Canada spent billions developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) so the country has released a new strategy on how to scale and leverage the investment. The Government of Canada’s AI for All Strategy intentionally focuses on governance, adoption, and sovereign infrastructure, but leaves out explicit intellectual property (IP) implications or statutory reforms. The overall document, while reasonable and reasoned, is boring and late. While it may affect your AI strategy, it is unlikely to affect your IP strategy.
The Core Strategy Focus
The newly launched strategy pivots around the belief that “trust makes adoption possible” and that “opportunity and sovereignty ensure adoption creates benefits for Canadians.” It commits over $2 billion in funding to boost productivity, infrastructure, and job creation. Despite extensive national consultations that flagged IP protection as a critical issue for stakeholders, the core framework treats IP as an ecosystem enabler rather than an area for immediate legislative restructuring.
Overview of the Six Pillars Through an IP Lens
The strategy aims to:
- Protect Canadians from the risks and harms of AI: This pillar prioritizes data privacy modernization, online safety, and preventing misinformation. Rather than introducing IP-specific restrictions, it looks to compel AI companies to watermark AI-generated content to ensure marketplace transparency.
- Strengthen multinational partnerships with trusted allies: Focuses on creating strategic multilateral alliances. This involves aligning international data governance and technology standards, which indirectly influences cross-border IP sharing and interoperability.
- Power shared prosperity through Canadian institutions and companies: Targets commercialization and widespread business adoption of AI. It emphasizes helping Canadian companies extract value from AI deployments and retain commercial pathways domestically.
- Empower Canadians to participate in and benefit from AI: Calls for the government to promote widespread AI literacy programs, public training, and job matching. It prepares the workforce to utilize AI tools creatively, but does not define the legal ownership of their AI-assisted outputs.
- Support globally competitive Canadian champions: Shifts the government’s role toward scaling domestic AI firms. This pillar is designed to help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) protect their innovations and commercialize proprietary AI products globally.
- Build sovereign Canadian AI foundations in compute, data, talent, and infrastructure: Fund a world-leading public supercomputer and a sovereign Canadian cloud. This infrastructure secures Canadian-hosted datasets, safeguarding domestic data assets from being absorbed unprotected into foreign jurisdictions.
The Omission of Legislative Amendments
The absence of copyright or patent legislation within the strategy text reflects a deliberate division of federal policy portfolios.
- The Copyright Act Pathway: Previous legislative attempts like Bill C-27 (which contained the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, and died with the 44th Canadian Parliament) did not alter copyright law. Federal representatives have consistently maintained that the Copyright Act — governed by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) and Canadian Heritage — remains the exclusive mechanism to address AI copyright issues.
- Pending Consultation Outcomes: The government completed a targeted Consultation on Copyright in the Age of Generative AI, publishing its “What We Heard” report. This parallel process specifically evaluated text and data mining (TDM) exemptions, AI authorship, and infringement liability.
Because the creative industries and tech sectors remain deeply divided on fair compensation versus data-mining exceptions, the federal government chose to keep these contentious statutory IP negotiations separate from the broader, adoption-focused AI for All Strategy.
Not Exciting is a Good Thing
Canada’s AI for All Strategy is considered reasonable and well-reasoned in its prioritization, based on public input, workforce literacy, and data security, yet it is boring for promoting broad, safe policy language and failing to address specific regulatory actions for big tech. Furthermore, the framework is widely considered late and reactive compared to global peers. But being predictable and measured is a good thing for a government.
Affect of Canada’s AI Strategy on Your AI Strategy or IP Plan
You may want to update your AI strategy in view of this government document. It is very unlikely you will need to update your company’s IP plans in view of this AI strategy.
The national strategy may influence your AI strategy and practice. This could be as simple as being careful about where your cloud documents are stored, who has access to them, and whether you pay for premium services that don’t train on your data.
You, as a reader of this blog, likely have an IP strategy (IP plan). These days, many companies use machine learning to innovate or support services don’t have a plan. They rely on secrets instead of patents (which is a defensible strategy if you protect these secrets properly) but then these companies go and share them with open platforms, contractors, remote employees, casual contractors, and expect them to be considered trade secrets when these matters go to court. Even worse, some rely on only trademarks and third-party code.
We favour holistic approaches that protect your business with a mix of IP rights, and ideally including some robust rights like patents. However, remember that getting patents for the application of AI to a problem or domain is impossible. Hence, we recommend you plan your portfolio.
Conclusion
If you want to discuss the protection of inventions with patents or an update of your company’s IP strategy, please contact us.
