The Bank of Canada offers a helpful snapshot of AI adoption, job losses, and early productivity gains
In Ottawa last week, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, Michelle Alexopoulos, offered an illuminating snapshot of how AI is affecting employment and productivity across industries in Canada.
I posted a few details about her speech on LinkedIn on Friday, but there are a few other points here that I think will be of interest to readers.
Alexopoulus poses a big-picture question about AI at the outset. Will it prove to be a general-purpose technology, like the steam engine or the computer, that “reshaped entire economies and societies”? Or will it remain for many of us in the short to medium term limited to certain purposes, with a marginal impact on the workplace as a whole?
The early data on the uptake of AI in Canada points in the direction of a more pervasive transformation, but one that may unfold gradually. While some 12% of companies were using AI last year, up from 3% in 2022, they’re adopting it unevenly, with only 1.5% of businesses in accommodation and food services using AI, but more than 30% of finance and insurance firms doing so.
The Deputy Governor anticipates that “some jobs will be replaced by AI. New jobs will emerge, and others will be transformed,” offering this helpful analogy:
… when computers were first introduced into offices, some jobs vanished, like office typists and switchboard operators. New jobs were created, like entire IT departments. And other jobs changed — analog tasks were digitalized, and workers learned to use computers.
Alexopoulos makes three more specific observations about what the data tell us about how AI is currently affecting the workforce.
May 14, 2026
Most of our closest allies do not force telecos to retain everyone’s metadata for up to a year without oversight
Last week, when I appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Bill C-22, a question kept coming up from members on both sides of the table: how do other countries handle this? Do our closest allies require electronic service providers to retain the metadata of nearly everyone in the country for a lengthy period, without grounds or individualized suspicion, as the government is proposing to do here?
With one exception, no, the Five Eyes partners have not gone where Bill C-22 proposes to go.
The European experiment
For context, the European Union passed a similar law in 2006 and the European Court of Justice struck it down in 2014. In the Digital Rights Ireland case, the Court acknowledged the general interest in making sure that data is preserved to help investigate and prosecute serious crime, including terrorism. But it held the impact of bulk metadata retention on privacy to be “wide-ranging,” “serious,” and disproportionate. The data retained under the law was not limited to investigating “serious crime.” Police could access it without a warrant. And the periods of data retention bore no connection to the possible usefulness of the data for investigations.
May 12, 2026
Probably not, for reasons that point to the limits of what Canada can do here
Recently, governments in Manitoba and Ontario have signalled their support for a ban on social media for children under 16 years of age, and last month, the federal Liberals passed a resolution to this effect at a party convention. Manitoba’s premier Wab Kinew and the national Liberal Party are also keen to ban youth access to “all AI chatbots and other potentially harmful forms of AI interaction.”
Passing a complete ban would entail Canada following Australia’s lead, which, in late 2025, banned social media for everyone under 16. Governments in Europe have taken a less stringent approach by imposing age-verification and parental consent rules around social media access.
It remains to be seen whether Ottawa will choose the European or Australian path. But for reasons I sketch out here briefly, the European path seems more likely — and we may see the Carney government take this path when it soon re-tables the Online Harms Act.
Many commentators have been critical of the idea of Canada imposing a ban on social media or AI for young people due, among other reasons, to the fact that we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees everyone a right to free expression.
If a ban on social media or AI would infringe this right, could it still be legal? Yes it could, because no right in the Charter is absolute. All of our rights under the Charter are subject to reasonable limits — as decided by the courts — under section 1. (And of course, in the case of limits to free expression, we the people have the final say under section 33.)
So if a ban on access to social media or AI from those under 16 would violate section 2(b) of the Charter, would it be a reasonable limit on that right? No, it probably wouldn’t.
The thrust of this post is to briefly show what a challenge would look like and why access with parental consent or other guardrails is likely the furthest Canada can go in restricting youth from their favourite platform or chatbot.
May 7, 2026
The government is playing down key concerns, but they haven’t gone away
On Tuesday, Bill C-22 came before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. The Ministers of Justice and Public Safety were there to defend the bill in response to strong concerns raised about it by MPs who had clearly done their homework.
Ministers Fraser and Anandasangaree defended the bill largely in line with the government’s Charter Statement on C-22 tabled in the House on April 24th. This is a document intended to set out why the government thinks potentially contentious elements of the bill are Charter compliant.
The Ministers’ appearance before the Committee followed comments by officials from the Department of Justice and the RCMP that were also largely consistent with the framing of the bill in the Charter Statement.
Because the Statement sets out the playbook of the bill’s main advocates, this post looks briefly at what it gets right and what it gets wrong or leaves out.
May 4, 2026
A group of privacy law scholars and lawyers call for amendments to powers in the new lawful access bill that are overbroad and unlikely to survive Charter scrutiny
This morning, I joined a group of privacy law scholars and lawyers in sending an open letter to Members of Parliament (and the Leader of the NDP) calling for amendments to Bill C-22. The letter, signed by all of us listed below, follows. (PDF version here .)
The Right Honourable Mark Carney, P.C., O.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Canada
The Honourable Gary Anandasangaree, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Safety
The Honourable Sean Fraser, P.C., M.P., Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
The Honourable Pierre Poilievre, P.C., M.P., Leader of the Official Opposition
Mr. Yves-François Blanchet, M.P., Leader, Bloc Québécois
Mr. Avi Lewis, Leader, New Democratic Party
Ms. Elizabeth May, O.C., M.P., Leader, Green Party of Canada
Open Letter Calling for Amendments to Bill C-22
Dear Prime Minister, Ministers, and Honourable Leaders of the Opposition,
We write as lawyers and law professors who teach and practice in the areas of privacy law and constitutional rights in Canada. We welcome the effort that has gone into revising the lawful access framework since Bill C-2. Bill C-22 marks an improvement over its predecessor in several respects. But certain provisions of the bill as currently drafted raise serious constitutional concerns and fail to strike a reasonable balance between the legitimate needs of law enforcement and the privacy rights of Canadians. We urge Parliament to carefully consider the following issues before the bill proceeds further.
First, the new production order for subscriber information, to be added to the Criminal Code as section 487.0142, retains a legal threshold that is too low and a scope of disclosure that is too broad. As affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Spencer, Canadians have had a strong privacy interest in anonymity online. The existing general production order — available since 2004 and readily obtained by telewarrant — already gives police an effective tool to link an IP address or phone number to a named subscriber, and requires them to establish reasonable grounds to believe that an offence has been committed. Bill C-22 creates a new, dedicated subscriber information order that reduces that standard to reasonable grounds to suspect. The courts have held that this distinction is not semantic: in R v West, the Ontario Court of Appeal excluded evidence obtained through a production order precisely because the officer had established only grounds to suspect rather than grounds to believe.