Without Black Voices, Canada’s AI Strategy Is Already Broken
Canada cannot claim to build an “AI for all” while excluding the communities most vulnerable to algorithmic bias.
By: Hermon Afowork
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Mark Carney, alongside Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, unveiled Canada’s new National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (AI Strategy) built around an ambitious promise: “AI for All.” The strategy aims to create a “responsible, safe, and sovereign AI industry” that “serves all Canadians.” But this promise raises a fundamental question: who exactly is included in “all”? This is especially important with a task force that lacks Black representation.
The absence of Black voices in AI governance is a significant equity and legitimacy gap, and one that risks reproducing the anti-Black biases artificial intelligence systems have historically amplified.
AI does not emerge in a vacuum. It is built on historical data, institutional practices, and social structures that reflect existing racial inequalities. And these disparities are not accidental. They reflect the fact that many AI systems are trained on datasets that have historically overrepresented white faces and underrepresented Black and other racialized communities. As AI and machine-learning systems become more widely adopted without the expertise of racialized communities, the consequences of biased systems become far more significant.
In 2025, Statistics Canada reported that 21.5% of businesses in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector considered investment in AI to be very important, highlighting the speed at which these technologies are being integrated into everyday decision-making. One prominent example is facial recognition technology (FRT), a biometric tool developed for security and identity verification. Studies have repeatedly shown that these systems do not perform equally across racial groups. In fact, reporting by The Washington Post found that African American individuals were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, while Indigenous communities experienced some of the highest false-positive rates.
The consequences of algorithmic bias extend beyond surveillance and policing into healthcare, where the stakes can be life or death. In 2023, the Doris Duke Foundation awarded more than $10 million to health organizations to address the use of race in medical algorithms after evidence showed these tools produce harmful outcomes for patients of colour. Among those impacted is Jazmin Evans, a Black woman who waited four years for a kidney transplant before discovering that a race-based algorithm had overestimated her kidney function, making her appear healthier than she was. She was one of roughly 14,000 Black candidates whose eligibility for a transplant was delayed by this algorithm.
When I first heard in September 2025 that Canada’s federal government had announced a new AI Strategy Task Force to help develop a national artificial intelligence strategy, I was optimistic that a national framework would address these racial inequalities that currently impact our communities. Their mandate was ambitious: within just 30 days, the group was tasked with helping to “fast-track” Canada’s approach to AI adoption. The issues they were expected to address included: AI research, safety, privacy, digital sovereignty, and workforce displacement, all of which are deeply social and political issues that touch all Canadians.
I was eager to see what this new task force and office would accomplish and who would be invited to shape Canada’s AI future. I hoped there would be people who looked like me at the table. However, after seeing a photo of the 27 Task Force members on my LinkedIn feed, I was shocked. There were none.
This absence is not just a personal disappointment. On October 15, a joint letter signed by 60 Black Canadian scholars called on the federal government to address the lack of Black representation on the Task Force. This call to action should not be ignored. As AI systems continue to adversely impact the lives of Black communities, exclusion of Black voices from policy-making becomes dangerous.
Representation, in this context, is not symbolism; it is expertise. An “AI for All” approach requires more than shared benefits; it requires shared governance. The strategy itself identifies the need to “foster public trust” and “protect Canadians from the risks and harms of AI”. Yet trust cannot be built if the communities most vulnerable to those harms are excluded from shaping the policies designed to address them.
The government’s AI strategy aims to generate $200 billion in economic growth and create 250,000 AI-related jobs. These ambitions are significant, but the benefits and the risks they generate will not be distributed evenly. Technological progress without equitable participation in governance risks concentrating economic gains among those already positioned to succeed while leaving marginalized communities to shoulder the consequences. The future of AI should not be something done to Black communities; it must be something built with them.
There are several pathways forward that the Government of Canada ought to consider. In the short term, the Minister should establish an Equity and Accountability Subcommittee composed of Black and other racialized researchers, entrepreneurs, and community advocates, tasked with creating an explicit mandate that addresses concerns around anti-Black racism and AI adoption. In the longer term, the federal government should also invest in Black-led AI research, data sovereignty, and community remediation to develop culturally grounded approaches to AI governance in alignment with its Anti-Racism Strategy.
If “AI for All” truly means all Canadians, then Black communities cannot remain an afterthought. Black voices must be central within the decision-making bodies that govern the adoption of the technologies that increasingly determine who is monitored, who receives critical services, and ultimately who is heard. There is no question that the mainstream adoption of AI has already transformed Canadian society for better and for worse. What remains to be seen now is whether the federal government will rise to the challenge of ensuring that these critical technologies do not reproduce the existing racial inequalities and harms to Black Canadians.