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OTTAWA — Canada’s new minister of artificial intelligence said Tuesday he’ll put less emphasis on AI regulation and more on finding ways to harness the technology’s economic benefits.
In his first speech since becoming Canada’s first-ever AI minister, Evan Solomon said Canada will move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” to make sure the economy benefits from AI.
His regulatory focus will be on data protection and privacy, he told the audience at an event in Ottawa Tuesday morning organized by the think tank Canada 2020.
Solomon said regulation isn’t about finding “a saddle to throw on the bucking bronco called AI innovation. That’s hard. But it is to make sure that the horse doesn’t kick people in the face. And we need to protect people’s data and their privacy.”
The previous government introduced a privacy and AI regulation bill that targeted high-impact AI systems. It did not become law before the election was called.
That bill is “not gone, but we have to re-examine in this new environment where we’re going to be on that,” Solomon said.
He said constraints on AI have not worked at the international level.
“It’s really hard. There’s lots of leakages,” he said. “The United States and China have no desire to buy into any constraint or regulation.”
That doesn’t mean regulation won’t exist, he said, but it will have to be assembled in steps.
Canada won’t go it alone, Solomon added, because it’s a “waste of time.”
Solomon’s comments follow a global shift among governments to focus on AI adoption and away from AI safety and governance.
The first global summit focusing on AI safety was held in 2023 as experts warned of the technology’s dangers — including the risk that it could pose an existential threat to humanity. At a global meeting in Korea last year, countries agreed to launch a network of publicly backed safety institutes.
But the mood had shifted by the time this year’s AI Action Summit began in Paris. There the focus was broader and U.S. Vice-President JD Vance used his speech at the summit to push back on European efforts to regulate AI.
Proposed legislation in the U.S. through President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill could ban states from regulating AI for a decade.
Solomon told the audience Tuesday that getting AI regulation right is critical to Canada’s “economic destiny.”
Solomon said that includes government investments in data centres and research, protecting Canadian intellectual property “and, critically, cranking up our commercialization.”
Solomon outlined several priorities for his ministry — scaling up Canada’s AI industry, driving adoption and ensuring Canadians have trust in and sovereignty over the technology.
He said that includes supporting Canadian AI companies like Cohere, which “means using government as essentially an industrial policy to champion our champions.”
While big companies are leading on AI use, small and medium enterprises are not and the government needs to encourage them, Solomon said.
Solomon said we are at a “Guttenberg moment” of new possibilities, referring to the inventor of the printing press.
“The fight Canada faces is not to prevent change, is not constrain change, is not to scare people. It is to define it, to shape it and to lead it,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 10, 2025.
Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press
