The federal government released the much-anticipated results of its national AI strategy public consultation this week.
BetaKit has been all over the release, parsing through not only the nearly 350 pages of recommendations (please reward reporter Josh Scott’s hard work by reading his story below) but also identifying what was not included: namely, important context on how the report was compiled and its recommendations weighted.
This public consultation is novel because ISED used an AI-enabled workflow, alongside human review, to organize and categorize the extensive set of submissions into a structured set of themes. While ISED shared which AI tools were used, it didn’t share any data on what prompts were given to those tools.
We weren’t the only ones to notice. “The methodological details of how this analysis was conducted are so scant, if the feds are hoping to court public trust with the new AI strategy this is a bad start,” posted Blair Attard-Frost, an Amii fellow and University of Alberta assistant professor.
AI trust is a big deal for the feds. Last year, Abacus Data found that 52 percent of Canadians surveyed said they do not trust the federal government to oversee AI in a way that protects the public.
Look, this is new territory for everyone, and best practices in government use of AI have yet to be established. I think many would have been unhappy if the feds didn’t use AI in service of developing their national AI strategy.
But the question of who is ultimately accountable for AI outputs is a serious one, particularly for government! So I have one suggestion for the feds to help engender public trust: show us your prompts.
It’s a suggestion I put to former ISED senior policy advisor Jaxson Khan on The BetaKit Podcast this week. If you want to know what he thought, you’ll have to check it out below.
Douglas Soltys
Editor-in-chief
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Ottawa releases findings from AI task force and public consultation
Canada’s innovation ministry released the results of the 30-day national consultation that will inform the country’s renewed AI strategy. However, the report’s high-level summary cites little of the data or methodology behind the compilation of its broad recommendations.
The official government report was put together with a mix of AI tools; BetaKit, instead, assigned a human reporter to review all 348 pages submitted by the task force.
Y Combinator reverses decision, will invest in Canadian-domiciled startups again
After more than a week of backlash and discourse, Y Combinator announced on Thursday that it had added Canada back to its list of accepted countries of incorporation.
“We don’t want to suggest that we no longer fund Canadian startups or Canadian founders,” YC president and CEO Garry Tan said in the blog post following the reversal.
“Meditate and stay calm”: Hopper, Lightspeed CEOs on how to survive as a founder
Hopper founder Frederic Lalonde and Lightspeed founder Dax Dasilva, two notable figures of Montréal’s tech scene, had somehow barely met before they entered the green room.
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Neo Financial secures $68.5 million in equity as it adopts big-bank funding playbook
The Calgary FinTech company has secured support from investors, including AIMCo and Northleaf, to fuel its securitization strategy.
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Building with AI is now the “price of admission” for software startups, Inovia report says
Inovia’s 2025 State of Software report shows that while venture fundraising for firms had a dismal year, the big winners were “AI-native” startups, which ate up 40 percent of software deal value in Canada.
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Ian Paterson, CEO of Victoria-based cybersecurity company Plurilock, explained in a sit-down with BetaKit how AI assistants have so quickly hit a critical mass, and how some users might be sacrificing security for convenience.
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The BetaKit Podcast — An insider’s take on Canada’s AI task force report
“If we don’t get our AI ducks in a row at some point and we miss that boat to shore up our industries right now, it’s not really going to matter what regulations we have on the table. Because we won’t have control.”
The federal government has released the results of its public consultation on AI, including over 30 submissions from Minister Solomon’s AI task force. Former ISED senior policy advisor Jaxson Khan joins to discuss how the consultations might inform Canada’s AI future, and why the task force was “remarkably consistent” in its diagnosis, but not its prescriptions.