The Hub’s third annual Hunter Prize for Public Policy, generously supported by the Hunter Family Foundation, focused on solving Canada’s stagnant living standards and slow productivity growth. A diverse group of ten finalists has been chosen from nearly 250 entries, with the finalists and winners chosen by an esteemed panel of judges, including Theo Argitis, Hon. Lisa Raitt, Frances Donald, Jack Mintz, and Alicia Planincic. The Hub is pleased to run essays from each finalist this week that lay out their plans to help solve this persistent policy problem. The Hunter Prize is made possible thanks to the support of the Centre for Civic Engagement.
Canada’s productivity and growth crisis demands a new nation-building project. Not a railway, pipeline, or port, but the mass deployment of intelligence, both human and artificial. Canada’s next great project must be to build an AI Nation.
Building an AI Nation means integrating AI across the entire economy, not only in the technology sector. It implies empowering every Canadian and every organization with the technology, fostering a culture open to change, and embedding AI in our national identity.
Canada is in an economic emergency. Over the last half-century, the country’s labour productivity growth has been the weakest in the G7. Adjusted for inflation and population, Canada’s economy has barely grown in a decade. Without decisive action, Canadians will face lower living standards than our peers, and the next generation will inherit fewer opportunities than their parents.
Fortunately, a new wave of technological change offers a way forward. AI has the potential to add as much as $200 billion (4.3 percent) to our GDP by 2035, providing vital funds for public services like health care, and increasing affordability and living standards for Canadians.
With the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, AI left the lab and entered daily life. Suddenly, anyone could use natural language to generate ideas, analyze data, write code, and automate tasks. This distinguishes AI as an inclusive general-purpose technology (GPT) that can boost the entire economy.
An important lesson from previous GPTs, like electricity, computers, and the internet, is that the largest gains from transformative technologies go not to those who build the underlying infrastructure, but to those who build upon it. While Cisco and Nortel were the early winners of the internet age, it was Amazon, Google, and Meta who joined the ranks of the world’s most valuable firms by reimagining entire industries around the new technology.
AI will follow the same pattern. Moreover, costs are falling rapidly, fueling an explosion of practical AI applications across healthcare, logistics, finance, and education. While Canada might benefit from hosting new data centres, for example, our greatest opportunity lies in the applications layer of the AI technology stack, where businesses adopt AI to do things better, and entrepreneurs reimagine entire industries around the technology.
To seize this opportunity, Canada must both establish the right foundations—AI literacy, nimble regulation, research and commercialization, data libraries, and compute access—and directly support business AI adoption and AI entrepreneurship.
Canada must urgently launch a mass AI literacy and education campaign to build awareness, trust, and hands-on competence across the entire population. We must replace anxiety with confidence and hesitation with curiosity. Public lectures, community workshops, media partnerships, and national challenges can engage citizens at scale, while open learning platforms can make training accessible to everyone, from students and teachers to small-business owners and retirees. Embedding AI education in school curricula at every level will ensure that the next generation grows up fluent in this technology, rather than fearful of it. By empowering everyone, we also ensure that the benefits of AI are widely shared and not just captured by a small technical elite.
A complementary set of workforce tools is also needed. AI education tax credits, stackable micro-credentials, and online programs can help workers at all skill levels learn to integrate AI into their professions. Executive-level courses can equip leaders with the ability to connect AI adoption to their business strategies and bottom lines.
But literacy and education alone are not enough. To enable widespread adoption, Canada must also develop clear and responsive AI regulation that provides certainty and builds trust. We must offer continued support for AI research while expanding programs to support its commercialisation. Access to data must be increased by building a national AI data library. By investing in compute infrastructure, we can ensure affordable and reliable computing power for researchers, SMEs, and startups.
These initiatives provide the foundations. We can further directly support business AI adoption, particularly among SMEs, through financial incentives, advisory services, and practical tools. Sector-specific playbooks and toolkits with examples from Canadian firms can demystify adoption and illustrate tangible benefits and typical costs. Governments can lead by example through the successful deployment of AI in the public sector—showcasing practical value, building public trust, and developing shareable tools.
View reader comments (2)
Many of our future economic champions will be created by entrepreneurs who reimagine industries around AI. We must create the conditions for these new ventures to start, scale, and stay in Canada through targeted founder programs, commercialization funding, access to capital, challenge-based initiatives, and strategic procurement. Research commercialization grants can bridge the gap between world-class academic research and market-ready innovation. Strategic public procurement can act as an early and reliable customer, validating Canadian solutions, reducing market uncertainty, and helping startups scale.
While the great project proposed here is ambitious, it is necessary both to reap AI’s full economic rewards and to ensure that the benefits are shared among all Canadians.
Canada must act decisively to alter its economic trajectory and reclaim a future of shared prosperity. We must urgently build an AI nation: A country where the use of AI becomes a shared civic skill, woven into the economy and society, empowering every Canadian and every organization to thrive in the age of intelligence. Canada can become the land of hockey, maple syrup, and AI.
Read the policy paper:
Is building an 'AI Nation' Canada's best path to economic growth?
How can Canada ensure AI benefits are shared broadly, not just by elites?
What are the key foundational steps Canada needs to take for AI adoption?
Comments (2)
We don’t need any of this. Our new government has sold us to the Arab powers that have built huge piles of petrobucks while we squandered ours. They will make the investments — no reason to incentivize Canadians to invest in Canada — and reap the rewards. We will again become the hewers of wood and drawers of water.