Canada’s AI Strategy Prioritizes Adoption. But What About Accountability?

By: Dorotea Gucciardo

The federal government’s draft national AI strategy, AI for All, offers a glimpse into how Canada hopes to position itself in an increasingly AI-driven economy. The document focuses heavily on accelerating adoption: expanding AI literacy, increasing business uptake, creating jobs, and strengthening Canada’s domestic AI capacity.

Those goals are understandable. Canada has invested heavily in AI research over the past decade, yet adoption remains relatively low. The strategy’s emphasis on training, workforce development, and public access to AI education reflects a growing recognition that AI will affect nearly every sector of society.

What stands out, however, is the imbalance between the strategy’s ambitions for adoption and its discussion of governance. While the draft references protecting Canadians from AI-related harms and building public trust, it offers comparatively few details about how those protections will be achieved. As AI systems become more deeply embedded in everyday decision-making, questions about transparency, accountability, privacy, and oversight cannot remain secondary considerations.

These issues were recently explored in an article published by The Walrus, to which Starling Centre contributed feedback. We argue that ambitious innovation strategies often struggle against the realities of concentrated power and public skepticism. While the government’s AI strategy promises economic growth, sovereignty, and opportunity, it pays relatively little attention to the ways AI can reinforce existing concentrations of power, generate social harms, and undermine public trust when deployed without meaningful oversight.

We also argue that the strategy risks treating public trust as a tool for driving adoption rather than as an outcome that must be earned. Canadians’ concerns about AI reflect growing awareness of issues ranging from surveillance and discrimination to errors in automated systems and the influence of large technology companies. Addressing those concerns requires transparency, accountability, and democratic participation in decisions about how AI is governed.

Canada’s AI strategy signals an important shift from research leadership toward adoption at scale. Whether it succeeds may depend not only on how quickly Canadians embrace AI, but on whether governments, institutions, and industry can build the trust necessary to support that adoption over the long term.

As the strategy moves from draft to final form, there is still an opportunity to strengthen that balance.