AI for All: Canada’s National AI Strategy - Highlights and Takeaways for CPAs

June 12, 2026

After roughly nine months of anticipation, and a public consultation that drew over 11,000 submissions, the federal government has released its updated national artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, titled AI for All.

First promised by Minister of AI Evan Solomon in the fall of 2025, the strategy arrives as Canada looks to strengthen its position on several long-standing economic priorities: improving productivity, translating Canada’s world-class AI research into commercial success, and retaining domestic AI talent – all while building public confidence and trust in the technology. The government has framed its approach around a unifying message of “Artificial Intelligence for All,” built on six pillars first previewed in the Spring Economic Update 2026, spanning everything from protecting Canadians and safeguarding democracy to scaling homegrown AI champions and building sovereign compute infrastructure.

Building on those pillars, the updated strategy lays out the government’s specific plans across each priority area. Here’s what CPAs need to know.

AI Adoption and the importance of trust

AI for All is built on a central premise: Canadians need to trust AI before they will adopt it. Without adoption, the economic benefits won't materialize.

On trust, Canada has a significant gap to close. Canadians are roughly evenly split on whether AI is good for society (34 per cent) or harmful (36 per cent), and half regard it as a threat to humanity. Fewer than four in ten say they have moderate or high knowledge of AI, and less than half believe they can use AI tools effectively. In a global comparison, Canada ranks 42nd of 47 countries on trust in AI systems and 44th of 47 on AI training and literacy. In its October 2025 submission to Minister Solomon, CPA Ontario identified the trust gap as a central barrier to AI adoption and called for a governance framework built on transparency, accountability, and independent assurance.

The adoption numbers reflect that lack of confidence. Only 12 per cent of Canadian businesses have formally integrated AI into their operations, dropping to 8 per cent among small and midsized enterprises (SMEs). Among non-adopting firms, 78 per cent report that they simply don't see how AI applies to their business. The strategy frames this as a translation problem; businesses aren't opposed to AI, they just don't know where to start.

The government's target is to move business adoption from 12 per cent to 60 per cent by 2034, with a particular focus on SMEs. The strategy projects that broader adoption could create up to 250,000 new jobs by 2031 and unlock nearly $200 billion in GDP gains (equivalent to about 3% of GDP) through productivity improvements.

Governance and regulation

Protecting the Public

Based on the trust gap noted above, moving the needle of public sentiment will require putting the right guardrails in place to reassure Canadians that their privacy and safety are being protected. The strategy clearly lays out the potential risks of AI that are giving Canadians pause: AI generated misinformation and its impact on democratic institutions, the proliferation of deepfakes and threats to privacy and personal data.

While the strategy claims that Canada has a “tradition of pragmatic regulation that can govern AI responsibly without smothering innovation,” it offers little substantive detail on what shape that regulation will take. There is no mention in the strategy of standalone AI legislation, such as the now scrapped Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA). Instead, the strategy points to the future introduction of online safety laws and the modernization of existing consumer protection legislation “to enshrine a fundamental right to privacy, safeguard children’s information from exploitation and harm, and strengthen people’s control over their personal data.” On the government’s own use of Canadians’ data, the strategy leans on the federal government’s ongoing review of the Privacy Act, the results of which are expected in the winter of 2026-2027.

AI for All does include two novel proposals for improving transparency. The first is a “Canada Trusted AI Certification program” to help Canadians identify trustworthy AI products in the marketplace. The second is a proposal for “the watermarking of AI-generated content.” The strategy includes no further explanation on either proposal, including the scope, how AI “products” and “content” will be defined, or how certification and watermarking will be enforced.

One transparency mechanism that is notably absent from the strategy is mandatory high-risk AI incident reporting. In its submission, CPA Ontario recommended that the government explore establishing a mechanism for businesses to report when an AI system, such as a Large Language Model (LLM), AI agent, or AI powered search engine, behaves in a way that poses a risk to the public. This would align with similar reporting requirements under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which requires disclosure of breaches of security safeguards involving personal information. Including this requirement in future legislative updates would reinforce the role and responsibility of business in protecting the rights and data of Canadians and building trust in the technology.

Setting the standard

The federal government recognizes that Canada cannot implement a governance model for AI in isolation. With every jurisdiction walking a tightrope between innovation and regulation, Canada cannot be an outlier.

To that end, the federal AI strategy includes renewed funding for the Standards Council of Canada’s AI Program, with the mandate to develop standards-based AI testing, certification, interoperability and global market access. It also points to “alignment with international standards” and global partnerships in broad recognition that Canada needs to lead in the setting of global standards, or risk impacting its ability to innovate and compete in a fast-moving international AI ecosystem.

This reality is why CPA Ontario’s submission pointed to broadly adopted international frameworks, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission’s (IEC) first international standard for establishing an Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS), as potential starting points for the establishment of a regulatory structure. The race is underway to set standards for the regulation of AI globally. It is essential that Canada, and Canadian CPAs, have a seat at that table to ensure we are rule-makers, and not just rule-followers. As Jim Basillie, FCPA, FCA, Canadian innovation champion and co-founder of the Innovation Leadership Accelerator put it: “Firms that want to protect their margins as industries evolve must pursue a sophisticated standard strategy and be present at the table where standards are set.”

Talent, workforce and the push for adoption

The strategy devotes significant attention to the talent and workforce side of AI: who will use it, how they’ll be trained, and what happens to jobs that change along the way. The strategy is explicitly framed as “pro-worker,” stating that AI should augment expertise rather than replace it.

The strategy commits to a National AI Literacy Initiative, aimed at reaching one million entry-level post-secondary students and training more than 3,000 educators. The strategy also commits to providing all post-secondary students with access to “trusted AI agents” and investing $50 million over five years to modernize the Job Bank with AI-powered matching.

On the labour market side, the government is projecting 250,000 new AI-relevant jobs by 2031 and committing to 90,000 AI-related work opportunities across existing programs. It is also launching sector-specific “Workforce Alliances” across six priority sectors (health, energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and defence) to coordinate talent pipelines between employers, unions, post-secondary institutions and government.

As the competition for AI researchers and engineers heats up, attracting and retaining highly skilled talent is identified as a strategic priority. Nearly seventy per cent of Canadian-founded startups are now headquartered outside of Canada. The government plans to strengthen the network of national AI institutes (MILA, Vector and Amii), expand the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs program from 130 to nearly 200 researchers, broaden the Global Talent Stream for faster entry of highly skilled AI workers, and align permanent residency pathways to retain the talent Canada recruits. A new Prime Minister's Innovation Fellows Program will recruit technical talent directly into the federal public service to build the internal capacity needed to procure, evaluate, and deploy AI systems.

For Canadian businesses, the strategy outlines several measures aimed at increasing adoption, some new and some already existing. The BDC’s existing $500 million LIFT program will be leveraged to help SMEs access financing for AI tools, while $500 million in new funding for the Regional AI Initiative will flow through Regional Development Agencies to accelerate adoption and commercialization across the country. Targeted support for entrepreneurs through the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Development Program, and new AI readiness assessment tools have also been included, with the goal of helping SMEs identify AI use cases, understand potential business impacts and connect with available programs.

Capital commitments and “Scaling Canadian Champions”

Throughout AI for All, the federal government emphasizes Canada’s existing strengths in AI. From research undertaken by AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton to a Canadian frontier AI model company (only a handful of such companies currently exist) and our favourable climate and clean electricity grid for data centres, the government believes that Canada has an excellent foundation to build on. .

But the strategy is also candid about what isn’t working. As AI for All notes: “Canadian companies can compete at the highest tier. The question is whether they will do so from Canada, and whether more will follow” – referring to recent research showing that Canadian startups are leaving Canada in record numbers. In the strategy’s own words, the path from research to commercialization remains “thinner than it should be.” In its submission to Minister Solomon, CPA Ontario also noted concerns about Canada’s innovation ecosystem and highlighted the importance of major tax reform, as first outlined in Tax Reform for Growth in Canada, to keeping the fruits of Canadian innovation in Canada and to helping them attract the capital they need to grow and thrive. and to helping Canadian innovators attract the capital they need to grow and thrive.

AI for All treats high-performance computing as a core pillar of national sovereignty, using direct financial commitments to ensure sovereign compute is available to Canadian scale-ups and that the current reliance on foreign infrastructure is lessened or overcome where appropriate. For example, rather than continue to rely entirely on foreign hyperscaler cloud companies to provide AI compute, one of the major commitments in AI for All is the building of a world-leading supercomputer by 2031. This supercomputer will help SMEs gain affordable access to raw processing power that will remain subject to Canadian privacy and security laws. The strategy also signals a broader sovereign compute build-out, with partnerships proposing 850 megawatts of capacity by 2030 and scaling potential to 2.3 gigawatts. The Compute Access Fund, first introduced in Budget 2024, will receive an additional $700 million, to provide SMEs with affordable access to sovereign compute for training, testing and deploying AI models on Canadian infrastructure.

A major element of AI for All is federal funding for, among other things, building the Canadian sovereign AI foundation, growing Canadian AI literacy and ensuring the “investment flywheel” that rewards risk-taking by Canadian companies. In total, AI for All commits $2.3 billion toward the implementation of the strategy.

Beyond the significant dollars being committed in this strategy, AI for All highlights that Canada has often led in research but needs to improve when it comes to commercialization of this research. The focus of the funding is building a commercialization ecosystem and helping domestic scale-ups attract the capital they need to stay, and grow, in Canada.

Additional funding and capital commitments include:

• $500 million for a new Canadian Tech Growth Fund to provide capital to AI scale-ups, including the potential for the federal government, at times, to take equity stakes in the most promising Canadian AI firms;
• $700 million in additional funding for the Compute Access Fund to provide Canadian SMEs with affordable sovereign compute (building on the initiative introduced in Budget 2024 and bringing the total budget to $1 billion);
• $200 million for an “AI Missions Program,” a new initiative to advance targeted, high-impact projects that deliver significant public good (focused on the strategy’s priority sectors), with the first mission focused on improving health outcomes for Canadians;
• $130 million for commercialization programs across the National AI Institutes;
• $100 million to launch the Health Sector Data Space to link secure, private and standardized health datasets;
• $50 million to expand the Canadian AI Safety Institute;
• Where appropriate, the newly announced Canada Strong Fund (Canada’s sovereign wealth fund) may also be leveraged to support “emerging national champions;”
• An unspecified commitment, by Budget 2026, for the Department of Finance to explore mechanisms “that encourage Canadians to reinvest gains earned from successful tech companies into new Canadian AI startups,” seemingly acting on the capital gains rollover reforms CPA Ontario has advocated for; and
• Leverage the Buy Canadian policy to establish the federal government as a strategic anchor customer for domestic scale-ups.

The strategy also references the SR&ED tax credit and Productivity Super-Deduction from Budget 2025 as levers to make AI investment more affordable for businesses.

What this means for CPAs

AI for All is a balancing act.

On the one hand, it’s a call for Canadians to join the government in the global AI race by accelerating adoption, building out our sovereign compute infrastructure and supporting homegrown AI entrepreneurship and innovation. On the other, it is also a commitment by the federal government to put safety measures in place so Canadians can feel comfortable picking up the pace. This balancing act should be all too familiar to CPAs.

The national AI strategy has made it very clear that the global economy is moving into a new age in which data and intangible assets like intellectual property and patents are economic and national security assets. This transformative change will have sweeping ramifications for everything from global standard setting to how firms create value.

CPAs who understand the implications for this shift will be well-equipped to play a leading role in supporting Canadian innovators in the commercialization of their intellectual property and grow their business here in Canada. What’s more, organizations are looking to CPAs for their guidance on how to successfully incorporate AI tools into their own work to drive productivity and efficiency.

CPAs are also called to the highest standards of ethical practice. The dedication to protecting the public interest, represented in the CPA Code of Professional Conduct, does not stop at the cutting edge of innovation. It will fall to CPAs to understand the implications of new protection measures, from privacy requirements to online safety laws, on their business models.

After all, both the CPA profession, and Canada’s AI future, is built on a foundation of trust.