If Carney hopes to achieve this, he needs more than a declaration. He needs a plan — one that can redefine Canada’s future.

AI and the Liberal Platform

Going to Washington is a good start. If Carney can launch a round of trade talks with Donald Trump, that could begin to unwind some of Canada’s long-standing economic dependencies on the U.S.

Creating prosperity will be harder. Here, Carney calls for new partners, new markets, and new strategies for growth — ones that don’t just swap players but instead make our trade model more resilient and self-directed.

The prime minister hasn’t said much about that yet. But the Liberal campaign platform contains a clue. It frames Artificial Intelligence (AI) not just as a sector, but as a force multiplier — a foundational tool for innovation, productivity, and competitiveness.

What the platform doesn’t say is that AI is also key to sovereignty — and that makes it one of Carney’s most important tools for bringing prosperity and sovereignty back together. It’s the critical factor in a workable plan.

Intelligent Systems — The Exportable Edge

If Carney wants a broader, more diversified trade strategy, then interactive AI systems — the kind that engage, adapt, and serve human needs — are a natural place to start.

Canada has a global edge in this field: intelligent systems that learn, respond, and collaborate through language and feedback. These aren’t just backend tools. They’re products for the markets of the future — and Canada can lead in exporting them. Think tutoring, caregiving, public service, facilitation, mediation — the kinds of digital systems other countries will need, and that Canadians could provide.

This isn’t speculative. Canadian researchers and designers are already leading here. But to turn that lead into leverage — to make these systems real, trusted, and competitive — we’ll need more than lab breakthroughs. It will take investment, shared standards, and public infrastructure — in short, a plan. And that’s where Carney should turn next.

Infrastructure — The Systems That Deliver

Intelligent systems need something to stand on — they need the right kind of infrastructure: the digital systems through which services are delivered, decisions are made, and influence flows.

Today, those systems are emerging quickly. A new global layer of AI infrastructure is being built — fast, vast, and mostly beyond our control. American Big Tech is racing to dominate this space, constructing the compute clusters, cloud platforms, and delivery systems that will power not only their own products, but the digital lives of entire countries. Their goal is simple: build the rails, and everything else will run on them.

That presents a strategic risk for Canada. As we begin to disentangle ourselves from one kind of dependence — the traditional ties to the U.S. — we risk falling into another. If the platforms that deliver Canadian services, host Canadian systems, and interpret Canadian data are governed elsewhere, sovereignty weakens. We don’t govern. We integrate.

Canada may not have the kind of investment dollars that America has, but we can’t afford to leave the backbone of our digital future entirely in foreign hands. Strategic independence doesn’t mean doing everything ourselves — it means knowing which parts of the system must be ours: compute capacity, public data trusts, national platforms governed by Canadian rules and values.

This is about keeping enough control to steer — to ensure that the infrastructure beneath our economy serves public goals, not just private reach. The point isn’t to build everything. The point is to build what we can’t afford to lose.

Information — The Bedrock of Sovereignty

While intelligent systems and infrastructure are vital, the third pillar of a good plan — information management — is the bedrock of sovereignty. Canada’s vast data resources — from healthcare to natural resources — are not just economic assets. They are civic ones. They contain the stories, signals, and histories that shape how we understand ourselves and make decisions.

Take healthcare. Canada has one of the richest health data ecosystems in the world — spanning provincial systems, hospital networks, insurance records, and population-level studies. But much of it is siloed, outdated, or inaccessible.

AI offers the power to connect and analyze this data — to make care more responsive, efficient, and equitable. But if that system is governed by platforms we don’t control, the logic of care shifts from public good to private optimization. We risk losing not just who we serve, but how we choose to serve them.

And healthcare is just one example. Across the board, AI is reshaping how knowledge is gathered, ranked, and delivered. From service eligibility to policy analytics to basic search, our systems are being tuned — not always for truth, but for speed, engagement, or cost.

This is the most critical pillar of our sovereignty — and maybe the hardest to protect. But without it, the rest is theatre. If we don’t steward our information resources wisely — if we don’t govern how knowledge is structured, and meaning is made — we risk losing the coherence that makes democracy possible.

With robust, accountable use of AI, Canada can manage its own data, make its own decisions, and tell its own story. Without it, sovereignty is just a word, rather than something lived.

The Carney Test

Carney says he wants to rebuild Canadian sovereignty. The Liberal platform says AI is key to future prosperity. But those two goals won’t come together on their own. They must be made to fit.

For a generation, we treated prosperity and sovereignty as separate paths. If we’re going to bring them back together, we must start here — with the systems that shape what we build, how we decide, and who we answer to.
That’s what’s really at stake.

And this is the test.

Don Lenihan PhD is an expert in public engagement with a long-standing focus on how digital technologies are transforming societies, governments, and governance. This column appears weekly. To see earlier instalments in the series, click here.