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Blog | Building an AI Commons for Canada’s Future

Blog | Building an AI Commons for Canada’s Future

By Ana Serrano, President & Vice-Chancellor, OCAD University

Building an AI Commons for Canada’s Future

The Internet has always been a paradox: it connected people and ideas in unprecedented ways, but it also concentrated power in a few companies, pulled us into addictive platforms and weakened trust in democracy. In the 1990s, the world had a chance to shape it into a true digital commons and didn’t. With AI, Canada now has a second chance. The question is whether we’ll do it differently this time.

When Innovation Minister Evan Solomon spoke at the Empire Club about Canada’s approach to artificial intelligence, I heard echoes of that earlier optimism. In 1997, I co-founded the CFC Media Lab, one of Canada’s first labs for interactive and digital media. Around the same time, I appeared before the CRTC arguing that the Internet should not be tightly regulated. We wanted to give creativity and innovation room to grow. We believed in the promise of a democratizing Internet.

But that optimism missed how a few firms would grow into monopolies and how surveillance would emerge as the Internet’s most profitable business model. We can’t afford to make that mistake again.

Sovereignty Means More Than Infrastructure

To his credit, Solomon acknowledged this tension. He called for Canada to "make haste slowly," and announced a task force and public consultations. He also made digital sovereignty a central pillar of the government’s approach, promising new data centres and computing power to help Canadian firms compete. These are necessary steps. But sovereignty isn’t just about servers on Canadian land or keeping intellectual property at home. It’s also about shaping the culture of how AI is built and shared in this country.

That requires something we’ve built before when it mattered: a commons.

What a Canadian AI Commons Looks Like

By an AI commons, I mean public infrastructure—compute, data, tools and education made widely accessible so Canadians are not only users but creators. An AI commons means treating AI as shared infrastructure—open enough that people anywhere can experiment, adapt it to their context and build with it.

Canada has always built for public use when the stakes were high—public health care, the CBC, community-led digital networks in remote regions. Canada’s strength has come from public institutions that gave everyone a stake, not just private monopolies at the top. Other countries are already moving. In China, local governments teach AI in schools. In Europe, a public consortium is building open-source language models for everyone to use. And globally, initiatives like the Public AI Network are advancing a similar vision: AI built as civic infrastructure—publicly governed, ethically trained only on data that is freely given and permanently accessible as a common good.

Canada’s $2.4 billion is promising but partial. It does not yet add up to a commons—one that links infrastructure, education, governance and open access through the mix of public investment, procurement and partnerships that has built our national institutions.

An AI commons isn’t one program. It’s a framework to ensure benefits are broadly shared. In practice, that means three interconnected commitments:

  1. Access paired with education.Infrastructure only matters if people can use it. That means putting AI tools in Canadians’ hands, letting them test ideas in real contexts and teaching not just technical skills but also ethics, limits and possibilities. Education here is broad—classrooms, maker spaces, libraries, workplaces and cultural institutions—so individuals can explore AI for themselves and adapt it to their own challenges. As Jutta Treviranus reminds us, the most resilient systems are those designed from the margins. A commons makes that resilience the starting point, not the afterthought.
     
  2. Support for practical innovation.Much of AI’s value will come from smaller gains that never make headlines. Many of these will be built not by tech giants but by smaller teams—artists, designers, cultural workers, creative technologists and SMEs (which make up 98 percent of Canadian firms and nearly half our GDP). These smaller players often spot needs others miss: how to flag early health risks in community clinics; how to optimize energy use in local grids; how to preserve Indigenous languages with speech models. For those efforts to thrive, they need shared resources that lower costs and connect ideas across sectors. A commons should work like open-source software: local solutions are shared back, refined in common and redistributed so everyone can build on them. That’s how distributed ingenuity can become collective capacity.
     
  3. Civic trust embedded in the system.The last digital wave showed us that people keep using technology even when it undermines trust. But surviving isn’t the same as legitimacy. Solomon is right that adoption moves at the speed of trust. But real trust is more than investor confidence. It’s civic trust—Canadians knowing the systems they use are transparent, secure and accountable. A commons makes that trust real by embedding fairness and openness into the infrastructure itself, not bolting on ethics later. Cultural sectors play a vital role here too, helping the public make sense of new technologies and ensuring the values of equity and pluralism are part of their design.

A Choice That Defines Us

An AI commons demands a culture shift. Canada won’t get there by managing innovation from the top down. We get there by creating the conditions for people to experiment and build on each other’s work. When powerful tools are widely accessible, farmers and small manufacturers, teachers and artists, hospitals and local governments all gain the ability to shape solutions for their own needs. Shared back into the system, these efforts compound into healthier communities, stronger businesses and new forms of creativity rooted here. A commons makes space for that messy mix—because it’s culture, not just capital, that gives sovereignty its strength.

We missed the chance to shape the Internet into a true commons, and we are still living with the consequences. Now is the time to demand something better. An AI commons would make the infrastructure we are already building the basis for something larger: broad participation, shared prosperity, cultural vitality and civic trust. That is the kind of sovereignty that strengthens not just our economy, but our identity—and signals the kind of leadership Canada can offer the world


 

Call for Participation

The federal government is now asking Canadians to help define the next chapter of AI leadership. At OCAD University’s Cultural Policy Hub, we are partnering with Nordicity to gather perspectives from across the arts, culture and creative industries. We invite artists, cultural workers and creative entrepreneurs to respond to our sector-wide survey.

By aggregating responses, we will submit a coordinated contribution to ISED’s consultation—ensuring our community’s insights are heard alongside those of other sectors.

We are interested in hearing a wide range of perspectives on how Canada should approach the development of AI—particularly in the areas ISED has identified for feedback: access to computing resources, responsible governance, data and innovation and public confidence and trust. We hope many will join this chorus of ideas about how public investment in AI can reflect the values, creativity and diversity of Canadian society.

Stay tuned for an email with the survey in the days to come. If you’re not already following the Cultural Policy Hub, sign up here for our newsletter here.