{"slug": "ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age", "title": "AI can be the First Spike of Canada’s digital age", "summary": "Alex Tapscott argues that Canada must build its own sovereign AI infrastructure, comparing the current digital economy to the era of the Canadian Pacific Railway. He warns that dependence on foreign tech giants leaves Canada vulnerable to external control, as demonstrated by the Trump administration's 2026 directive forcing Anthropic to restrict access to its AI models for non-U.S. persons.", "body_md": "*Alex Tapscott is the CEO of CMCC Global Capital Markets, Co-founder of the BRI and the co-author of the institute’s report Rebuilding Canada for the New Technology Order, published June 16.*\n\nToday, we celebrate Canada Day. While Canadians rightly mark our Confederation in 1867 as our founding, only in 1879 did Sir John A. Macdonald make “Dominion Day” a statutory holiday. Like many projects he championed, it helped to form a common Canadian identity from vastly disparate regions and peoples.\n\nA few years later in 1885, Donald Smith drove in the Last Spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Most Canadians know the image of Smith with hammer in hand at Craigellachie, where the east met the west.\n\nIt was the First Spike in an integrated nation. Unlike the Grand Trunk Railway between Montreal and Toronto, it was Canadian owned. It connected markets, attracted investment, accelerated settlement, and secured Canada’s place on the continent from its southern neighbour. Before the railway, travel between Toronto and Vancouver took months. Afterward, it took days.\n\nCanada may have had railways, but they did not always serve our interests. Today’s tech giants operate in Canada, but gains accrue elsewhere.\n\nThe twentieth century may not have belonged to Canada, as Sir Wilfrid Laurier predicted at the turn of the last century, but our nation has become what he described as a “star towards which all … who love progress and freedom shall come.” The CPR was foundational to this increasingly industrious and sovereign Canada.\n\nIt was a moment strikingly like our own, except we are talking about our digital dominion, our digital economy, in a world where Canada must increasingly build on its own strengths and build out its own assets.\n\nJust as the CPR laid the foundation for twentieth-century Canada, this generation must undertake nation-building projects that will preserve our prosperity and sovereignty in the digital age.\n\nGlobal technology companies, like the British-owned Grand Trunk Railway before them, operate extensively in Canada. But much of what passes for Canada’s technology infrastructure serves to move economic and strategic value to shareholders, executives, and governments beyond our borders.\n\nCanada may have had railways, but they did not always serve our interests. Today’s tech giants operate in Canada, but gains accrue elsewhere.\n\nWith railways as with data centres, if you’re not the landlord, you’re a renter. Foreign landlords can always evict you. Case in point: on June 12, 2026, the Trump Administration directed AI giant Anthropic to suspend access to its most advanced models—Fable 5 and Mythos 5—for all non-U.S. persons, including foreign nationals working at the company itself.\n\nUnable to distinguish users reliably in real time, Anthropic shut those systems down globally to comply. The details of the directive ([and its apparent resolution](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-says-trump-admin-has-lifted-export-controls-on-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5.html)) matter less than what it revealed: when the foundational infrastructure of the AI era belongs to foreign firms operating under foreign governments, those foreign powers can restrict, reprice, or revoke access without warning, recourse, or regard for the institutions that depend on it.\n\n**RELATED: Did the Anthropic model ban prove Cohere is right about sovereign AI?**\n\nDependency dressed as convenience is still dependency. The builders of the CPR understood this. George Stephen, the railway’s financial architect, lobbied to block the Grand Trunk from extending north of Lake Superior. Had it done so, much of the economic bounty of the Canadian Northwest would have been diverted to Chicago rather than Toronto and Montreal.\n\nThe railways of the nineteenth century determined patterns of commerce, migration, and economic power for generations. AI will do the same in the twenty-first.\n\nHere’s another lesson from the 1880s: incentives matter. The initial government-led railway effort largely faltered. Construction advanced slowly, costs mounted, and the project struggled to attract capital to complete the line.\n\nOnly when Ottawa partnered with private entrepreneurs, assembled a syndicate, provided meaningful incentives, and recruited foreign investment did the project acquire the scale and speed necessary to succeed. To wit, Ottawa granted the railway 25 million acres of land—roughly the size of New Brunswick—and then sold “land grant” bonds to foreign investors, unlocking the vast capital required to traverse a barren wilderness.\n\nThe objective is not for government to build AI infrastructure. The objective is to make Canada the most attractive place to build it.\n\nThe lesson is not that government has no role. The lesson is that government alone is rarely enough.\n\nWith the right incentives, we could attract private capital at home and abroad. The Maple 8 Group of Canada’s largest pension funds collectively manage more than $2 trillion in assets. Our Big Five Banks are among the strongest financial institutions in the world. Canada possesses abundant energy, world-class universities, political stability, and proximity to the largest technology market on earth, to entice foreign investors, too.\n\nMacdonald did not simply ask investors to believe in Canada. He created structures that made building Canada investable.\n\nThe modern equivalents of CPR land grants are not hard to imagine. Governments control vast Crown lands near hydroelectric resources in Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador. A one-gigawatt AI campus may require 500 to 800 acres and as much electricity as a mid-sized city.\n\nOttawa and the provinces are moving in this direction, albeit scattershot: sovereign compute initiatives under Canada’s AI strategy, Hydro-Québec’s active allocation of power to data centres, BC Hydro’s expansion of baseload capacity, and federal efforts to accelerate approvals for “nation-building” projects.\n\nThe next step is coordination. Governments could identify strategic sites, pre-clear permitting, secure grid access with utilities, and contribute land through long-term leases that reduce development risk, clearing the way for the Maple 8 pensions and Canada’s Big Five Banks to crowd in private capital.\n\nThe objective is not for government to build AI infrastructure. The objective is to make Canada the most attractive place to build it.\n\nWith the Alto high-speed railway, the government has signalled it can take on $100 billion projects. Why not redirect that capital to projects that will futureproof our economy, not marginally shorten train rides?\n\nThe CPR also offers another lesson. In *The Last Spike*, Pierre Berton observed that American engineers, operators, financiers, and entrepreneurs came north because Canadians were building the most ambitious project on the continent.\n\nOur anxiety about losing AI researchers and engineers to Silicon Valley need not be our destiny. The right project, pursued at sufficient scale, can reverse the flow. Great national projects not only retain talent. They attract it.\n\nContemporary critics once called the CPR “Macdonald’s Folly.” The builders thought differently, even before Calgary became a global energy capital or Vancouver, a Pacific gateway. But they knew that infrastructure expanded the realm of possibility. If you build it, they will come.\n\nAs Canada marks another birthday, let’s remember that, as a much smaller, poorer, and technologically primitive country, we built great infrastructure equal to the challenges and opportunities we faced.\n\nWho will drive the First Spike of our digital age?\n\n*The opinions and analysis expressed in the above article are those of its author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of BetaKit or its editorial staff. It has been edited for clarity, length, and style.*\n\n*Feature image courtesy Library and Archives Canada under public domain.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age", "canonical_source": "https://betakit.com/ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age/", "published_at": "2026-07-01 13:59:52+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-01 14:02:12.325002+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-safety", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Alex Tapscott", "CMCC Global Capital Markets", "Canadian Pacific Railway", "Anthropic", "Fable 5", "Mythos 5", "Trump Administration", "Cohere"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-can-be-the-first-spike-of-canadas-digital-age.jsonld"}}