Canada AI Strategy

In June 2026 Mark Carney unveiled AI for All, Canada's national AI strategy. Five years, more than two billion dollars, aimed at a country that ranks 28th out of 30 advanced economies on AI training and literacy. The two parts that stood out to us at Ollon are sovereignty and the push to increase adoption.

On sovereignty, we depend on foreign compute, cloud, and data infrastructure, and the plan to build domestic capacity is the right thing to do. But sovereignty is not just owning the servers. Staying independent means keeping up with the technology, and you cannot do that as a laggard.

Adoption is where the conversation has gone sideways. Our slow uptake is not new. Canada has been slow to adopt technology for decades.

What worries me is the framing in the media. The commentary on the CBC kept treating AI as something forced on people by this strategy, asking why Canadians should learn a technology they are not keen on, as if it were avoidable. It is not. The interviewer also pushed for a number on jobs AI will destroy, as if that were the crux. Nobody can predict the net, but the people who adapt will be far more valuable in the workforce than those who do not.

Here is what adoption actually looks like. The CEO at one of Ollon's clients told every manager to start using Claude Code and show how it could make their team more productive. Two months later, when they presented, every one of them, from every department, had built something real. Agents, internal guides, small apps they vibe coded themselves, all aimed at bottlenecks they already understood. None of them got trained and certified. They put their hands in, tried things, and reported back.

Adoption is a mindset before it is a skill set. We are just not using what we have. The AI Literacy Initiative is worth investing in, and plenty of people need a boost to get going, but a program can only do so much. What really matters is the shift in attitude.

The same thing is true for us at Ollon. The way software gets built is changing, and we have to change how we develop. If we don't make that shift, we won't be able to compete. That holds for a company and for a country. Our leaders should be saying it to everyone, and we need to hear it from Carney and other Canadian leaders.