Can Mark Carney get Canadians to trust AI?

Source Domain: www.cbc.ca

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Mark Carney’s Liberal government wants Canada to embrace the arrival of artificial intelligence technology. It apparently believes that, for the country’s economic sake, Canada needs to embrace AI.

But it, quite reasonably, sees Canadians’ lack of trust in AI as an obstacle.

“Trust is the North Star of this strategy,” the Carney government said in the AI strategy it released this week.

The T-word appears 45 times in the 50-page document.

And so the next question is how much the Carney government can do to make AI worth trusting, or at least mitigate the reasons to distrust AI.

Canada’s minister for artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon, suggested a year ago that Canada had been “over-indexing on warnings and regulation.” But on Thursday Carney said “we have to be honest about the risks that AI poses to Canadians.”

“Deepfakes, unsafe chatbots [and] AI-generated disinformation are becoming more prevalent,” Carney said. “The privacy of Canadians is under threat.”

Those sounded like warnings and the government is promising regulation.

“We will protect your data, your privacy and your children,” Carney said.

The depths of Canadians’ distrust

As the government’s strategy acknowledges, Canadians’ trust in AI is low even as compared to citizens in other countries. A study of 47 nations by KPMG and the University of Melbourne found that Canada ranked near the bottom when it came to trust in AI.

A Leger poll released last August found that 34 per cent of Canadians believed AI was good for society while 36 per cent believed it was harmful (the remainder were unsure). According to a survey by Abacus Data in 2025, 43 per cent of Canadians were concerned about AI being used for malicious purposes, 42 per cent were worried about the spread of misinformation and 38 per…

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