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Evan Solomon Wants Canada to Trust AI. Can We Trust Evan Solomon?
Last September, nearly 6,500 people—including start-up founders, investors, and researchers—gathered at the Palais des congrès in Montreal for All In, Canada’s largest artificial intelligence event. After passing through a security checkpoint, they lounged on plush furniture and posed in front of a luminous “ALL IN” sign. Everyone wore a lanyard with a QR code that could be scanned to connect through an app, a sort of modern-day business card. Kiosks showcased AI companies; smooth jazz flowed and so did coffee.
Canada’s minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, Evan Solomon, was there, working the room. With a small entourage, he stopped by several of the kiosks, asking questions and shaking hands. He appeared at a funding announcement for INOVAIT, a national network focused on image-guided therapy and AI, and another with Telus as it revealed plans for a “sovereign AI factory” in Rimouski, Quebec, which is intended to deliver AI compute power to Canadian businesses and researchers. At All In, there was money and goodwill to go around: the mood was frothy with it, yet also undercut by a sense of urgency.
“This conference comes at a hinge moment,” Solomon said in his opening remarks from the main conference stage. “We’ve got a technological revolution colliding with a political realignment, and the choices that we make are going to shape our economy, our democracy, and our daily lives for decades to come.” What’s at stake? In other words, only everything.
Artificial intelligence is the branch of computer science in which machines are developed to simulate certain human functions, like learning and prediction. Its applications range from supply chain management to developing new products, like drugs. Canadians are probably most familiar with generative AI tools, which can produce text, video, and other content. These tools are often described as a sort of super assistant that can handle emails, scheduling, research, and other mundane tasks, freeing up time for more important jobs (or leisure) and ultimately making us more productive.
Canada is betting big on AI. The 2025 fall budget earmarked about $925 million over the next five years for “sovereign public AI infrastructure” to boost AI compute capacity, and announced the creation of an Office of Digital Transformation to lead AI adoption across the federal government, where these tools are already being implemented (for example, the Canada Revenue Agency has been beta-testing an AI chatbot to help people find tax information). At the same time, the budget outlined plans to trim approximately 16,000 jobs from the federal workforce, including through retirement and other forms of attrition.
Nearly six in ten Canadians have used an AI tool, according to a 2025 Leger survey. The majority—85 percent—think the government should regulate the technology for safe and ethical use. Solomon has emphasized that any regulation must be “light, tight, and right” because overregulation can chase companies and capital away. As Canada’s first minister of AI and digital innovation, part of his job has been to win over a wary populace and convince them that the benefits of widespread adoption, like an anticipated boost to Canada’s sluggish productivity, will outweigh the risks.
In his political debut, the former journalist has moved with haste. He spent his first months in government laying the groundwork for an updated national AI strategy, which is expected in early 2026. Solomon says that the “guiding principle” of his ministry is “AI for all,” and that his approach is defined by four pillars: scaling up Canadian companies, encouraging adoption, promoting digital sovereignty—that we control our own critical tech and data—and building trust, which might be the keystone. “Technology moves at the speed of innovation, but adoption moves at the speed of trust,” he said at All In. In December, when I asked him what we might expect from the forthcoming AI strategy, he mentioned trust again. “What are we trying to do?” he said. “Trust first.”
For three months last fall, I set out to understand how Solomon is trying to earn the trust of Canadians. I attended some of his panels and events and tuned in to his media appearances. I reviewed decades-old issues of Shift, the technology magazine he co-founded in 1992, and read some of his fiction. I also spoke to AI and quantum researchers, including from each of the three national AI institutes; privacy and cybersecurity experts; economists; investors; labour leaders; and old friends and colleagues of Solomon’s—people who’d known him for decades.
Many in AI and the tech community more broadly (Solomon’s file includes quantum) are thrilled to see a high-profile minister speaking supportively of their industries, not to mention handing out money. But Solomon, who has described himself as a “skeptical optimist,” has also alienated some who feel that their concerns about this rapidly evolving technology aren’t being addressed adequately. He has been accused of naively embracing artificial intelligence rather than working to mitigate its harms, and of listening mostly to voices from the tech sector—those who stand to benefit most from rapid AI adoption.
Solomon is a born storyteller. One story he often tells is how, in 1992, he and his friend Andrew Heintzman—who were then fresh out of grad school at McGill University—launched Shift, which would become an award-winning digital culture magazine. “The first part of my life was as a small business owner and entrepreneur, tracking the evolution of technology’s impact,” he told me.
Shift started as a fiction magazine, a place to publish young writers (Heintzman let me borrow some issues, including the first, which features a short story by Solomon). Solomon and Heintzman had roughly $600 and produced the first issue from Heintzman’s parents’ basement.
Heintzman recalled how he and Solomon walked up and down Yonge Street in Toronto, “literally going door to door” to sell ads. The first issue was launched with a splashy party at Lee’s Palace, a well-known Toronto music venue, where Heintzman’s rock band performed. “Everyone paid twenty bucks, and that’s how we paid for our first [issue],” Heintzman told me. Soon Solomon was talking up Shift on CBC’s Morningside radio show, displaying an ease and confidence on air that would serve him in later roles as a journalist and now, a politician.
After the second issue was published, he went to Asia, promising Heintzman, with whom he is still close, that he’d return (he did, several months later). He cut his teeth in journalism in Hong Kong. “I was working at a Chinese freight-forwarding company,” he told podcaster Aaron Pete in 2024. “They wouldn’t pay me ’til the end of the month, and I knew I was going to quit, because I wanted to be a journalist. But I didn’t know how.” He connected with an editor from the South China Morning Post. “He said, ‘What do you know about the Hong Kong pension fund situation?’ And I said, ‘Everything.’” In Solomon’s own telling, this was a fib. He didn’t know what a pension fund was. But he wrote the story, delivering 700 words the next morning.
Shift was undergoing its own transformation. The market for short fiction wasn’t as viable as they’d hoped, Heintzman said, and the small editorial team had become increasingly hooked on the ideas of people like communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan and writer-artist Douglas Coupland, who coined the term “Generation X.” No longer a literary magazine, Shift morphed into something weirder and more interesting: a place to explore internet culture.
Issues I reviewed, which were published between 1992 and 1997, included an email interview with Wired founder Louis Rossetto; a rollicking tour by writer Miles Kronby through the “electronic frontier” of internet message boards; and Solomon’s interview with Moses Znaimer, then at CityTV, in which Znaimer was invited to add his own acid commentary in the form of footnotes. Ambition and experimentation also infused the business model. According to The Ryerson Review of Journalism (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s Review of Journalism), Shift launched one of the first magazine websites in Canada. It also sold early digital ads on its website.
It’s important to emphasize how unusual this was. In the ’90s, the internet was seen as the place where culture went to die, even though a whole new one was thriving online. By treating digital culture as a topic worthy of reporting on back in the ’90s, Shift broke ground.
But Solomon’s ambitions stretched beyond the magazine. In part because of his on-camera work as host of the cable access show Shift TV, he was invited to audition for FutureWorld, a weekly half-hour show about trends in science, tech, and pop culture. He got the job, hosting four seasons on CBC Newsworld. He hadn’t given up on the literary aspirations that first fuelled his work at the magazine, either. He eventually left Shift to focus on writing, and in 1999 published his first and only novel, Crossing the Distance. “I’ve sort of geared my whole life to this,” he told McGill News at the time, hinting that he was also working on a screenplay. Two children’s books followed, in 2005 and 2007.
The launch of his book dovetailed with his next CBC show, Hot Type with Evan Solomon, in which he interviewed authors. On Pete’s podcast, he described sitting down with American writer Richard Ford, a famously intimidating presence. (When fellow novelist Alice Hoffman gave Ford a negative review, he shot a bullet through one of Hoffman’s books and mailed it to her.) Solomon recalled Ford bristling at one of his questions. “I said, ‘Well, Richard, you seem to be getting very defensive,’” he told Aaron Pete. “I felt very clever—like this is great, it’s good TV, and I’ve quickly whipped the ball back to you.’ And [Ford] looked right at me and said, ‘I am defensive. That’s because I have something to defend. What about you?’”
After FutureWorld and Hot Type, Solomon went on to increasingly prominent roles at the CBC, reporting from ground zero in New York on 9/11 and from Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in 2004, after the deadly tsunami there. In 2009, he was named host of the CBC’s flagship Power & Politics and then of The House on CBC Radio One. Solomon and his family settled in Ottawa, where he got to know the current prime minister, Mark Carney, who was then governor of the Bank of Canada.
Solomon is probably still best known for hosting Power & Politics, and for how he abruptly left the CBC. He was fired in 2015 following a Toronto Star investigation alleging that he’d brokered art deals with some of the same people he was reporting on, including Carney. In Ottawa, with its outsize number of politicians, public servants, and journalists, some overlapping of social circles is bound to happen. But observers still declared themselves mystified that Solomon would allegedly risk even the appearance of a conflict of interest. “I’ve never said a bad word about the CBC,” he told Pete on his podcast. He said that he and the CBC reached a settlement, the details of which have not been disclosed. “It wasn’t an easy time. I’m not going to sugar-coat it,” Solomon said. “It was a shock.”
He soon picked up fresh hosting duties on The Evan Solomon Show, a national talk radio program, and never seemed to lose his taste for reporting. In 2022, when the “Freedom Convoy” occupied downtown Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates and other aspects of COVID-19 management, Solomon was on the ground for CTV. Apparently unflappable, he was harassed by protesters; one threw a beer can at his head. “I’m out there every day doing stand-ups,” he told the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. “It’s very passionate. There’s lots of yelling.” He noted that CTV would send a security guard with him. “People will threaten you, people will throw things at you—that’s all happened to me. If you have a big news camera, then you’re a target.”
When I asked him how his years as a journalist prepared him for government, he described a walk he took in Toronto with his father, a lawyer, in the early booming days of Shift. He was pointing out landmarks, like the Horseshoe Tavern and the CityTV building, humble-bragging to his dad (who has since passed away) about his life as a magazine editor.
“I was trying to prove that I was doing something productive,” he told me. His father stopped him in front of a building and pointed to a window, growing misty eyed. “That’s where your grandfather worked,” Solomon’s father said, according to this account. The building was a former “sweatshop” where Solomon’s grandfather, who had immigrated to Canada, sewed pockets onto clothing, including the suit that Solomon’s father wore to his own bar mitzvah. Solomon said his grandfather died at age fifty-three, just two months after that event.
“My dad said, ‘Don’t forget where you came from,’” Solomon told me. “That is a thing I think about literally every single day. Today I have the privilege to be in the House and make sure folks have opportunities to get their first step on the economic ladder.”
Canada was an early leader in AI development. This country launched the world’s first funded national strategy in 2017, which saw the creation of three AI institutes—Vector, in Toronto; the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), in Edmonton; and Mila, in Montreal—aimed at recruiting and retaining top talent.
A lot of groundbreaking research happened here too: in 2012, for example, a team led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto showed how deep learning could be used to improve a computer’s ability to read images, an advancement that is considered foundational to much of the AI technology we see today. (Hinton collaborator Ilya Sutskever went on to co-found OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.) But commercialization has largely happened elsewhere, and business adoption has been slow. Two of Canada’s most high-profile AI researchers, Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have spoken openly about what they see as AI’s potentially catastrophic risks, which might help explain Canadians’ pessimistic attitudes toward AI. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global online survey, found that 31 percent of Canadians said they trusted AI, nineteen points lower than the global average.
Although the previous Liberal government invested heavily in AI—the 2024 budget set aside $2 billion over five years to be spent on AI compute—it also explored certain guardrails. In February of 2025, Canada was one of dozens of countries to sign a document pledging to develop inclusive, sustainable AI; the US and UK refrained. And Canada pursued regulation through the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), which was tabled in 2022 as part of Bill C-27, although that bill died when then prime minister Justin Trudeau resigned and Parliament was prorogued. But AIDA was controversial even among those who might welcome some form of AI regulation, in part because critics said it relied too heavily on input from the tech sector.
Once Donald Trump was elected US president in November 2024, tech policy seismically shifted like everything else. Trump named investor David Sacks, who has railed against “woke AI” and regulation, his “AI and Crypto Czar” and issued executive orders aimed at eliminating hurdles to development. Tech execs have regularly turned up at the White House. Companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google helped pay for the new ballroom.
Trump’s comments about turning Canada into the fifty-first state sparked a nationalistic “elbows up” movement that Carney rode to power. He recruited Solomon, who had moved to New York City to become publisher of GZERO Media, to join his team. (Diana Fox Carney, Mark Carney’s wife, joined GZERO’s parent company, Eurasia Group, as senior adviser in 2021.) Carney’s creation of a dedicated AI ministry was a clear sign that Canada is staking its position. In naming Solomon minister, he installed a skilled communicator who has a long association with tech. Journalists love to report on their own, which didn’t hurt either. (Solomon and I had not met before I started working on this story.)
Soon he was doing interviews, podcasts, and panels, delivering a bullish message. Rather than drone about impending legislation or dwell on doomsday scenarios, he has compared this country’s leading AI researchers to famous hockey players like Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers. More than once, he described how his father was initially hesitant to use his credit card online. It’s a way to illustrate and gently deflate our fear of technological change.
But there is no standalone Department of AI and Digital Innovation; Solomon’s ministry sits within Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada (ISED), whose mission is partly to help businesses grow and compete. ISED supports multiple ministers, among them Minister of Industry Mélanie Joly. Solomon is also the minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario). Links to business and industry are, in a sense, baked into his role. And many I spoke with in those communities have been largely supportive of Solomon’s work on AI so far.
The minister’s tone has struck others as overly boosterish. “We’re hearing a very ‘sunny ways’ message from Solomon.”
Christian Sauvageau is chief executive officer of Reveal Surgical, with whom Solomon briefly shared a stage at All In. (Reveal was partially funded through INOVAIT.) That company has created an AI-powered tool that detects cancerous cells in the brain in under three seconds. “We’re very impressed by the government, from an AI perspective,” he told me in September. “It’s more than just tone.” Ottawa’s prioritization of AI is sending a much-needed signal to private investors, he added. And Canada’s investment in its AI institutes, including Mila in Montreal, the city where Reveal Surgical is based, has been important to the company’s success, Sauvageau said. Without having this expertise close at hand, “I’m not sure we would have cracked the code.”
The minister’s tone has struck others as overly boosterish. “We’re hearing a very ‘sunny ways’ message from Solomon,” Matt Hatfield of internet advocacy nonprofit OpenMedia told me. To Hatfield, this didn’t line up with Canadians’ attitudes toward or concerns about AI—for example, its environmental impacts, like energy and water use.
Then there’s the growing problem of deepfakes. Today’s AI tools can generate hyper-realistic images and other media that then circulate online, confusing or distorting reality and potentially putting people at risk. In the 2025 Online Harms Survey from the Dais Institute, 67 percent of Canadian residents reported seeing AI-generated or synthetic media online at least a few times a year, up from 60 percent the year before.
On January 12, the UK’s independent online safety watchdog announced an investigation into Elon Musk’s X platform amid reports that the Grok AI chatbot was creating and sharing “undressed images of people” and sexualized images of children. Musk, who has previously suggested on X that the UK wants to suppress free speech, said that anyone using Grok to make “illegal content” would face the same consequences as those who upload any such content to X.
Following an earlier report in the Telegraph that the UK, Canada, and Australia might work together on a coordinated response, Solomon posted on X on January 11 that Canada was not considering a ban of the platform. (News of this was reposted by Musk, who added heart and Canadian flag emojis.) “Deepfake sexual abuse is violence,” Solomon said in a separate post on X. “We must protect Canadians, especially women and young people, from exploitation. Platforms and AI developers have a duty to prevent this harm.” The statement went on to mention Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, which would amend the Criminal Code to provide Canadians with greater protection from non-consensual deepfakes.
Some observers have criticized government officials for continuing to use X at all. A politician’s presence on X does not amount to an “endorsement,” Solomon’s office told me via email, noting that officials keep posting there “to ensure that Canadians can access accurate, timely public information where large audiences already are.”
In all the ways that AI can make our lives easier, it also makes the work of bad actors—from cybercriminals to authoritarian governments to garden-variety trolls—easier too. Then there are the more existential worries. As AI becomes more advanced, self-preservation tendencies have been documented in certain models. In 2025, AI firm Anthropic reported on an experiment in which its Claude Opus 4 tried to blackmail a company executive to prevent itself from being shut off. At the Canada 2020 summit in June 2025, Solomon was asked about AI regulation in the context of self-preservation concerns. He suggested that regulation is difficult, while acknowledging that certain guardrails, including data and privacy protection, are necessary. “How do you regulate? No constraint has worked,” Solomon said, noting that Canada already has a voluntary code of conduct on the responsible use of generative AI. And the Canadian AI Safety Institute, launched in 2024, conducts research into risks. Solomon has said that updates to Canada’s privacy legislation are coming.
In September, he announced a thirty-day “sprint” to inform Canada’s approach to AI. This involved a public consultation (run through ISED) and a twenty-eight-member task force that would provide recommendations. Digital rights advocates had long been calling for a broad public consultation on AI; many have highlighted Canada’s overreliance on US tech giants, suggesting common ground with the Carney government, which has emphasized the need to prioritize digital sovereignty, including through a “sovereign Canadian cloud.”
But to some I spoke with, the process launched last September missed the mark. The list of names on the task force struck them as heavily skewed toward industry: those who stand to benefit most from rapid adoption. Blair Attard-Frost, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta who has studied AI governance in Canada, said it would be difficult for a non-expert to participate in the consultation, in part because it asked technical questions and gave only thirty days to answer them. (For example: “How can Canada better connect AI research with commercialization to meet strategic business needs?”) To Attard-Frost, the public consultation on AI resembled a “checkbox exercise.”
An open letter dated October 31, 2025, and signed by more than 120 groups and individuals—including the BC Civil Liberties Association, PEN Canada, and OpenMedia—decried what it called the “prioritization of business and economic interests” in ISED’s survey and the “lack of human rights, civil liberties [groups] and similar representatives” on the task force. It called on the government to extend the public consultation, review the mix of voices on the task force, and rewrite the survey to make it more “unbiased.”
Among those who signed the letter was Ron Deibert, who is founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, which investigates digital threats to democracy, human rights, and global security. Deibert is a well-known expert in tech and cybersecurity. He told me that he opted not to participate in the government process. “I don’t want to lend credibility to such flawed processes by participating,” he said in an email. He cited a need for much greater transparency from AI companies—for example, mandated transparency requirements and independent auditing of their platforms—alongside the long-awaited updates to Canadian privacy laws.
For their part, unions want more transparency around how AI is deployed in the workplace. And there are signs this is happening, at least at the federal level. In November, Canada launched a public register of AI use in the federal government. Chris Roberts of the Canadian Labour Congress welcomed this as a “positive step,” although he said the group would like to see it extended to other levels of government. According to the Treasury Board, a public consultation on the registry will happen this year.
Last October, when the task force and consultation were still underway, I asked Solomon how he felt about charges that the task force wasn’t inclusive enough, and that timelines were too short. “The mix on the [task force] is pretty good. I’m pretty satisfied with it,” he said, noting that he and his team were also meeting with “stakeholders” across the country. As for the tight timelines, Solomon emphasized that the goal was to be agile and efficient. “If I did a year-long task force, by the time I got it back and we heard from everybody, would it still be relevant?”
The public apparently had a lot to say on the topic of AI. The thirty-day online consultation attracted over 11,000 responses, the most ISED has ever received. The federal government used an AI tool to review and summarize responses to its public consultation on AI, Solomon told the Canadian Press in December.
As the minister moves with haste, he has telegraphed the urgency of this file. It’s a tone we’ve heard from Carney and other officials as our relationship with the US convulses. Pierre Trudeau once famously likened Canada’s position to “sleeping with an elephant,” and these days we are insomniacs, awakened at random hours by some new crisis or surprise.
“It’s a challenging economic global environment, where there’s a need for us to diversify trade routes,” Solomon told me. “It doesn’t mean we’re not going to continue to trade very robustly with the United States.” The Carney government has prioritized building stronger ties with allies like the European Union, and in December, Solomon signed agreements with EU counterparts to expand collaboration on AI. It’s a delicate balance, because the US has opposed efforts to regulate the technology. Moving too aggressively might risk further alienating our most important trading partner. We are between a rock and a hard place.
At a time of cutbacks and belt tightening, when affordability concerns are top of mind for so many, it might seem odd, to say the least, for the government to be heavily investing in “deep tech” sectors. AI isn’t the only industry that’s benefited from attention and money during Solomon’s tenure: in December, he announced up to $92 million for the Canadian Quantum Champions Program, aimed at keeping top quantum companies here.
Investments in AI have been framed by the Carney government as a way to increase productivity and thus the prosperity of the middle class. “Deep down, Canada’s affordability problem is really a productivity problem,” the Bank of Canada’s Nicolas Vincent said in November. “If we want to make things more affordable, we need to raise our income. And the way to grow our income is by increasing productivity.”
Productivity is one of Solomon’s main arguments for boosting AI adoption. “Productivity is a massive challenge,” he told me. “The prime minister has been very open about our need to increase productivity.” The fall budget cited an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimate that AI adoption could raise productivity by 1.1 percentage points annually over the next decade.
There is no evidence yet that AI can boost national productivity statistics. But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming.
But estimates vary and the productivity impacts of AI are not clear cut, even at firm level. A 2024 report from the Dais at TMU, for instance, found no relationship between AI adoption and short-term productivity improvements at Canadian firms; in fact, those companies that adopted these tools were already more productive. “We’ve heard a lot about how AI is going to solve Canada’s productivity problem, and we wanted to examine that,” said study co-author Viet Vu, who leads economic research at the Dais. The study’s findings, from 2020 and 2021—which was pre-ChatGPT—suggest that AI is “not going to be a silver bullet,” he told me. What’s more, just 2 percent of Canadian business leaders reported seeing a return on investment in generative AI, according to a separate survey from KPMG Canada released in November. But 93 percent of the 753 executives surveyed said their organizations were using AI in some way.
I asked economist Ajay Agrawal, founder of Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto and a member of Solomon’s AI task force, whether there’s evidence that AI can boost national productivity. “There is no evidence yet in any [national] productivity statistics,” he told me. But, he added, that doesn’t mean it’s not coming. In Power and Prediction, Agrawal and co-authors Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb describe the moment we’re in as “The Between Times”: AI solutions exist but are still small and localized in their effects.
This isn’t unheard of in the history of technology. “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” US economist Robert Solow famously remarked in 1987. Back then, productivity was in a rut despite the rapid uptake of computers. It’s possible that we’re seeing the same sort of lag today, with AI. “We’re in phase one of a profound transformation,” Solomon told me. In other words, give it time.
When I asked Solomon how AI can boost national productivity, he talked about start-ups such as Reveal Surgical. Its AI-powered tool could help ensure that a patient’s cancer is removed while healthy tissue is not, meaning fewer surgeries, reduced patient wait times, and less overall burden on the health care system. (The device isn’t approved, but a US Food and Drug Administration trial is scheduled for later this year.) It’s easy to imagine potential productivity gains from this, not to mention patient benefits. Maybe they aren’t showing up in national economic data yet, but Solomon wants Canadians to trust that they will come.
At All In, after the INOVAIT announcement, I followed Christian Sauvageau to his kiosk and asked him to show me Reveal Surgical’s cancer-detecting device, called Sentry. We sat at a table. He held the small AI-guided probe in his hand. It looks like a slim silver pen with a wire sprouting from one end, which leads to a box about the size of a bar fridge on the floor. By bouncing light off a patient’s cells (known as Raman spectroscopy), it captures what Sauvageau calls a “molecular fingerprint,” using AI to translate this into a simple piece of information indicating whether cells are healthy or not, which the surgeon can take into account.
So far, the device has been tested on patients diagnosed with breast, lung, and other types of cancer. It was originally developed for use in the brain, said Reveal co-founder Kevin Petrecca, who is a surgeon-scientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital. “Because it’s the brain, you are reluctant to remove tissue you’re not sure of,” Petrecca told me. Rather than relying on pre- or post-surgical MRIs to locate the tumour, surgeons could use the device while the patient is on the operating table. The day after I met Sauvageau, Petrecca performed surgery on a brain cancer patient using the Sentry device at the Montreal hospital where he works.
In 2017, my father died of cancer, and I remember the cost—emotional, physical, financial—of his treatments. Sitting beside Sauvageau, staring at the pen-like object, I had to wonder if such a device might have spared him some of that. Of course, it’s impossible to know.
AI is sometimes spoken about with a sense of inevitability, as though it’s a meteor headed for Earth and all we can do is get ready. But there’s nothing inevitable about the moment we’re in. Attard-Frost told me that the tendency to frame AI in this way obscures what we’re really talking about, which is people—in business, in government, in civil society—and the decisions they make. An AI system “didn’t just spontaneously arise,” she said. “It has a whole business case driving it. There are people profiting from it [and] people who are at risk.” Whatever happens next will be the result of a series of decisions made not by machines but by us.
In Solomon’s own telling, the choices we make right now will define our economy, our democracy, and our daily lives for decades to come. With a new AI strategy set to be unveiled, he has asked Canadians for their trust. But only they can decide if he has earned it.
The post Evan Solomon Wants Canada to Trust AI. Can We Trust Evan Solomon? first appeared on The Walrus.
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