regulatory certainty and stronger tax treatment for AI deployment.

Canada’s new AI strategy sets the right goal but focuses on the wrong problem: lowering costs when most firms struggle to identify valuable uses for AI. Ottawa should help businesses find and implement the right tools, not simply subsidize their purchase.

Bill C-34 gives platforms a reason to design safer services for children. But sequencing matters: If Ottawa brings the restriction into force before the Digital Safety Commission is operational, the fastest path to compliance will be removing the very users the bill means to protect.

Canada says it wants to be a technology and innovation economy, but its research budget still treats balance across disciplines as the priority. If innovation is the actual goal, the Carney government should shift funding from social sciences and humanities toward NSERC and CIHR.

A ban on personalized pricing would not make Canada more affordable; it would eliminate discounts at the bottom of the distribution and raise the floor for price-sensitive shoppers, the very consumers these proposals aim to protect.

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.