Canada Doesn’t Need American AI. It Needs to Back Its Own.

by BrainStream CEO Steve Alcorn

Jean-Christophe Bélisle-Pipon’s op-ed in today’s Vancouver Sun (“There is no such thing as ‘Sovereign AI’“) makes a point that anyone trying to build an AI company in Canada has been feeling for a while: the federal government talks about AI sovereignty while routing the actual work through American firms.

OpenAI wants to open an office in B.C. It wants to build data centers here. It wants to embed itself in our schools, clinics, and public services through its “OpenAI for Countries” initiative. As Bélisle-Pipon notes, this isn’t a product pitch; it’s a proposal to become part of Canada’s institutional fabric.

The $2 billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy sounds good on paper. But when the companies best positioned to build that infrastructure are American, and when the U.S. Department of Defense is simultaneously flagging foreign workers at AI companies as security risks, “sovereign” starts to feel like a word on a slide deck rather than an actual policy.

Here’s what I find frustrating. Canada has everything Bélisle-Pipon says it does: world-class AI research, abundant energy, deep talent pools, publicly funded institutions already doing the work. What it lacks is follow-through on supporting the entrepreneurs who want to build AI companies here.

BrainStream Ltd. is an AI education technology startup in the process of establishing itself in British Columbia. Our team is building personalized learning tools powered by AI — the kind of technology that could strengthen Canadian schools and institutions rather than make them dependent on foreign platforms. We chose B.C. because the talent, the research community, and the quality of life make it the right place to build this company.

We’re not pretending to compete with OpenAI’s compute infrastructure. But we represent something the sovereignty conversation keeps overlooking: people who want to build AI companies in Canada, for Canada, as Canadians.

There are teams like ours across the country. Health AI in Montreal. Natural language processing in Toronto. Computer vision in Edmonton — the city that helped put Canada on the global AI map. The talent is here. The ideas are here. The question is whether Canada’s startup and immigration programs will match the ambition of the people trying to build here.

Bélisle-Pipon warns about “vibe compliance,” where companies perform the aesthetics of accountability without enforceable substance. I’d extend that to the sovereignty strategy itself. Announcing billions for “Canadian AI” while inviting American companies to build it — and while entrepreneurs with AI startups navigate years of visa uncertainty — is its own kind of performance.

Canada doesn’t need OpenAI to open an office in Vancouver. It needs to clear the path for the companies that are already trying to set up shop here.