Around the world, governments are going hard to present themselves as AI leaders willing to do whatever the industry wants to attract investment.

Last month, I spoke to Will Dunn on Tech Won’t Save Us about how this is playing out in the UK, where the government has gone so far as to use chatbots to drafts laws. France has gone all in too, presenting itself as the third pole of AI leadership between the United States and China. Now, my own country is making its bid to join the fray.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney rolled out his government’s AI strategy earlier this month, annoyingly titled “AI for All.” But in it, I saw something novel: not just the aggressive pursuit of AI dollars by giving industry what it wants, but also reframing opposition to AI and hyperscale data centers as the product of a lack of AI “literacy.” If only the Canadian public was taught to use AI tools, the strategy suggests, they’ll come around to backing them.

As you won’t be surprised to hear, I think that’s a poor judgement that misunderstands why people have turned against AI so aggressively. I wrote up my thoughts recently for The Tyee, a fantastic progressive publication based in British Columbia. They’ve been kind enough to let me share them with Disconnect subscribers.

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In late May protesters marched through Vancouver in an attempt to halt two AI data centres that Telus is planning for the city.

They called out the massive energy demands to power all the computers inside the centres and the vast quantities of water that would be used to keep them cool, especially as the region faces water restrictions. The demonstration came just weeks after the federal government threw its support behind the project.

Of course, they were focused on not just data centres, but the chatbots and generative AI tools they were being built to power.

By early June, the Vancouver School Board started rolling out chatbot accounts for students aged 13 and over, despite the research suggesting it could affect students’ critical thinking skills and cognition, not to mention ongoing media reports about the effects chatbots have had on teens’ mental health.

Those details should have been red flags for administrators; they certainly were for some parents.

A group called Parents for AI Caution in Education Spaces is now seeking signatures to demand a two-year pause on the rollout of chatbots in Vancouver schools until there’s better data on the technology’s effects on students. Those ideas are spreading, not just in British Columbia but across Canada. But you might not get that impression if you listen to the federal government.

On June 4, Prime Minister Mark Carney rolled out his long-awaited AI strategy. Called “AI for All,” it laid out an ambition to invest in domestic AI infrastructure such as data centres, significantly increase the adoption of AI by Canadian businesses and begin to address some of the concerns with generative AI that are stymying what the government described as people’s trust in the technology.

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The centrepiece of the strategy revolved around the concept of AI literacy. Carney acknowledged that trust needs to be established, which at this point is an understatement. Recent polling from the Angus Reid Institute suggests 68 per cent of Canadians want to see strict regulation of artificial intelligence, even if it slows development. But the prime minister is not seriously trying to address the concerns of those in the streets who oppose data centres, or of parents concerned about what chatbots might mean for their children.

Instead, the government is positioning the disconnect over the exuberance of industry — not to mention Carney himself and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon — and the public’s skepticism as the product of a knowledge gap. The plan seeks to invest millions to educate Canadians on how to use AI, in effect increasing their “literacy” of the technology. They will give chatbots to every university student, train 90,000 young people to be advocates of the technology in small and medium-sized businesses, and equip more than 3,000 educators to provide AI training accessible by all Canadians.

The government acknowledges that the sector will need to be regulated, but the changes to privacy legislation, measures to protect children and their data, and restrictions on the production of deepfake images are only the tip of the iceberg of the concerns that civil society groups and many ordinary people have with generative AI.

Canadians are seeing their own social media feeds filled with AI slop and misinformation. They’re reading stories of people taking their lives after forming dependencies on chatbots. People who live in quiet small towns fear that proposed data centres will threaten their quality of life. Artists are seeing their work ripped off by AI companies. And who can forget how OpenAI refused to report the troubled 18-year-old shooter in Tumbler Ridge months before that devastating tragedy took place?

There’s so much more than a literacy gap leading Canadians to push back against having generative AI forced on them in so many areas of their lives. The government itself should know better. It has already tried to roll out a chatbot to give Canadians tax advice, only for the auditor general to find it provided incorrect information 66 per cent of the time. More recently, its use of generative AI in immigration was found to have denied a woman’s permanent residency application after the system made up parts of her submission.

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Just weeks before Carney stood in front of medical workers from the University Health Network in Toronto to announce his strategy and talk about how beneficial AI will be in health care, the auditor general of Ontario had released a scathing report on AI scribes. Those chatbots, used to transcribe conversations between doctors and patients, are currently used by over 5,000 doctors in the province. But the technology sold as a means to save time had been regularly registering incorrect information and making up details about patients’ health. It was so bad that the AI scribes were recording the wrong drug prescribed to patients 60 per cent of the time.

This isn’t just a problem in the public sector. As Carney’s strategy seeks to boost business adoption of AI from 12 per cent today to 60 per cent in eight years, there are growing reports in the United States of companies pulling back on AI spending as the growing costs are not delivering the expected benefits or efficiencies. In May, the president of Uber even admitted that AI spending was becoming “harder to justify” as the company burned through its annual AI budget in just four months.

It’s clear that Carney and Solomon have bought the industry narrative hook, line and sinker. They seem to firmly believe that chatbots are the foundation of the next industrial revolution, but that claim is based more on faith — and the hype needed to boost the valuations of AI companies — than on hard data. In fact, it requires actively ignoring the stories of the very real harms of the technology that continue to pile up.

There’s a certain irony in the federal government’s belated focus on legislation to address the harms of social media, beginning with plans for a higher age limit to keep those 16 and under off the platforms — because even as that delayed online harms legislation moves forward, the age limit won’t be extended to cover AI chatbots.

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We’re now playing catch-up on social media safety because we believed the companies’ narratives for far longer than we ought to have, and now our society is paying the price. Instead of being proactive on generative AI, the government is failing us all over again — all in the name of trying to attract some of the many billions flooding into AI investment to Canada.

If anyone needs better literacy on AI, it is not the public, but Carney himself.

Canadians may not know exactly how a large language model functions, but they can see how the chatbots and image generators they’ve made possible have changed society for the worse in just a few years. At this point, I’d put far more trust in the data centre protesters and the concerned parents to craft a real AI strategy than in the prime minister.

Since Australia took up the cause of higher age limits on social media in 2024, the push for such policies has spread like wildfire. A ban on under-16s came into effect down under in December 2025, and since then another 41 countries have either implemented their own or begun taking actions in that direction.

There’s no denying the policy is a controversial one. On one side, you have parents and advocates of children’s safety pointing to the harms of social media addiction and the type of content that can be pushed at teens when they use the platforms. Pushing back against them are privacy advocates and digital rights campaigners who worry about how all that data to verify people’s ages is going to be used and whether it makes sense to limit young people’s access to online spaces altogether.

Maybe there was a day when social media was all it once claimed to be — an altruistic means of connecting people so they could keep in touch, engage with their community, be more informed, and maybe even push for positive change. But that is clearly not how these platforms operate today.

As the pressure to grow their user bases, accelerate engagement, and increase profits intensified, so too did unethical behaviors designed to keep people on the platforms for longer periods of time. It included serving users content to keep them coming back, sometimes to push them toward political extremes or even make them feel bad about themselves in relation to others.

There’s no doubt in my mind that modern social media is a toxic product that is long overdue for regulation. The question is whether higher age limits and stricter enforcement of them is the right way to achieve that.

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I’ve been quite clear from the beginning that I’m not inherently opposed to making it harder for young people to access social media platforms, given the negative personal and social effects they have. After years of handwringing, I felt we needed to start taking swings — even if they were imperfect ones. The question for me has always been more centered around whether the policy is effective and is delivering the outcomes we actually want. That’s where I’ve been worried that putting so much focus on age limits was leading us in the wrong direction.

The effectiveness of the Australian legislation so far is debatable. Young people are clearly getting around it in high numbers, but those who point to those figures often miss (or intentionally leave out) how the legislation isn’t yet fully implemented. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is currently investigating five platforms for potential non-compliance. But even worse is how focusing on an age limits frames the problem as one that narrowly affects youth and potentially shifts energy away from forcing companies to change how platforms are designed.

So many of the features of modern social media platforms were made to keep us engaged and feed us regular dopamine hits, from the infinite scroll of content to like buttons and incessant notifications. Algorithms have been designed over many years to surface content that will keep us hooked, often pulling in things that are sensational and extreme in place of posts from friends or family to ensure we spend more time with our screens, and as a result, looking at ads. There’s no question that has negative implications for young people — but it does for everyone else too.

As I watched the effort to ban youth from social media spread around the world, this was precisely my concern: that the more effective policy would be sidelined for the easier and more populist one. That instead of targeting how the platforms function, we would simply kick off young people and call it a day. I saw that repeated as the debate around age limits finally came to Canada in recent months.

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Media coverage made it seem that an age limit would be central to provincial and federal efforts to address the harms of social media. I began speaking out against seeing that policy as a silver bullet and the need for measures focused on platform design and algorithmic amplification in addition to the age limit, if not in place of it. But when the federal government finally rolled out its Safe Social Media Act on June 10, I was pleasantly surprised at the nuanced positions it took on the issue.

The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not really the centerpiece of the legislation. If anything, the age limit serves as a stick to get companies to comply with a broader set of design standards meant to make their platforms safer for younger users. Unlike in the Australian legislation, if platforms make those changes, they can win an exemption from the age limit.

One of the problem is that the focus is on changing how platforms operate for younger users, when many of those “safer by design” standards should apply regardless of a user’s age to reduce the addictiveness, mental health impacts, and broader antisocial nature of what we call “social” media. The Canadian legislation also targets various types of harmful content that can spread on platforms, including those that sexualize children or incite violence, proposes the creation of a Digital Safety Commission that sounds not unlike Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, and begins to extend some of those standards and responsibilities to AI chatbots.

This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. Australia, having been a pioneer on the social media age limits, is also rolling out a “digital duty of care” for social media platforms that will include an expectation that platforms be “safe by design.” Earlier this year, Brazil’s Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents came into force too, setting age limitations on social media paired with prohibitions on addictive design choices like infinite scroll and video autoplay.

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These developments make me more hopeful than I expected to be upon seeing the Canadian legislation. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about how precisely the different aspects of the plan will work, but to me it shows that the perfect is the enemy of the good and ultimately leaves the major tech companies off the hook for the harms they’re causing.

There are clearly problems with social media age limits, but the experimentation with that policy got the ball rolling and also got the public engaged in talking about the issue. Just six months after Australia’s implementation of its age limit, we’re already seeing other countries learn from their experience and improve their own social media legislation in response, including by focusing more on those design and algorithmic interventions.

I found McGill University professor Taylor Owen’s breakdown of the Canadian legislation instructive on this front:

It brings together what has worked in peer democracies. From Britain, design rules that make products safe for kids by default and a duty of care. From the European Union, risk assessments, transparency requirements, and data access for independent researchers. From Australia, a narrow takedown obligation for child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images, removed within 24 hours. And a strong independent regulator with power to enforce it all. This approach learns the right lessons from a decade of other governments’ trial and error. But this bill adds two genuinely new elements: conditional age restrictions, and the inclusion of AI chatbots.

In short, it learns from other jurisdictions while moving the ball forward in other ways for its peers to learn from too. There is still work to be done and issues to work out, but policy experimentation rather than endlessly debating the perfect solution while getting nowhere is the way to actually make progress on reining in the power of major tech companies. I feel more than ever that the voices that act primarily to criticize and delay action are helping the tech companies avoid accountability, even though they often claim to be doing otherwise.

Taking on the power of the US tech giants will be a marathon, not a sprint, but getting to the finish line requires us to actually start the race. Now that we have, we can improve as we go. Doing so requires us to push our governments to do better, but we shouldn’t ignore the signs that they are receptive to expert voices — and of learning from one another. It should have happened years ago, but we should take what we can get, and make sure we don’t make the same mistake of waiting far too long to take on the harms of AI chatbots too.

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