Inside Canada's Plan for
AI for All

A strategy organized around one word: trust

The document states: "Trust is the north star of this strategy." The government's logic runs in a chain. For Canadians to benefit from AI, they must adopt it. To adopt it, they must trust it. And for adoption to produce lasting benefits, it must rest on infrastructure over which Canada holds a meaningful degree of sovereign control.

That chain — trust enables adoption, adoption delivers opportunity, sovereignty makes the benefits durable — is the strategy's organizing structure. Each of the six pillars maps onto one of three values: trust, opportunity, or sovereignty. The strategy also commits to what it calls "clear-eyed agility," acknowledging that AI is moving faster than any single plan can anticipate and pledging ongoing review and revision.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada frames the moment as one of "extraordinary opportunity and profound strategic risk": nations that lead in AI, the document argues, will increasingly shape global markets, technological standards, supply chains, and the balance of economic and political power.

An AI innovator with a major adoption gap

The strategy describes Canada's starting position in both directions. Canada helped invent modern AI — the document names Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton — and remains home to one of only a handful of frontier model companies in the world. The digital sector employs roughly 800,000 workers and contributes over $140 billion to GDP, with 150,000 jobs directly tied to AI across more than 3,500 firms that have collectively raised over CAD$37 billion in venture capital.

But invention has not translated into use. Statistics Canada data cited in the strategy shows only 12 percent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or services between mid-2024 and mid-2025. Among small and medium-sized enterprises — 99 percent of Canadian businesses, employing 14.3 million workers — adoption sits at about 8 percent, well behind peer economies.

Beneath the adoption gap sits a confidence gap. In the KPMG–University of Melbourne global trust study cited by the strategy, Canada ranked 44th of 47 countries on AI training and literacy, and 42nd of 47 on trust in AI systems. Fewer than a quarter of Canadians (24 percent) report having received any AI training, and fewer than half believe they can use AI tools effectively. The strategy calls low literacy and low trust "the binding constraints."

On sovereignty, the document lists the dependencies: Canadian researchers train models on foreign cloud platforms, sensitive data sits in foreign jurisdictions, GPU fabrication is almost entirely offshore, and "too much Canadian innovation is captured and scaled elsewhere" — nearly 70 percent of Canadian-led startups end up headquartered outside the country. Against that, it lists structural advantages: one of the cleanest electricity grids in the world (more than 83 percent renewable and low-emission), a cold climate that cuts data-centre cooling costs, deep talent pools, rich sectoral data, and standing as a trusted international partner.

The numbers Ottawa says it will hit

The strategy commits to a set of measurable outcomes. The headline target: lifting business AI adoption from 12 percent today to 60 percent by 2034 — a fivefold increase in eight years.

Other stated outcomes include: protecting Canadians — particularly children — from AI risks and online harms; free AI literacy training for all Canadians, reaching 1 million entry-level post-secondary students and more than 3,000 trained educators; trusted AI agents for all post-secondary students; up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and work placements for young Canadians by 2031; up to 250,000 new jobs through AI adoption by 2031; a 3 percent GDP increase — nearly $200 billion — from labour productivity; a new AI Missions Program starting with $200 million for health outcomes; a world-leading supercomputer by 2031; expanded public compute access for SMEs; and a multilateral sovereign technology alliance.

Where the money goes

The strategy names specific dollar commitments across adoption, compute, safety, skills, and capital. The largest single new figures are a $700 million expansion of the Compute Access Fund for SME compute, and three $500 million programs: the BDC's LIFT financing initiative, an expanded Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative, and a new Canadian Tech Growth Fund that can take equity stakes in promising AI firms.

The sovereign compute build-out

Pillar 4 rests on a "build-partner-buy" approach: build key capabilities domestically where possible, partner with trusted allies or buy market solutions where appropriate. The strategy estimates Canada will need 5.5 gigawatts of AI compute for its commercial players by 2030. Partnerships now being finalized have proposed 850 megawatts of capacity by 2030, with scaling capacity of up to 2.3 gigawatts — backed, the document says, by investments in the tens of billions.

Energy figures prominently in this pillar. More than 83 percent of Canada's grid runs on renewable and low-emission sources — primarily hydro, nuclear, and wind — and data centres on such power can cut total operating emissions by up to 90 percent, per the strategy. Canada plans to double its electricity infrastructure by 2050 under its National Electricity Strategy, and the document frames the country's cold climate as "a built-in cost advantage that competitors are spending billions to replicate artificially."

Beyond compute, the pillar covers data and talent: a $100 million Health Sector Data Space with the Canadian Institute for Health Information, a $100 million expansion of the VITAL pan-Canadian health data platform into five more provinces, growth of the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs program from 130 to nearly 200 researchers, and an expanded Global Talent Stream with aligned permanent-residency measures to retain recruited AI workers.

An alliance strategy for a consolidating market

Pillar 6 opens with the strategy's assessment of the global landscape: AI today is "a game of scale that is dominated by hegemons and hyperscalers," and countries risk becoming subordinate to or reliant on them. The strategy's response is coalition-building. In February 2026, Canada and Germany launched the Sovereign Technology Alliance — a framework for sharing AI models, digital infrastructure, capital access, joint research, and common evaluation standards among trusted democracies. The strategy commits to expanding it.

The diplomatic ledger the document cites: 20 new economic and defence partnerships signed in the past year, nearly $100 billion in foreign investment commitments secured, and free-trade negotiations advancing with India, ASEAN, and beyond. Eleven of those 20 partnerships explicitly advance AI cooperation, spanning four continents.

The named partners span Europe (Germany as anchor; the UK on AI safety and defence AI; France on G7 governance; the EU, Finland, and Norway), the Indo-Pacific (a trilateral technology partnership forming with Australia and India; collaboration with Australia's AI Safety Institute; semiconductors, robotics, and quantum with Japan), and the Middle East (UAE sovereign-wealth investment into Canadian data infrastructure; Qatar and Saudi Arabia on technology cooperation).

The pillar also commits Canada to leading a global, multi-stakeholder push for open-source AI — framed as an antidote to vendor lock-in and structural dependency — and to using trade missions to showcase Canadian firms. The document points to Hypertec's $5 billion plan, announced at VivaTech 2025, to build one of Europe's largest sovereign AI infrastructure networks with over 2 GW of capacity and nearly 100,000 GPUs.

What the strategy says it will be

The conclusion describes the plan as dynamic by design. AI, the document states, "moves faster than any single strategy can anticipate," and the government commits to reviewing and updating the plan as the technology evolves. The constants, it says, are the principles — trust, opportunity, and sovereignty — and the central importance of widespread adoption.