A new national AI strategy puts sovereignty front and centre as Canada moves to reduce its dependence on foreign cloud and AI providers.
On Wednesday, the European Commission launched its Technological Sovereignty Package, introducing new legislation to loosen the grip of US Big Tech on European cloud and AI infrastructure. Now Canada has followed suit with its own ‘AI for All’ strategy, built around six pillars and with the explicit goal of ensuring Canadians can “adopt, build and govern AI on their own terms”.
“We will strengthen Canadian sovereignty at a time when it is being deeply challenged,” the strategy states, in a clear reference to tense relations with its neighbours under the Trump administration.
“Too much Canadian innovation is captured and scaled elsewhere,” the strategy reads. “In an era where prosperity, resilience and sovereignty increasingly depend on the ability to build and govern AI on national terms, these are vulnerabilities Canada cannot leave unaddressed.”
The strategy, published yesterday (4 June), points to some of those “vulnerabilities” that Canada needs to address. Sovereign compute capacity is described as “nascent”, with Canadian organisations remaining heavily reliant on foreign providers for the infrastructure underpinning economic, scientific and public-sector activity.
GPU chip fabrication sits “almost entirely offshore”, and only 12pc of Canadian businesses currently use AI – well behind Nordic counterparts, the strategy claims, where adoption runs between 29 and 42pc. The strategy’s six pillars cover:
- safety and democracy protections
- AI skills and literacy for all Canadians
- accelerated adoption across the economy
- building sovereign compute infrastructure
- scaling Canadian AI champions
- forging trusted international alliances
On infrastructure, the Canadian government is committing to building a world-leading supercomputer by 2031 and growing sovereign cloud capacity to reduce dependence on foreign providers, echoing the EU’s CADA (Cloud and AI Development Act) proposals published on Wednesday.
Canada aims to increase business AI adoption from 12pc today to 60pc by 2034, create up to 250,000 new jobs through AI adoption by 2031, and create nearly $200bn in GDP gains from labour productivity improvements.
Priority sectors for investment will be: health and life sciences; energy and natural resources; transportation; agriculture; and manufacturing and robotics.
The strategy flags that Canada has already signed 20 new economic and defence international partnerships in the past year, 11 of which advance AI cooperation. The Canadian government said it will build a strategic multilateral alliance to move “from reliance to resilience” in key AI and technology capabilities.
For children and its citizens in general, the Canadian strategy commits to modernising privacy legislation, introducing online safety laws and providing free AI literacy training to 1m entry-level, post-secondary students.
Canada’s strategy and the EU’s sovereignty package this week are clear signs that the race to reduce dependence on a small number of US technology giants is now a mainstream policy priority on both sides of the Atlantic.
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