This article originally appeared in the future economy. Below is an excerpt from the article, which can be read in full here.
By Ryan Khurana, July 4, 2025
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s creation of a dedicated Artificial Intelligence ministry—with Evan Solomon sworn in as Canada’s first federal AI minister—deserves high praise. This move signals a meaningful national commitment to a field that Canada quietly pioneered for decades.
Boosting Recognition of Canada’s AI Contributions
The new AI ministry’s top priority should be boosting public and international recognition of Canada’s outsized AI contributions, past and present. By celebrating our achievements and promoting our talent, Canada can sustain its intellectual leadership in AI, even as capital-rich competitors like the United States vie for our brightest minds. It may surprise many Canadians to learn that Solomon and his team will have plenty to brag about.
Some of the earliest foundations of artificial intelligence were laid here at home. As far back as 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb at McGill University proposed the idea that “neurons that fire together, wire together,” now known as Hebbian learning. Modern artificial neural networks still build on Hebb’s principles, forging the link between neuroscience and the now ubiquitous field of AI.
When much of the world soured on AI research during what’s been dubbed the “AI Winter,” Canada continued to support frontier research through institutions like CIFAR. Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Richard Sutton—recipients of the highest honour in computer science—all call Canada home. In 2024, Hinton did something no AI researcher had done before: he won the Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions to neural networks. Yet these Canadians are hardly known outside tech circles. We should be shouting their names and accolades from the rooftops.
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Ryan Khurana is an AI practitioner in Toronto, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, and a contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
