When Business Doubts AI, Ottawa Listens. When You Do, You Get a Course: How "AI for All" Splits Business and Citizens

Send us Fan Mail Canada's new national AI strategy, "AI for All," contains a contradiction hiding in plain sight. When Canadian businesses hold back from adopting AI, the strategy is gracious: it reports that 78 per cent of non-adopting firms simply do not see the value yet, calls this "not resistance" but "a translation problem," and answers with a $500-million growth fund, tax breaks, equity stakes, and a pledge to buy Canadian. When ordinary Canadians hold back, the same document files it under low literacy and low trust, a deficit to be corrected with a national literacy program and a certification mark. Same hesitation, two verdicts: prudence in the boardroom, ignorance in the living room. In this Season 2 premiere, host Paul Karwatsky reads the strategy against philosopher Onora O'Neill's 2002 Reith Lectures, "A Question of Trust," and asks why Ottawa respects what business thinks while trying to fix what citizens think. For a plan named for all Canadians, the unsettling question is whose judgment that "all" is built to respect.