Canada's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All

Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All (PDF, 2.37 MB)

Table of contents

Message from the minister

The Government’s vision: AI for All

Key pillars of the strategy

Priority sectors

Pillar 1: Protecting Canadians and safeguarding democracy

Pillar 2: Ensuring AI empowers Canadians

Pillar 3: Powering AI adoption for shared prosperity

Pillar 4: Building the Canadian sovereign AI foundation

Pillar 5: Building and scaling Canadian AI champions

Pillar 6: Building trusted partnerships and global alliances

Conclusion

Message from the minister

An innovative Canada is a stronger Canada. And AI is the major driver of innovation in Canada and around the world. But to understand the potential of Canadian AI, you have to see how it is already working to improve the lives of people. How a Canadian pediatric cardiologist in Halifax named Dr. Robert Chen is using the AI application he built to diagnose heart murmurs in newborns. His technology could cut down wait times by many months for anxious parents to see a specialist, saving our health care system tens of millions of dollars.

You have to see how a Canadian AI company called Croptimistic is helping farmers precisely map their soil. This technology allows them to use less fertilizer, while increasing crop yield, making our food system more resilient and more affordable.

You have to see how Canadian AI is helping businesses in advanced manufacturing, auto parts, and mining stay competitive even through global trade disruptions.

These aren't isolated stories. Over 150,000 Canadian innovators employed by more than 3,500 Canadian companies are developing AI solutions that will build a stronger, more resilient economy, solve problems, serve people, and create good, high paying jobs. Canada’s new AI strategy will build on this momentum to develop a responsible, safe, and sovereign AI industry and research community — one that ensures AI will serve all Canadians, not the other way around.

Canada must be open to the enormous opportunities in AI, but we must also be candid about the real concerns. AI raises hard questions about job security, privacy, sustainability, sovereignty, and trust. Responding to these concerns and building responsible Canadian AI will not be easy, but it must be done. We will face these challenges head on.

This is exactly the pragmatic and prudent approach Canadians told us they wanted. Through our national consultation, we received more than 11,000 submissions from workers, entrepreneurs, researchers, students, and community leaders across the country. We also received insights from our 28-member expert AI Strategy Task Force. We heard from First Nations, Métis and Inuit leaders, arts and culture organizations, labour and environmental groups, and many others concerned about economic growth, AI safety, and the welfare of children.

This strategy reflects their voices, their concerns, and their ambitions for our country.

We will strengthen Canadian sovereignty at a time when it is being deeply challenged. We will build a robust, advanced economy for all, where our workers and SMEs are adopting AI at a wide scale and competing globally. We will build resilience with new alliances among like-minded countries to ensure that Canadians have choices in the AI tools they use. And we will build this on a foundation of trust and safety. We will protect our children and our citizens, our culture and languages, and our democracy.

Canadians want safe, reliable, and sovereign AI. They want the best tools to build a prosperous future guided by our values. That is our plan.  This is Canada's AI for All moment. Let’s seize it.

The Government’s vision: AI for All

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of daily lives — at work, at school, at home, and in the businesses, organizations, and governments that shape our communities. What we are seeing today is only the beginning. The speed and scale of this transformation bring both promise and uncertainty about how AI will affect our jobs, privacy, security, and the institutions we rely on. For Canada to thrive in the era of AI, Canadians need to trust in its promise. Trust that they will share in its benefits and that it will be developed, adopted, and governed in ways that reflect our shared values. Trust is the north star of this strategy. Prosperity and sovereignty in this era belong to nations that can leverage trust to adopt, build, and govern AI on their own terms.

AI must also work for all Canadians, not the other way around. It must be put to work to grow our prosperity and wellbeing, promote our culture, and strengthen our communities. We envision a Canada where AI is not a threat, but a critical piece of technology which enhances everyday life for Canadians. Done right, AI can be a powerful force – harnessed with innovation and deployed with intention for the betterment of society.

We must implement this vision with urgency: this moment carries both extraordinary opportunity and profound strategic risk for Canada. AI is rapidly becoming a foundational driver of economic growth, productivity, industrial capability, and geopolitical influence. Nations that lead in AI will increasingly shape global markets, technological standards, supply chains, and the broader balance of economic and political power. This transformation is already underway.

This strategy asserts that adoption will drive AI’s benefits for Canadians. For Canadians to benefit from AI, they must first learn to use it.

To use it, they need to trust it. And for AI to benefit Canadians, it needs to present them with new opportunities grounded in technological infrastructure over which they have a meaningful degree of sovereign control.

Trust makes adoption possible. Opportunity and sovereignty ensure adoption creates benefits for Canadians now and in the future. To realize this vision, this strategy sets out six pillars:

To foster trust, we will:

protect Canadians from the risks and harms of AI, creating rules and safeguards that build and maintain trust; and

strengthen multinational partnerships with trusted allies, shaping an international AI community and global standards that reflect values of mutual respect and cooperation.

To provide opportunity, we will:

power shared prosperity through Canadian institutions and companies, channeling adoption into the quality work, economic activity, and public services that benefit Canadians broadly; and

empower Canadians to participate in and benefit from AI, building the understanding and access that enables Canadians to shape how we use AI in Canada and pursue the opportunities AI adoption creates.

To safeguard sovereignty, we will:

support globally competitive Canadian champions, giving Canadian AI companies the resources and reach they need to project Canadian strength outward; and

build sovereign Canadian AI foundations in compute, data, talent, and infrastructure, ensuring Canadians can trust that the systems they adopt are built and governed on Canadian terms.

Notably, while these pillars form an enduring foundation for Canada's approach to AI, our implementation of them must adapt as the world changes. Technological, social, and geopolitical forces are driving change in unexpected ways and at staggering speeds. As a result, a commitment to dynamism is part of this strategy.

Together, these pillars, combined with a commitment to clear-eyed agility, form a coordinated national strategy for Canadian prosperity, resilience, and sovereignty in the AI era.

Text version

A circular diagram illustrating the six pillars of Canada's National AI Strategy surrounding the central theme “AI for All.”

The six segments are:

Pillar 1 (Protecting Canadians and Safeguarding Democracy)

Pillar 2 (Empowering Canadians)

Pillar 3 (Powering Shared Prosperity)

Pillar 4 (Building the Canadian Sovereign AI Foundation)

Pillar 5 (Scaling Canadian Champions)

Pillar 6 (Building Trusted Partnerships and Global Alliances).

Around the center are three key values—Trust, Opportunity, and Sovereignty—each linked by the concept of “Adoption.” Simple icons represent each pillar.

The diagram emphasizes how the pillars collectively support the AI for All vision through adoption, trust, opportunity, and sovereignty.

The state of AI in Canada

An important contributor to Canada’s economy

The Canadian AI ecosystem has demonstrated strengths in AI research, but it is also a significant contributor to Canada’s economic performance. Canada’s strong digital sector employs approximately 800,000 workers and contributes over $140 billion to GDP, with 150,000 jobs directly associated with AI.

Over 3,500 Canadian firms are actively developing advanced AI models, tools, and applications, collectively raising more than CAD$37 billion in venture capital funding. Continued growth is expected to further expand this contribution. AI is also a key element of productivity growth across the broader economy, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and government services. There are significant benefits of broader AI adoption and commercialization, which are forecasted to generate a 0.3 percent to 1.1 percent annual labour productivity increase even before the Strategy’s impacts. Some estimates for generative AI alone add $187 billion annually to the Canadian economy by 2030 and create hundreds of new Canadian firms.

In addition to economic vitality, Canada's AI ecosystem reflects a high degree of maturity and integration across the full technological value chain. The key elements of the AI ecosystem include:

AI applications, embedded AI and physical AI: practical, enterprise-focused and industry-specific applications for core economic sectors, such as Clio, Sanctuary AI, and Ada. This is an emerging area where Canada will need greater volume of firms and higher levels of adoption.

Models, tools and integrators: AI models and the frameworks used to build, train, and deploy them, such as Cohere, Coveo, and OpenText. Canada is home to global enterprise integrators and a foundation model firm, with increasing integration into larger players in the economy.

Data centres and cloud: A growing build-out of cloud-based and on-premises environments hosting compute hardware at scale — including Denvr, eStruxture, and ThinkOn. Canada's sovereign compute capacity is nascent, particularly in cloud, and significant investment will be required to overcome reliance on foreign providers.

Infrastructure and compute hardware: Cooling, connectivity, networking, and AI chips, racks, and servers — brought together by firms like Hypertec and Micro Logic with equipment from Ranovus and Celestica, alongside Rogers, Bell, and Telus networks. The global data centre build-out has driven real growth for Canada's hardware value chain, with the exception of chips, where Canada relies on global fabrication capacity for GPUs.

Energy and power: Canada's electricity grid underpins the entire AI value chain. It is sustainable and predictable, but currently constrained. Canada’s new National Electricity Strategy, Powering Canada Strong: A National Strategy for an Electrified Canadian Economy, sets out a vision to build Canada’s electricity system, recognizing that Canada will need to double its electricity infrastructure by 2050, which will allow for the pairing of sustainable base load with sovereign AI data centre build-outs.

Research and development: World-class research institutes advancing new AI methods and safety approaches, including CIFAR, the three National AI Institutes (Amii, Mila, and Vector), and the Global Innovation Clusters that translate Canadian research into AI-enabled technologies for core sectors. Canada's research leadership is globally competitive, but requires further effort to drive commercialization.

The Government will leverage this whole value chain to accelerate its transformation and improve services

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