As the world evolves at a breakneck pace in the age of AI, Canadian tech leaders, politicians, and innovators have been left wondering what role Canada will play in that future.
The 500 leaders from Canada’s innovation ecosystem who packed the Tiff Lightbox for BetaKit’s Most Ambitious Town Hall on Monday may not have gotten a definitive answer, but they likely got a lot closer to understanding the possibilities and challenges that lie ahead.
The second annual BetaKit Town Hall, which kicked off Toronto Tech Week, honoured the nearly 100 innovators who were included in BetaKit Most Ambitious, many of whom were in the audience or graced the stage.
The framework for understanding Canada’s current position and potential future was laid out plainly by the country’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon. When asked about how he views his responsibilities in his relatively new position and portfolio, Solomon said he thinks about it in terms of the horizontal and vertical axis.
“We’re now at an inflection point where we can’t consider what to buy for a decade, we have to buy now.”
Eliot Pence,
Dominion Dynamics
On the vertical side sits “the energy systems and the infrastructure, the talent, the research, the ability to commercialize the models, the applications all the way up the stack.” Before Canada can reach its full potential as a technology leader, it needs to ensure that vertical access is in place.
As for the horizontal axis, where AI crosscuts into different industries like agriculture, healthcare, the arts, and defence? That’s where the government has a role to play, Solomon said.
“You’ve got this incredible vertical axis, which you see here at Tech Week, and then you see where the applications are across the spectrum,” he said. “And, frankly, the adoption across those sectors is really my job; to build this up and to make sure safe, transparent Canadian AI is adopted across the sector, so we get that economic lift and can stay competitive.”
Many of those sectors were represented during the three-hour event. TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, for one, kicked off the afternoon by describing the bond between technology and art.
“We believe that that deep, rich storytelling experience is transformative, and also that transformative storytelling and advanced technology are mutually dependent,” he said.
Following Bailey was a panel dedicated to a technology subcategory that may not have made the mainstage at a marquee industry event in year’s past, but seems incredibly pressing in the wake of the Federal Government’s $6.6-billion Defence Industrial Strategy.
The panel introduced another theme that reverberated throughout the afternoon’s programming, highlighting how Canada needs to update its approach to procurement in favour of policies that strengthen sovereignty by strengthening Canadian competitiveness.
“Every procurement structure is faulty; it either privileges the incumbents, the large companies, or privileges the insurgent companies like mine,” said panelist Eliot Pence, founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, and one of the issue’s honourees. “We’re now at an inflection point where we can’t consider what to buy for a decade, we have to buy now. We’re also in a moment in time in which we want to privilege Canadian companies, and we have not done that for a long time.”
Pence explains that it took Canada more than a decade to purchase fighter jets to replace its aging CF-18s. “That’s just an irrelevant timeframe for modern warfare,” he says. “We have to find different ways of buying things that save lives.”
“The West is seriously, seriously outgunned en masse in the era of modern warfare,” added panelist Katheron Intson, co-founder and CEO of Sentinal R&D. Intson added that her company, which manufactures fix-winged drone technology on Canadian soil, was looking to raise money from American investors prior to the recent federal funding announcement.
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“I would have thought that we were on a fast track to becoming an American company,” she said. “Luckily, Canada seems to have woken up and identified us as having a sovereign, albeit exportable technology.”
Xanadu founder Christian Weedbrook experienced a similar about-face from the federal government. The Toronto-based quantum computing company—which became the first tech firm to list on the TSX in five years when it went public late last year—has long been an active participant in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI).
“The Canadian government thought, that’s not good—and also what’s not good is us potentially leaving,” he said. “So, they decided to set up the Canadian Quantum Champions program as a complement to that, but its main goal, or one of its main goals, was to keep Canadian companies here, and I think it’s achieved it.”
Jim Balsillie
“I love the fair play, but I love it when Canadians win the gold medal.”
In the rapidly expanding domain of physical AI, Waabi—which recently raised Canada’s largest-ever funding round at $750 million USD—has been deploying its self-driving technology on the other side of the border and will be operational in every US state by 2028. Founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun says robots “will be everywhere” in five to ten years, and not just in the streets.
The native of Pamplona, Spain, told University of Toronto president Melanie Woodin that she originally chose Canada—and U of T—because of its head start in AI innovation, but worries it’s now at risk of falling behind.
“The reason why I came to Canada in the first place is because a lot of the breakthroughs in AI were actually happening here,” she said, but added that Canada needs to do better at translating that innovation into economic opportunities and entrepreneurship.
Closing out the event was Research in Motion co-founder and chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators Jim Balsillie, who laid out the challenge in blunt terms.
“Canada’s economic thinking remains rooted in the 1970s—a tangible production era,” he said. “Because of this, Canada has been in a structural, 40-year erosion, ranking last in the G7 in productivity per capita, and is projected to remain the worst performing advanced economy in the OECD for the next 40 years.”
Balsillie explained that Canada continues to operate under a model of “traditional trade equilibrium” as others—and especially the United States—adopt a winner-takes-all approach.
“I’m as much an economic nationalist as I root for the Canadian teams at the Olympics,” he said. “I love the fair play, but I love it when Canadians win the gold medal.”
Despite the challenges Canadian innovators face, Balsillie ended the event by tipping his cap to those in the room.
“You guys have done what you’ve done with the wind in your face,” he said. “Imagine if you had the wind at your back. Wow.”
READ BETAKIT MOST AMBITIOUS 2026
In the 21st century, there is no sovereignty without technology. Meet the Canadian innovators strengthening our nation’s autonomy, security, and prosperity in BetaKit Most Ambitious.
All images courtesy Lilac for BetaKit.