07/22/2026
Canada's AI strategy, AI for All, opens with a common refrain these days: AI is inevitable, Canada is behind, so we adopt first and trust follows.
Our VP and Partner Gordon Ross has been allergic to “technology is inevitable” rhetoric since he wrote a term paper in 1996 on technological determinism, and a recent ACM FAccT whitepaper gave it a definition when used in the context of AI: the inevitability decoy, a narrative that flatters the people telling it more than it describes reality.
Helen Hayes from McGill recently wrote in the Globe and Mail that Canada’s AI trust follows governance, not familiarity, and Gord agrees in part with that idea. Yet governance stays abstract until you find where that trust gets earned or lost. For Gord, that happens at the service encounter. Whether someone gets a say before AI enters a decision that affects them, whether the logic stays legible enough to question, whether a path to appeal exists when the system gets it wrong.
Call it service design, the work that affords trust, where governance is made durable. Read the full article: https://bit.ly/4wcuT7e
