Canada’s Strategy for AI Adoption Should Start by Taking Students Seriously

Canada’s new AI strategy is ambitious in its main goal: increase public trust so that more Canadians will adopt AI across the country. Among other commitments, the strategy pledges free AI literacy training for 1 million entry-level post-secondary students, access to trusted AI agents, and 90,000 jobs and placements for young Canadians. These are lofty goals. 

But the strategy still treats students as a means to an end – viewing them essentially as vehicles for driving faster AI adoption across sectors. 

This view of students is too narrow. Canada has more than 2.3 million students currently enrolled in higher education, representing Canada’s best and brightest and forming the very backbone of our current and future workforce. 

Canada’s post-secondary students should not be treated simply as passive users of AI; they should be equipped with the skills they need to understand, question, and govern it. If Canada wants long-term AI adoption, we need students who trust AI because it is trustworthy, ethical, and useful – not because they are told to do so. While the strategy rightly admits that Canada’s low AI literacy rates and low public trust are major barriers to AI adoption, it fails to acknowledge that students need to be empowered with practical, critical thinking skills to identify bias, recognize misinformation, and flag unsafe uses. Meaningful AI literacy, in other words, is where AI for All should begin.

Effective and meaningful AI literacy should be an essential aspect of post-secondary education, not just a surface-level seminar about AI examples. Students need to be challenged with AI literacy learning that is discipline-specific, and that actively teaches how to evaluate AI outputs, check sources, flag AI-generated content, protect their personal data, and critically assess when AI use is appropriate and when it is not. For example, engineering, journalism, and nursing students all need AI literacy training that is specific to their fields, but also teaches the same underlying skills: to think about AI critically, rather than passively. Canada’s AI strategy gets this partially right in its goal to provide “free AI literacy training” for all students, but it needs to rethink how these ambitious goals will be implemented as meaningful AI literacy initiatives. 

Despite what Canada’s AI for All strategy promises, trust will not come from simply giving more students access to these technologies, like AI agents. It will grow when there are clear expectations on use, “safe-by-design” elements are built into its systems, and tools are designed in ways that students can actually use and understand. If Canada’s post-secondary institutions issue vague AI bans, students will use these tools in secret. If these institutions allow these systems without guidance or rules, students may depend too heavily on systems they do not understand, which may lead to serious harm. AI agents for students could help, but only if they have clear privacy protections, rules on proactive disclosure, and are paired with effective training on limitations. 

Overall, Canada needs to stop treating AI literacy as a periodic policy intervention and waiting before disaster strikes before changing policy. Students need long-term support on their campuses, not just from their accessibility offices, program faculties, and campus libraries, but also through consistent funding support backed by governments. AI for All’s emphasis on partnering with community organizations, educators, employers, and Indigenous partners is a good start to building a network to provide this holistic support. Likewise, Canada’s post-secondary institutions need to adopt a similar approach, working with partners to build meaningful AI literacy training into coursework and graduation outcomes. 

Failure to act effectively will not only disrupt Canada’s future workforce, but also our society at large. Students live in a world where misinformation, deepfakes, and addictive algorithms are actively being driven by major online platforms – making it that much more difficult to access reliable information. AI literacy is not just about students’ employability – it is about their ability to think critically and engage actively in our democracy. If the Government of Canada wants students to trust AI, it first needs to treat students as active participants in shaping these tools and technologies, and empower them with training that helps them question, critique, and shape AI. That means AI literacy training that focuses on AI bias, privacy, and safety – not just productivity. 

For us at Student Affairs Group, our key message is simple: Canada should not treat post-secondary students simply as a means to scale AI adoption across workforce sectors. The AI for All strategy needs to treat students as active participants in AI systems, not merely users. If students are granted real agency, input, and influence in how AI is developed and deployed across Canada, AI adoption will not only be stronger, but it will be more meaningful, longer lasting, and more useful for all Canadians for years to come.

*Note: AI was used as an ideas-generator tool to develop ideas for this article in the form of bullet points. All text was written, reviewed, and approved by myself, as the human author, exclusively.