Okay… wow. I even pointed you to two government groups working on other sides of the issue, but you’re just ignoring the overall government approach.

The government approach isn’t perfect, but I don’t have interest in arguing with someone focused on establishing an ideological position, going back to hyperbole again and again, and responding to a reasonable question with stuff stuff like this:

What is the “grounding” of any belief about anything? That’s a much more interesting question, one that AI boosters would do well to think more deeply about.

We can just leave it as agreeing to disagree. No point wasting anyone’s time.

we would want like 90% advocacy and civil society groups

If Canada had a national strategy group on achieving leadership in the arts, would you say 90% of members must be from outside the arts and not even experts on the arts who receive any public funding? What would that actually achieve?

This is a strategy group on making plans for how to achieve Canadian leadership in AI. The whole purpose of it is to provide an urgent response to a lack of industrial strategy in a rapidly growing and emerging space of critical importance. They have an objective to provide an industrial strategy document. If you don’t have voices at the table who are engaged in industry, there will be no point in even forming a group because it will never achieve the goal. Nonetheless, it still has substantial civil society representation and open consultation. You didn’t like the questions in the survey? They provided an email address to receive open-ended responses where you could send whatever feedback you wanted.

Also, government is not just one group.

For long-term AI guidance with annual reports, the government also has the Advisory Council on AI. It has a mandate to ensure AI development in alignment with Canadian values. Its mandate was also expanded this year. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/advisory-council-artificial-intelligence/en

And, there is the Safe and Secure AI Advisory Group that is focused on guiding policy wrt risks from AI. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/advisory-council-artificial-intelligence/en/safe-and-secure-ai-advisory-group

Still, none of these are passing legislation or allocating funds.

Government is not a monolith, and Canada is taking a layered approach to AI strategy, one layer of which is industrial policy. And, if Canadians don’t like the strategic guidance produced by any of these groups, they can pressure their representatives to shape the actual legislation around them.

Out of curiosity, what is the actual grounding of your beliefs about AI and AI policy? There is plenty to be concerned about, but your responses are also full of hyperbole. What are you basing them on?

You’ve listed 13 that are on the industry side, including one who bridges academia and commercialization. There’s 11-12 who fall across civil society, academia and research. That doesn’t seem wildly unbalanced to me, but nobody is saying it’s perfect so feel free to suggest how you think it would be better structured and what categories you would look to form it around.

There’s like one person from Cohere.

No representation from labour? Did you miss the Senior Research Officer from CUPE?

Also, there is the Founding Director of the Center for Media, Technology and Democracy.

Your critique isn’t totally unfair, but there is a lot of academia on the panel. It’s not just industry, but it’s not a group representative of all sectors that stand to be affected. There are definitely people I would also like to see on there who aren’t part of it, especially on education. It’s a task force and an initiative that is aligned with an already determined strategic mandate to achieve AI sovereignty, and to shape whatever that ultimately means. It is taking for granted that AI is going to be part of Canada’s future in a big way. It is approached like a response to an arms race and how to keep up as best we can, not a fact finding mission. I don’t think that’s entirely unreasonable, as long as we have accountability on legislation that shapes what actually goes from strategy into budget and implementation, also via things like the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act that addresses the governance side. This group isn’t governance, but strategy.

I also disagree the only use case is surveillance. That’s also fear mongering, but it is definitely one of the concerning use cases. There are many concerning use cases. This is where we need other civil society pressure and accountability in parliament and the governance side to provide oversight and regulation.

It’s not perfect, but it’s not as terrifying as the Tyee article makes it out.

Fear mongering article imo. Canada does need to be very on top of this issue, because of the risks of not doing so. The national AI task force the government set up also has some good people on it. In reality, I would say Canada has not been moving fast enough on the topic.

https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-development/news/2025/09/government-of-canada-launches-ai-strategy-task-force-and-public-engagement-on-the-development-of-the-next-ai-strategy.html

It’s really not nearly as straightforward as that. The wine industry in BC is made up of many smaller wine producers, all dealing with a lot of uncertainty over the last couple of years. They make different styles with different grape varietals and all have to plan ahead and do their best while dealing with both market change and climate change, not even being sure which varietals will be viable in the province as the climate changes. Also, farming fruit is just subject to a lot of unpredictability. Can you predict the weather? Nobody knew winter 2024 would be so cold and kill so many vines. Nobody knew summer 2025 would be a great growing season. People running businesses still had to plan ahead and sign contracts, and wineries can’t just elastically expand production without expanding plants through large and long-term capital investments. Most couldn’t even afford to do that anyway. Also, for places that lost their vines entirely, they can’t just have new vines producing grapes the next year. Plants take time to grow. Many vineyards also resorted to trying things to save their vineyards that were totally experimental and nobody knew for sure how they would work out. It’s just a lot more complex than you’re recognizing, and if the winter is brutal again in 2026 or there is a terrible summer growing season that follows, the program might need to be preserved. It needs better administration to avoid problems like the current one, but it’s a result of nature’s chaos and uncertainty combined with less-than-perfect administration of a pretty good emergency response.

It’s really not that simple. Grapes are not all the same and are not just interchangeable. Some vineyards that were not wiped out having a good crop this year is great, but it does not mean everyone is recovered or that the grapes they grew are workable for all wineries. It’s a more complex, fragile and unpredictable industry than you are recognizing.

It’s also not really tangential. If the federal government stepped in and blocked the program, it wouldn’t have just protected Canadian businesses. It would have been blocking a valuable emergency program to save Canadian businesses. You don’t win a trade war by kicking the legs out from under one of your own industries when they’re on the rocks.

The program was implemented by the province as a result of weather that absolutely devastated vineyards in the province and would have resulted in the wine industry also being devastated without grapes to make wine. It was an emergency measure to save Canadian businesses. It needs better administration until vineyards are fully recovered and it can be closed, but it was an essential response to save a BC industry.

BC has VQA, and none of the wines being made using US-grown grapes should qualify.

The problem is that BC vineyards faced extreme cold that killed off huge numbers of vines a couple of years back, and if importing grapes hadn’t been allowed it would have devastated a bunch of wine producers who just couldn’t have made wine for years as their vineyards had to be replanted and take time to produce grapes.

The problem, as it so often is in Canada, is sensible rules on paper with absolutely shit enforcement and oversight. So, instead of ensuring that wine makers are only sourcing from the US what is not available in Canada, they have enabled them to source excess from the US and leave the BC growers stuck.

It should be great news for the BC wine industry that there is a good harvest this year after utter devastation last year, and if they make adjustments and start ensuring that only grapes to meet demand beyond local supply are purchased, it will be good news in future. It’s just really dumb right now.

It takes three seasons for new vines to produce wine grapes, so there should be no need for the province’s exemptions on US grapes at all after a one more season. Hopefully they deal with this properly.

Kind of wish that were true.

I was sad to see Peter Bros. Construction in BC recently got sold to a Blackrock-owned multinational that was found guilty of using forced labour in Qatar not long ago too.

Lots of respect for the people who initiated that and did all of the work canvassing and collecting petitions. Gathering that many signatures is hard even with an online petition, but doing it with wet signatures is super impressive. That is a lot of work! Heroic effort of democratic engagement.

They didn’t write the bills.

You think our elected officials are eco-terrorists?

Yep. Scotty Sockpuppet doing his thing. Next step, accusations of “whataboutism.”

Yep. This is substantial and concerning. Reminds me of the US after 9/11. Reality is, as much as Carney is working to diversify trade, we’ve only been deepening out integration with the US on continental security. Not good.

You can just read the bills then.

When an article starts off with a fabrication like this:

Chinese leaders have given a deadline of 2027 to unify China and Taiwan.

You know it’s not a serious piece worth reading.

Either the author is purposely perpetuating a falsehood, or they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Do we get it back if Alberta secedes?