Winston Smith

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[David Chilton @wealthy_barber]

Happy Canada Day! Enjoy celebrating with your friends and family. Spare me the negative comments. Focus instead on the many wonderful things about this country. Including, of course, its finest feature-- it's full of amazing Canadians!

[Adam⛰️ @AssetTraveller]

Carneys $2.5B condo bailout should enrage everyone.

Tax payers footing the bill into developers pockets who made more money than god for many years. Now their risk fails and tax payers foot the bill.

Shame on you @MarkJCarney

[Adam Chambers @adamchamb]

Socializing losses and privatizing profits is not how it's supposed to work. It is surprising the PM, who lived through the global financial crisis, would encourage this moral hazard.

But there's more. Rents are falling in many markets. And record supply of rental is coming online. The taxpayer through CMHC is already over exposed to rental. This scheme may put taxpayers at even greater risk of losses. More details are needed and should be scrutinized at a Parliamentary Committee.

[Windscribe @windscribecom]

A statement from the CEO of Windscribe.

[Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4]

Canada’s not going for gold with this strategy.

On the consumer side, this strategy gets a lot of things right and this government deserves credit for that.

But from a digital and economic sovereignty perspective I think it falls short. What the AI industry most needs is for governments to create the free market conditions for AI companies to start, scale and thrive here.

There are important elements in the strategy: sovereign compute, a public supercomputer, AI Missions starting in health care, a fund to scale Canadian champions, commercializing the Photonics Fabrication Centre, and the government as an anchor customer. Members of the Build Canada community have publicly written about many of these ideas and it's good to see these show up in the plan.

But we have to be honest about what this strategy is – and what it isn't.

This is primarily a strategy to help Canada use artificial intelligence, with government in a main character role in framing public perception.

It is not a strategy to make Canada the best place on earth to build it. Its own organizing goal – adoption, moving Canadian businesses from 12% to 60% uptake – is necessary but not sufficient to make Canada a global AI leader.

The strategy says it wants Canadian champions. But you don't build champions with government cheques and deferred studies – you build them by making Canada the best place on earth to start and scale a company.

Using AI and Building AI are different goals, and they require different instincts.

The companies that will define this century will get built where four things are true:
1. founders and engineers keep what they create;
2. capital is deep enough to write billion-dollar cheques; 3. energy and compute are cheap and fast to build; and 4. the rules are light enough to move at the speed of the technology.

Measure this strategy against those conditions and the pattern is clear:

On founder and employee economics – the single biggest reason talent leaves Canada – it does nothing now. The one capital-gains idea it raises, a reinvestment rollover, is deferred to a study due by Budget 2026.

On capital, it makes the government the venture capitalist instead of unleashing private capital to back Canadian companies.

On energy, it promises to double the grid by 2050. The build is needed this decade – and the strategy offers no permitting reform to get there.

On regulation, it adds a new layer – a trusted-AI certification program, watermarking, plus new privacy and online-safety laws – and compliance always lands hardest on the startups least able to carry it.

And it adds a dozen new programs on top of the 130-plus innovation programs founders already can't navigate. The answer was always fewer and faster, not more.

Prosperity is not something that the state can spend into existence. Prosperity is what happens when you clear the runway and let the free market work. No government can subsidize its way past the friction it is responsible for creating.

Playing to win would look different. It would look like:

--> Let founders defer capital gains reinvested in Canadian companies, and fix how we tax employee equity – now, not in a future budget.
--> Treat energy and permitting like the emergency they are. Approve power and data centres in months, not years, and build at wartime speed.
--> Set a hard speed limit on regulation: apply the laws we have, and clear new products fast.
--> Collapse the ~130-plus innovation programs into fewer than ten – and cut the friction founders hit at every step.

Canada invented modern AI. We have the talent, one of the cleanest grids in the world, and the research base to win. The opportunity is ours to lose.

This strategy is a genuine start – but a country that wants to win doesn't plan to be the world's best customer. It plans to build the companies the world cannot live without.

[Winston Smith @xalprider]

@DataRepublican @johnkonrad Killjoy.

[Winston Smith @xalprider]

@johnkonrad Simple math. The optimum number of boats to own is n+1 where n is the number currently owned.

[Lucy Hargreaves @lucyhargreaves4]

I’d expect a significant exodus of digital technology companies from Canada if C-22 passes.

This bill proposes generalized surveillance infrastructure, not law enforcement.

Incredibly concerning overreach.

It would weaken Canadian cybersecurity, lower the legal threshold for accessing Canadians’ data, and tells both Canadian and global technology companies that Canada is no longer a trusted jurisdiction for building digital infrastructure.

[Winston Smith @xalprider]

@terrynewman I love 'that character' as a pejorative and 'skepticism' thrown in like it's a bad thing. The CBC should come up with an apotropaic gesture to pair with the invocation of 'misinformation'.

[Richard Dias @RichardDias_CFA]

Canada's Manufacturing Sector has been in recession for TWO years. On April 1st, this government will yet again raise the industrial carbon tax. Imagine being so ideologically captured that you would further risk the livelihoods of millions of Working-Class Canadians.

[Winston Smith @xalprider]

@dccommonsense Dumb Canuck questions: isn't it a massive problem that 31,000 people in a state have no ID? Shouldn't getting them ID be priority 1? Wouldn't having ID improve their lives more than voting? Genuinely confused on this one, not political.