Canada’s AI minister says he’s more worried about creating unicorns than monopolies

Speaking at BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall, Evan Solomon said he wants to reward companies taking risks.

Evan Solomon isn’t worried about creating monopolies in Canada’s tech industry.

Speaking with BetaKit managing editor, Sarah Rieger, during BetaKit’s Most Ambitious town hall on Monday, the artificial intelligence (AI) minister took issue with a question posed to him about whether or not Canada picking national tech champions runs the risk of rewarding bloat rather than innovation, or stifling competition among the ecosystem’s smaller startups, by creating monopolies in Canadian tech.

“I’m more concerned, frankly, about more unicorns,” Solomon said.

The question’s genesis comes from a series of MOUs signed between the federal government and companies like Cohere and Xanadu, identifying the companies as national champions in fields like AI and quantum computing. Under those MOUs, companies receive support like subsidies and tax incentives from the federal government with the aim of advancing the national interest.

Canada has a history of a small number of companies, most notably in the big three of Canada’s telecoms or big five Canadian banks, dominating the market. According to Solomon, that won’t be the case in Canadian tech.

“What keeps me up at night is not that Cohere is too big, but how can I create 20 more Coheres? They’re a strategic asset,” he said of the native Toronto AI company that owns Canada’s only foundational AI model.

Canadian competition policy was initially created to be soft, and in some cases incentivize consolidation, in large part to help Canadian companies compete against much larger firms in the US. However, critics say that the Competition Act has created a landscape where companies have less incentive to lower consumer prices for Canadians, invest in research, and compete on the global market.

What keeps me up at night is not that Cohere is too big, but how can I create 20 more Coheres? They’re a strategic asset.
Evan Solomon, Canada’s AI minister

But Solomon told the audience at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox that he wasn’t worried about monopolies because of both the breadth of competition Canadian tech companies face south of the border, and support from federal programs for a large number of companies beyond Canada’s tech industry giants.

“Look at [Cohere’s] competitors. They’re competing against OpenAI and Anthropic. They are running with some big dogs, and you can fail quick. There’s no guarantee in business, especially this business,” Solomon said, referencing companies like Nortel and BlackBerry as Canadian tech giants that have come and gone in terms of global and national dominance.

“The truth is, it’s hard out there. We should reward people who are taking this risk,” he said. “So, my worry is honestly not … creating non-innovative, hyper-regulated zombies. It’s how can support millions of potential startups, and how can create an environment where innovation is rewarded.”

Solomon’s remarks were part of a broader conversation on the Most Ambitious stage, where he spoke at length about his portfolio as the minister of technology and innovation, the long-delayed federal AI strategy, which he said would be announced “soon,” building a top five supercomputer in Canada, and what it means to create a sovereign tech ecosystem that’s also collaborative and globally-facing.

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