Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a draft national AI strategy on Wednesday that he said would close the country's AI adoption gap and put public money behind AI literacy by 2032.
The draft, prepared by a federal AI Strategy Task Force, warns that Canadian firms have been slower to put artificial intelligence to work than their international peers, and that the country risks falling behind unless adoption accelerates over the next several years.
That AI adoption gap is sharpest among smaller companies. The draft notes that many SMEs — the small and mid-sized businesses that employ most Canadian workers — still have no AI tools in everyday use, trailing comparable firms in the Nordic countries, Germany and France.
"We cannot let our smaller employers be left on the wrong side of this gap," the prime minister told reporters. "An economy that reads, writes and reasons with these tools is an economy that keeps its jobs at home."
To make the case, the draft leans on a recent KPMG-style global trust study spanning 47 countries, which found Canadians more wary of artificial intelligence — and less confident using it — than residents of many of the peer economies it was benchmarked against.
The proposed remedy is a national AI literacy initiative. It would fund plain-language learning kits, classroom material for thousands of educators, and free training for SMEs that want to bring the technology into payroll, scheduling and customer service.
The draft also presses the case for what it calls sovereign control of AI — keeping the data, computing power and core models that matter to Canada under Canadian rules, rather than depending entirely on systems built and governed abroad.
Not everyone is convinced the targets are realistic. Some economists welcomed the focus on AI literacy but questioned whether a 2032 deadline and a single task force can move firms that have stayed on the sidelines for years.
The strategy is still a draft, open for consultation through the fall before any final version goes to cabinet. For now, officials say the AI adoption gap — and how quickly it can be narrowed — is the number they will be watching.