Canadian AI minister Evan Solomon stopped by Toronto innovation hub OneEleven yesterday to share more details and updated timelines for the Government of Canada’s AI and Buy Canadian strategies, which are both expected to launch in 2026.
The feds committed nearly $926 million over five years in Budget 2025 to fund the development of large-scale sovereign public AI infrastructure. However, $800 million of that will come from the previous Liberal government’s Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.
AI minister Evan Solomon
“The government has the opportunity to be a force for nation-building by becoming our own best customer.”
When asked by BetaKit why the latest budget was light on new funding for AI during a media scrum following his remarks, Solomon said the Government of Canada wanted to “fix some key things” first, including enabling the buildout of local data centres to meet domestic computing needs.
Once that happens, Solomon said the feds will reevaluate what comes next. “There will be other steps along the way,” he added, noting that he also expects Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy to play a role in the country’s “AI infrastructure story.”
The government intends to use the budget to enable Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) investments in AI infrastructure projects. It also grants Solomon the power to engage with industry to identify promising AI infrastructure initiatives and enter into memoranda of understanding (MOU) with them.
Solomon told the media that the feds are also considering forcing companies to buy from Canadian suppliers when they receive government funding for AI and digital technologies.
Solomon has signalled that the feds are interested in signing more broad MOU agreements, like the one it struck with Cohere, to expedite the procurement process with other qualified Canadian tech firms of strategic importance.
Solomon said that the AI Task Force the federal government assembled this fall to help guide its renewed AI strategy has finished its 30-day sprint and submitted recommendations, which it is in the process of reviewing.
In total, Solomon said the government received 28 submissions from members as well as 11,000 from the public—an Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada record. The feds are using AI to sort through the public data.
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While the AI minister did not offer a hard timeline for when the government might share those recommendations publicly, Solomon said that he is meeting with task force members over the next two weeks to discuss their submissions and consolidate them.
Solomon expects the launch of the government’s updated AI strategy to come next year, given the need to absorb those recommendations.
Solomon also acknowledged that the feds are looking to incentivize domestic data centre construction not just through CIB but also potential financial backstops or compute offtake agreements.
Solomon said that the government is “open to lots of different structures” and has lots of term sheets on the table at the moment. It has a mandate to negotiate, however, it has not yet signed anything.
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“We want to make sure that we’re building our economy in the future with Canadian products and Canadian companies, and in order to make sure that that happens, the government will have to play an incentivizing role in some places,” Solomon said.
But the AI minister said he expects the private sector “is going to sort a lot of it out” on its own when it comes to AI infrastructure, adding, “We’re not here to be backstopping everybody.”
In procurement, the budget set aside nearly $186 million in new funding over five years to implement a Buy Canadian Policy that ensures more federal spending goes toward purchasing domestic products and services.
Solomon and the feds shared that the policy will start to come into force this month and will initially apply to defence and construction ahead of full implementation by spring 2026.
“Through the power of federal procurement, the government has the opportunity to be a force for nation-building by becoming our own best customer,” Solomon said on stage.
Feature image courtesy ISED. Photo by Peter Wall.