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Canadian firms are slower to adopt AI than their global peers. Only about one-quarter have fully implemented AI, compared to one-third globally. But IBM data shows 84% of Canadian executives are confident in 2026 performance and 86% are already using agentic AI. So which is it? This episode examines the disconnect between Canada's research strength and its commercialization struggles, the cultural factors holding companies back, and why the AI adoption gap isn't uniform across the economy.

Sources:

https://thehub.ca/podcast/video/the-future-is-present-why-canada-cant-afford-to-move-slowly-on-ai-innovation-strategies/

https://canada.newsroom.ibm.com/2026-02-02-Canadas-AI-Moment-Five-Trends-Redefining-Business-Confidence,-Speed-and-Trust-in-2026

https://thelogic.co/commentary/quebec-ink/yoshua-bengio-geoffrey-hinton-canada-ai-doom/

Tags

AI North Brief, Canadian AI, AI Policy, AI Adoption, Linux Foundation, IBM Canada, Hilary Carter, AI Readiness, Open Source AI, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, AI Safety

Chapter Markers

00:00 Intro 00:30 Two Competing Stories 01:45 The Valley of Death 03:00 The Doom and Gloom Problem 04:15 What Readiness Looks Like 05:30 What's Holding the Rest Back 06:30 What This Means

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The deadline for Canada's sovereign AI data centre proposals closed on Saturday. For the past month, the federal government accepted pitches for projects over 100 megawatts, Canadian-controlled, designed to reduce dependence on foreign compute. Brookfield estimates hyperscale data centres cost $10 million per megawatt to build, with compute infrastructure adding another $30 million per megawatt. Selected proponents will enter MOUs with the government, though no funding has been allocated yet. This episode examines what happens next and whether the gap between policy and physical infrastructure can finally close.

Sources:

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/enabling-large-scale-sovereign-ai-data-centres

https://betakit.com/feds-call-for-proposals-to-build-large-scale-data-centres-in-canada/

https://www.torys.com/our-latest-thinking/publications/2026/01/canada-promotes-investment-in-sovereign-large-scale-ai-data-centres

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2026/02/government-of-canada-launches-call-for-proposals-for-large-scale-sovereign-ai-data-centres

https://datacenternews.ca/story/feds-seek-applications-for-sovereign-data-centres-over-100mw

https://www.brookfield.com/views-news/insights/infrastructure-outlook-accelerating-growth

https://www.ieso.ca/Corporate-IESO/Media/News-Releases/2024/10/Electricity-Demand-in-Ontario-to-Grow-by-75-per-cent-by-2050

https://betakit.com/microsoft-to-spend-7-5-billion-on-ai-data-centre-expansion-with-pledge-to-protect-canadas-digital-sovereignty/

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/canadian-sovereign-ai-compute-strategy

Tags

AI North Brief, Canadian AI, AI Policy, Sovereign Compute, Data Centres, AI Infrastructure, ISED, Evan Solomon, Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, Budget 2025, Brookfield, Microsoft

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Description

Canada and Germany signed an AI cooperation agreement at the Munich Security Conference, launching the Sovereign Technology Alliance. The deal focuses on compute infrastructure, AI research, and talent development. It explicitly names Yoshua Bengio's LawZero as a potential area for collaboration. The signing comes as the Munich conference wrapped with warnings about "wrecking-ball politics" and the fracturing of the rules-based international order. This episode examines what the declaration actually does, what it doesn't do, and how it fits into Canada's broader pivot toward middle-power partnerships.

Sources:

https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-development/news/2026/02/canada-and-germany-sign-ai-joint-declaration-and-launch-sovereign-technology-alliance.html

https://globalnews.ca/news/11668118/canada-signs-ai-declaration-germany/

https://lawzero.org/en/news/yoshua-bengio-launches-lawzero-new-nonprofit-advancing-safe-design-ai

https://time.com/7290554/yoshua-bengio-launches-lawzero-for-safer-ai/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/munich-security-trump-carney-9.7077801

https://securityconference.org/en/publications/munich-security-report/2026/

https://www.canadianaffairs.news/2026/02/11/how-ai-is-affecting-canadas-job-market/

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/carney-cancels-trip-to-europe-following-bc-school-shooting/

Tags

AI North Brief, Canadian AI, AI Policy, Canada Germany, Sovereign Technology Alliance, Munich Security Conference, Evan Solomon, LawZero, Yoshua Bengio, AI Safety, Sovereign Compute, Mark Carney

Chapter Markers

00:00 Intro 00:45 What the Declaration Actually Does 02:30 The Context That Matters 04:00 What It Does Not Do 05:30 The Bigger Picture

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Episode Description

A new paper just dropped in AI & Society with a provocative title: "Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the New Authoritarianism." Philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh argues that AI isn't politically neutral. The way it's being deployed mirrors features of historical fascism, just through quieter mechanisms: data extraction, algorithmic governance, behavioral nudging, platform monopolization. This episode breaks down the argument, from Hannah Arendt's "thoughtless bureaucrat" to why tech oligarchs sat front row at Trump's inauguration. Yesterday was the immediate threat. Today is the structural analysis.

Episode Tags

technofascism, AI, Big Tech, authoritarianism, fascism, Mark Coeckelbergh, Hannah Arendt, algorithmic governance, surveillance, democracy, Trump, Silicon Valley, corporate power

Content Rating

Clean

Episode Type

Full

Runtime

~6 minutes

Timecodes

0:00 – The Paper 1:00 – The Quiet Mechanisms 2:00 – The Thoughtless Bureaucrat 3:00 – The Corporatism Parallel 4:00 – The Loud Version 5:15 – Resistance

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Canadian security officials testified this week that AI deepfakes will "very likely" target the next federal election. Their solution? "Hopefully AI will help us detect AI. Hopefully." That's a lot of hope doing a lot of heavy lifting. This episode looks at the global evidence—Slovakia, India, Taiwan, Germany—and a concept called the "liar's dividend" that may be more dangerous than the fakes themselves. Then we project forward to 2028 and ask what happens when leaders who've already tried to overturn elections get access to tools that can fabricate any reality.

Episode Tags

deepfakes, elections, democracy, AI, misinformation, disinformation, Canada, CSE, liar's dividend, Trump, 2028, Slovakia, India, authoritarianism

0:00 – The Warning 1:30 – The Global Evidence 3:30 – The Liar's Dividend 5:15 – The 2028 Problem 6:45 – Canada's Thin Defenses

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Canada is sending an AI delegation to the World Governments Summit in Dubai this week—over 200 companies applied to pitch Canadian AI solutions to 35 heads of state and 6,000 participants. The mission follows an October MOU between Minister Evan Solomon and the UAE, with delegates presenting "responsible, human-centred AI" for government decision-making, health services, and public safety.

But new data from IBM suggests the home front isn't as confident. While 86% of Canadian executives already use agentic AI and 68% expect AI agents to act independently by year's end, only 36% of Canadian workers are willing to be managed by AI—below the global average of 48%. And 82% of consumers say they'd trust a brand less if it concealed AI use.

This episode examines the gap between Canada's international AI brand and domestic reality: executives racing to deploy while workers pump the brakes on trust, governance frameworks that remain aspirational, and a talent shortage that shows no signs of easing. Canada is marketing AI sovereignty abroad while struggling to build the foundation at home.

Sources: IBM Institute for Business Value "Five Trends for 2026" report; SCALE AI World Governments Summit announcement; Episode 15 research on Ontario AI principles and implementation challenges.

Tags/Keywords

• Canada AI policy
• AI governance
• IBM AI report
• World Governments Summit Dubai
• SCALE AI
• AI trust
• Agentic AI
• AI sovereignty
• Evan Solomon
• UAE Canada AI
• Canadian tech policy
• AI workforce
• AI deployment

Chapter Markers / Timecodes

TimeChapter00:00 | Introduction — Canada's AI delegation to Dubai
00:45 | IBM report: Two stories in one
01:30 | Executives all in: 86% using agentic AI
02:15 | Workers pump the brakes: Only 36% willing to be managed by AI
03:00 | The trust number: 82% would trust brands less
03:30 | What Canada is selling in Dubai
04:30 | The gap: International brand vs domestic reality
05:30 | 92% want AI sovereignty — but what does that require?
06:15 | Global context: Everyone is struggling
07:00 | The pressure to deploy vs pressure to govern
07:30 | Closing — You can't export your way out of a trust problem

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Will a company ever voluntarily kill a machine that’s making them money?

Ontario recently released joint principles for responsible AI use, including a bold requirement: organizations must be ready to "decommission" any AI system producing unsafe or discriminatory outputs. It sounds good on paper, but in the high-stakes world of corporate efficiency, it ignores a fundamental truth that profitable systems are rarely shut down for harms that are invisible to the naked eye.

In this episode, we strip away the "AI ethics" buzzwords to look at the massive infrastructure gap standing between high-minded principles and real-world enforcement. We explore why the current roadmap for AI governance is currently built on a foundation of "wishes" rather than workable systems.

In this episode, we break down:

• The Decommissioning Delusion: Why the assumption that companies will prioritize fairness over profit is a fundamental misunderstanding of corporate incentives.
• The Implementation Gap: How a lack of standardized testing and "objective evidence" makes compliance nearly impossible for most Canadian businesses.
• Invisible Victims: The reality of statistical discrimination, why individual applicants often never know they’ve been harmed by an algorithm.
• The Talent Crisis: The staggering shortage of AI governance professionals and why the few who exist are priced out of reach for most organizations.
• Principles vs. Infrastructure: Why articulating what "responsible AI" looks like is the easy part, and why no country has actually built the enforcement mechanisms to back it up.

Is AI governance currently just a collection of noble intentions? We’re diving into the social alignment problem and what it actually takes to make AI serve everyone.

AI Ethics, AI Governance, Ontario Tech Policy, Algorithmic Bias, Responsible AI, AI Regulation Canada, Tech Accountability, Machine Learning Bias, Corporate Ethics, AI Implementation.

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Episode Description

Microsoft beat on every metric and the stock dropped six percent. What the earnings call revealed about AI infrastructure spending, OpenAI concentration risk, and why Canada's sovereign compute push faces a $72 billion scale gap.

Chapter Markers / Timecodes

00:00 – Intro 00:25 – The Earnings 01:45 – The Spending Problem 03:30 – The OpenAI Problem 05:00 – What This Means for Canada 06:15 – The Scale Gap 07:00 – Outro

Episode Tags

Microsoft, Azure, OpenAI, AI infrastructure, sovereign compute, Canada AI, data centres, Bell Canada, capex, cloud computing, earnings

Content Rating

Clean

Episode Type

Full

Runtime

~7 minutes