The AI Governance workshop began with an undisputed premise: AI will reshape society. The harder question was whether public institutions retain enough leverage to shape that transformation in return. By day's end, the answer was less a policy agenda than a diagnosis. The rules governing the AI economy are being written now, amid uncertainty and geopolitical fragmentation, while governing institutions struggle to catch up. Speakers from government, law, economics, banking, healthcare, and telecommunications converged on a single conclusion: AI is not a narrow regulatory issue but a structural shift altering where knowledge is produced, where power gathers, and how far governance can reach.
AI Governance Beyond Regulation
Romel Mostafa opened by insisting that sovereignty should never be mistaken for self-sufficiency. The relevant question is whether a nation retains enough capacity over data, infrastructure, and standards to act with genuine judgment rather than coerced dependency. Ima Okonny, Chief Data Officer at Employment and Social Development Canada, gave that abstraction operational weight: ESDC's COVID-19 deployment of AI to triage Employment Insurance applications, achieving 99 percent accuracy by integrating legal, privacy, and program officers from the outset, illustrated the day's central principle: governance built in from the start enables value rather than constraining it.
The international picture complicated this optimism. Marc Rotenberg of the Center for AI and Digital Policy presented findings from the CAIDP AI Index 2026, rating 90 countries on democratic values. The Council of Europe AI Treaty, signed by 45 countries including Canada, is a historic first legally binding international framework. Yet the United States retreat from AI leadership has created a vacuum. Canada, ranked in Tier I alongside Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, is credible enough to help fill that void but lacks the legislative framework to capitalize on its standing, AIDA having failed to pass Parliament.
That legislative gap matters because the underlying stakes are larger than most governance debates acknowledge. Nathalie Smuha of the University of Toronto, who worked inside the European Commission during the drafting of the EU AI Act, widened the definition of regulation: technology governs through its architecture and design as much as through formal law. The EU's experience made the difficulty concrete; the Act was nearly finalized when ChatGPT arrived and forced legislators to scramble. Building institutional capacity to adapt to technological change while maintaining democratic foundations is essential for sustainable governance. Johannes Bauer, Professor of Media and Information at Michigan State University, deepened the point by shifting to political economy: AI is an infrastructural epistemic technology that participates in generating knowledge rather than merely processing it. If AI shapes how knowledge is created and discoveries are made, control over innovation becomes a question of public power. The concentration of knowledge and decision-making also raises governance challenges with significant economic and democratic implications.
Trust, Infrastructure, and Sovereignty
Where Smuha and Bauer identified structural risks, the panel on innovation and trust examined what governing them in practice actually demands. Kevin Chan of Meta argued that legitimacy follows systems that demonstrably expand access and improve outcomes, citing AI clinical second opinions and translation tools for low-resource Indigenous languages. Jonathan Obar of York University argued that public trust requires meaningful accountability and clear mechanisms for individuals to challenge AI-driven decisions. Matthew da Mota of the Canadian SHIELD Institute emphasized that building trust also depends on sustained community engagement and strong domestic oversight institutions.
Philippe Lefebvre, Senior Advisor at FIPRA Brussels, highlighted the growing strategic importance of data governance, arguing that long-term competitive advantage in AI will increasingly depend on access to and stewardship of data—a reality reflected in the European Union's Data Governance Act. Overall, their arguments point to a different policy agenda: enable demonstrable public benefit through reproducible evaluation, community-centered design, and funded institutional capacity for oversight and redress, rather than relying on one-off regulations or marketing assurances.
Practitioners showed how these arguments land in regulated sectors. Jennifer Curtiss of Scotiabank and Michael Page of Unity Health Toronto described governance as an operational practice embedded in day-to-day decision-making through review panels, risk thresholds, and board-level audit processes. Their discussion emphasized that effective AI adoption depends on governance structures that make systems transparent, understandable, and accountable, helping build confidence among both users and the broader public.
Mark Graham of Bell and Alexandre Guilbault of TELUS then reframed what governance is actually protecting. Once AI is embedded in payroll, hospitals, and public administration, the question shifts from data protection to whether a country retains control over critical systems. The U.S. CLOUD Act crystallized the point: data stored in a Canadian data center remains subject to compelled disclosure if the company is incorporated in the United States. True sovereignty requires owning the full stack, and a gap at any layer undermines the whole.
Canada's Opportunity
Mark Daley's closing keynote gave the argument its cleanest expression with a single test: when the next squeeze comes, do Canadian actors have more options than before? That is what sovereignty measures in practice. The strategy it implies is variable geometry: coalitions that form layer by layer rather than fixed alliances attempting to solve everything at once. Canada's assets—including abundant energy, critical minerals, research talent, democratic stability, and international credibility—provide a strong foundation for influence if supported by deliberate long-term strategy.
Daley cautioned, however, that this potential depends on translating investments into lasting public value through domestic capacity, resilient infrastructure, and effective governance. He pointed to risks including continued dependence on foreign cloud providers, subsidies that fail to generate long-term value capture, standards shaped primarily by incumbent firms, and public infrastructure that reinforces private market power. Across the discussion, AI governance emerged as an ongoing institutional challenge requiring sustained investment in adaptive public capacity and long-term policy coordination. Canada's future role in the global AI landscape will depend on the strategic choices it makes today.
This article draws on perspectives compiled by Noor Us Sahar, MSc '25, from the May 11, 2026 workshop AI Governance: New Tradeoffs for Sovereignty, Trust and Sustainability, the sixth in Ivey’s telecommunications policy dialogue series, held at the Ivey Donald K. Johnson Centre in Toronto and convened by Erik Bohlin, Ivey Chair in Telecommunications Economics, Policy and Regulation, and Romel Mostafa, Director of the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management. The workshop brought together 70+ participants, including international scholars, government, and industry leaders, and builds on a multi-year series of conversations on the future of telecommunications policy, infrastructure, and digital transformation.
Previous workshops in this series include: – Dec 2025 | Measuring the Digital Economy: Reimagining a Digital and AI-Driven World – May 2025 | Innovation and Telecommunications Policy: Shaping Tech, Markets & Networks – October 2024 | New Frontiers for Broadband and Resilience in Telecommunications: Satellites and Beyond – May 2024 | Building Resilience in Telecommunications – In Canada and Beyond – October 2023 | Comparative Perspectives on Broadband Regulation and Access
The Ivey Telecom Workshops are co-funded by the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management and the Ivey Chair in Telecommunication Economics, Policy and Regulation. The Centre gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Power Corporation of Canada, the Jack Lawrence Family, and the Mitchell and Kathryn Baran Family Foundation. The Chair is funded by Ivey Business School as well as by support, from Bell Canada and TELUS, to Western University.