Carney Launches National Council on Artificial Intelligence: What Canada's AI Plan Means

Canada wants to be an AI superpower — and it's building the institutions to prove it. On October 2, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the launch of the Prime Minister's National Council on Artificial Intelligence, a new advisory body stacked with the country's top AI minds, including deep-learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio.

The council is the latest plank in "AI for All," Canada's new national AI strategy. Here's what it is, who's on it, and why Ottawa is moving so aggressively on AI right now.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What Is the National Council on Artificial Intelligence?

The council will bring together public and private stakeholders to advise the government on the evolution of the AI for All strategy, according to the Prime Minister's Office announcement. Its mandate covers accelerating AI adoption, fostering Canadian AI champions, and building sovereign AI infrastructure — plus advising on AI safety, protecting democracy, and ensuring all Canadians share in the technology's benefits.

The founding members announced so far include Ajay Agrawal, the University of Toronto economist who wrote the book on the economics of AI, and Yoshua Bengio, the Université de Montréal professor and Turing Award winner whose work helped create modern deep learning. Bengio now leads LawZero, his AI safety nonprofit.

The council is designed to convene "Canada's leading thinkers, builders, researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, public servants, and international experts," in the PMO's words — a deliberately wide tent for a technology that now touches every sector.

AI for All: Canada's National AI Strategy

The council sits inside a bigger push. AI for All is the government's new national strategy to ensure AI is "adopted responsibly, in a way that truly serves all Canadians — building trust, expanding opportunities, and reinforcing our sovereignty," the PMO says.

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The sovereignty language is deliberate. As AI models become strategic infrastructure — like pipelines or telecom networks — Ottawa is explicit that Canada needs its own compute capacity, its own champions, and its own safety standards rather than renting all three from Silicon Valley.

The strategy's jobs pillar is concrete: the government has committed to creating up to 90,000 AI-related job and work placement opportunities for young Canadians by 2031, including 10,000 co-funded placements through Mitacs backed by $162 million over five years.

ALL IN 2026: The Ecosystem Shows Up

The announcement landed weeks after ALL IN 2026, Canada's flagship AI conference, which drew 10,000 attendees from 50 countries, according to organizers. The speaker list read like a who's-who of Canadian and global AI: Cohere's Aidan Gomez and Joelle Pineau, Mila's Hugo Larochelle, Google DeepMind's Tulsee Doshi, NVIDIA's Calista Redmond, OpenAI's George Osborne — alongside federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and his provincial counterparts from Alberta and B.C.

Sessions tackled the defining issues: building critical compute infrastructure, fostering public trust, advancing open-source alternatives, and forming global alliances. Coming just months after the national strategy's launch, the heavy government presence underscored that AI is now a top-tier priority for public leaders at every level.

The Harder Questions Ahead

Strategy documents are easy; execution is hard. Canada's AI ambitions face real tests: the fallout from the Tumbler Ridge tragedy earlier this year, where the AI minister pressed OpenAI on safety protocols after the company failed to alert police about the shooter's banned account; the compute gap with the U.S.; and the perennial Canadian challenge of keeping talent and companies at home.

The council's first real test will be whether its advice turns into policy with teeth — on safety standards, on compute investment, on adoption incentives for small businesses. For now, the signal from Ottawa is unmistakable: AI is no longer a tech file. It's an economic sovereignty file.