The prime minister and his minister of digital asbestos, Evan Solomon, released their “Digital Asbestos for All” strategy in Toronto yesterday, which involves giving half a billion dollars to firms to scale up their adoption of said digital asbestos, and doing a lot of back-patting about sovereign capability—or at least laying the foundations for it—and there were some utterly fantastic estimations of just how many jobs this will create. And by fantastic, I mean it looks an awful lot like fantasy. But it’s also a lot about trying to get people hooked, through giving access to ‘trusted [digital asbestos] agents” to all post-secondary students, which is not what professors want and is going to make their lives more difficult as they already have a hard enough time preventing cheating using these tools. They are also promising a “National [digital asbestos] Literacy Initiative” that involves training and tool-kits available to educators, which feels a lot like giving pot to high school students and telling them it’s good for them.
"Provide access to trusted AI agents for every post-secondary student – from the arts and commerce to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and medicine."I'm pretty sure that nobody who teaches in a post-secondary institution asked for this, and this makes their jobs even harder.
— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T15:46:27.206Z
If this wasn’t bad enough, there was a whole lot of handwaving from Solomon about “building trust” and “safety” without actually saying how they’re going to ensure that these platforms can be trusted, or what kinds of safety measures they’ll put into place. On Power & Politics, David Cochrane was giving Solomon the gears about how he can possibly make these kinds of promises when the tech bros controlling these companies have more money than many economies at their disposal so fines won’t be of any use, and they have the weight of the Trump administration behind them, so trying to force them to build any kinds of safety features that they don’t want to build are extremely unlikely to happen. And Solomon wouldn’t answer, but just kept repeating his lines. “Trust” is a whole lot of “just trust me,” and I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough. But that’s all that this government is going to offer, because Mark Carney and Solomon have guzzled all of the tech bro hype, and they’re going to pour all kinds of money into this just as the bubble is about to burst. We’re going to lose so much money, while this government is already cutting spending to programmes that need it, and we’re all going to pay the price because they couldn’t stop guzzling the hype.
My Latest:
Ukraine Dispatch:
President Zelenskyy published an open letter to Putin inviting him to peace talks in a neutral country, citing that Russians are tired of Ukrainian drone strikes.
Noteworthy:
- Here is some pushback on the Alberta separatist claims that they would get to retain their Canadian citizenships.
- Amarnath Amarasingam and Stephanie Carvin look at the changing face of far-right extremism in Canada in this excerpt from their new book.
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This take is just embarrassing. AI is not something that you can ignore and make it go away. It is a powerful new tool which can be put to good use or not. Like computers and the internet, it requires effort and investment to ensure that it works for our benefit. Leaving the field to others who are prepared to invest is something that Canada has often done that has made us weaker, not stronger. We are fortunate to have a PM who understands this.