Justin Trudeau
Former Prime Minister of Canada
The former Canadian prime minister who bet CAD $2.4 billion on AI compute and adoption in Budget 2024, championed Canada’s pioneering national AI strategy, and co-signed the first global AI safety declarations.
In his words
AI has the potential to transform the economy. And our potential lies in capitalizing on the undeniable Canadian advantage.
This will keep Canada a global leader in AI and ensure we are at the very cutting-edge of new technologies.
Biography
Justin Trudeau (born 1971) was prime minister of Canada from 2015 until March 2025. His government had an early claim on AI leadership: in 2017 Canada became the first country in the world with a national AI strategy, the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, built around the research hubs in Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton where deep learning pioneers like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton did their foundational work.
The $2.4 billion bet
On April 7, 2024, Trudeau announced a CAD $2.4 billion AI package in Budget 2024 — the bulk of it, $2 billion, for sovereign compute infrastructure to give Canadian researchers and startups access to the GPUs the boom demands, plus funds for sector adoption, worker transition, and a new Canadian AI Safety Institute, launched that November. He framed the package explicitly around jobs and productivity for young Canadians.
Internationally, Trudeau’s government signed the Bletchley Declaration at the first AI Safety Summit in 2023 and joined the G7’s Hiroshima Process on AI governance. His record was not all wins: his signature AI regulation bill, the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, stalled in Parliament for years and died when the session ended in early 2025 — leaving Canada, ironically, a compute-rich country with no AI law. Critics also noted the compute funds moved slowly while talent and startups continued migrating to the US.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/justin-trudeau