Prime Minister Mark Carney launched Canada's new national "AI for all" strategy Thursday, pledging up to $200 billion in economic growth, 250,000 new AI-related jobs over five years, and a jump in adoption rates from roughly 12% to 60% by 2034.
The "AI for All" plan is built around three pillars: building public trust, creating economic opportunity, and reinforcing Canadian sovereignty. It includes a National AI Literacy Initiative reaching one million post-secondary students, up to 90,000 job and placement opportunities for young Canadians, a flagship health AI mission, support for small businesses, and a world-leading public AI supercomputer backed by sovereign compute and cloud infrastructure.
“AI is here. The question is whether it will improve the lives of all Canadians or benefit only a few,” Carney said. The strategy, he added, will “build trust so that all Canadians are empowered to use this technology safely and with confidence.”
Among the trust measures is a commitment to strengthen protections for personal information against “harmful practices such as deepfakes and surveillance pricing,” alongside an expanded Canadian AI Safety Institute and new online safety rules for social media and chatbots.
The surveillance pricing pledge comes just weeks after NDP Leader Avi Lewis used his first major Parliament Hill press conference to warn of a “downright dystopian” future in which retail stores like Loblaws use AI and personal data, such as search history, to charge individualized, higher prices for everyday items like medicine or groceries. Lewis called for a national ban, tying the issue to the cost-of-living crisis and framing it as a clear example of Big Tech and corporate overreach.
Yet Canadian competition regulators have found little concrete evidence of widespread, real-time personalized pricing of the kind Lewis described. The strategy's inclusion of the issue effectively undercuts the NDP's recent push by promising action on a concern that appears more hypothetical than rampant in Canada. This political move hands the Liberals a ready-made response while shifting focus away from the NDP’s broader affordability narrative.
Opposition parties were not impressed by the overall package. Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman called the plan “a very ambitious plan which lacks a lot of details,” particularly on privacy and security. She questioned the government's ability to deliver on job promises when youth unemployment remains high, with more than 112,000 jobs lost since January. “We don't believe the Liberals when they say that they'll create 90,000 jobs,” she said, adding that AI risks costing far more positions than it creates without stronger transition supports.
Lewis echoed that the strategy feels more like “All in for AI” than “AI for All,” prioritizing rapid adoption over meaningful guardrails.
Beyond the partisan critiques, the plan faces pushback on several fronts that it largely sidesteps. Environmental groups warn that the push for large-scale sovereign compute and data centres risks massive increases in energy and water consumption, potentially driving up household bills and conflicting with climate goals, especially if some facilities rely on natural gas.
Critics have also noted that the strategy leans heavily on infrastructure spending while remaining vague on timelines for promised legislative updates to privacy laws or the precise powers of the AI Safety Institute. Broader concerns raised during consultations, such as labour displacement and the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure, receive comparatively little concrete attention.
The Carney Liberals say the plan was shaped by more than 11,000 public submissions and a 28-member expert task force. Still, many observers argue it reflects a clear choice to accelerate adoption and position Canada in the global AI race rather than impose the stricter regulatory framework some experts and civil society groups had sought.
Whether the ambitious targets can be met and the promised “trust” measures will satisfy Canadians wary of both corporate and government use of AI remains to be seen. For now, the strategy has succeeded in claiming ground on one high-profile NDP talking point while leaving plenty of other questions unanswered.
