Nuance is needed to temper fear and drastic ideology

A warning before you start: this is a long one. There’s a lot happening in Quebec right now, and I’m not interested in boiling it down to a slogan. Pour yourself a coffee.

A week of extremes

Last week in Montreal, it felt as though there was no middle ground left.

On September 9, a young researcher named Jacob Coxon publicly resigned, accusing his former employer, Anthropic, and OpenAI of gambling with our lives in their race to build superintelligence. His message, posted from a park bench in San Francisco, set off a chain reaction that changed the conversation around AI. As panic spread, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling on AI companies to slow the advance of their models’ capabilities. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he agreed. The companies building the technology were themselves asking everyone to ease off. We hadn’t seen that before.

Then, overnight on September 15 and 16, just hours before the ALL IN summit opened at the Palais des congrès, roughly 20 windows were smashed at the building housing Mila. Anti-AI graffiti was sprayed on the building, including “Burn the data centers.” The next day, more than 200 protesters gathered outside the Palais des congrès. Confrontations broke out with police, who used chemical irritants to disperse the crowd.

The irony was hard to miss. As an AI consultant passing the building pointed out, Mila is probably the most vocal advocate for AI safety in Canada, if not the world. The people whose windows were smashed are working on precisely the problem the protesters are concerned about.

Meanwhile, Mila founder and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio gave AFP an interview under the stark headline “We’re losing control.” He called for safeguards to address what he described as an international issue. Concern about AI risks had been building since the summer, fuelled by a series of incidents and dire warnings from people working in the industry.

Add the trade war with the United States, calls to boycott anything American, and a few local providers waving the CLOUD Act around to frighten customers into buying “sovereign cloud,” and you get a sense of the atmosphere. Everything is amplified. Every development is either a disaster or a triumph. There’s barely any room left to think.

Real life rarely fits those categories. There are countless shades of grey, and that’s usually where we find a more accurate picture of what’s happening. That’s what I want to spend some time on here.

1. Digital sovereignty goes beyond the flag

Let’s start with the subject I know best. Since the trade dispute began, a familiar argument has taken hold in Quebec: bring our data home, leave American cloud providers, and buy local technology the way we buy local produce. I understand the impulse and the feelings behind it. But refusing to buy anything from the United States hurts us far more than it hurts them.

Take the CLOUD Act, the 2018 U.S. law often held up as proof that our data can never be safe. Here’s what it actually means:

1. It does not give the U.S. government unlimited or automatic access to data. Law enforcement must demonstrate reasonable grounds to an independent federal judge.
2. Since it began tracking these requests in 2020, AWS has never disclosed enterprise or government content data to the U.S. government. It routinely redirects requests to the customer and challenges those it considers excessive.
3. The law applies to all providers doing business in the United States, not just American companies. A Canadian or European provider with U.S. operations is subject to it too.
4. It is consistent with international legal practice. The United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Denmark, among others, have similar laws. There is also the Budapest Convention and the European Union’s e-Evidence Regulation.
5. It does not prevent providers from putting technical protections in place. With the Nitro System and customer-managed encryption keys, AWS simply does not have the technical ability to read your data. You cannot hand over data you cannot decrypt.

That last point is fundamental, and the people selling fear tend to leave it out. Data sovereignty involves much more than the address of a server. It comes down to control: where the data resides, how it is encrypted, and who holds the keys. NCC Group’s independent assessment of the AWS Nitro System found no design flaws that would compromise those protections.

Does that settle the question in every situation? Of course not. Certain classified information and highly sensitive government uses may legitimately require Canadian control from end to end. AWS’s two Canadian regions, in Montreal and Calgary, are operated by Canadian personnel with security clearances and have been assessed by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security for hosting Protected B data. Different requirements call for different arrangements. We should be able to discuss them on that basis.

2. American cloud infrastructure creates wealth in Quebec

One thing keeps getting lost in this debate: the cloud sector generates growth here. Looking at it solely as money flowing south misses a substantial part of the picture.

Amazon employs roughly 46,000 people in Canada, including more than 10,000 in well-paid technology jobs. AWS invested $2.57 billion between 2015 and 2022 in developing its two Canadian regions and plans to invest another $24.8 billion by 2037. That means data centres, jobs, municipal tax revenue, construction contracts and electricity purchases, all here at home.

Then there are the businesses built on that infrastructure. At Unicorne, we work with dozens of Quebec technology companies that deliver their products and services through AWS: software developers, SaaS platforms, and companies in healthcare, finance and manufacturing. They generate considerable wealth, sell internationally and bring revenue back to Quebec. Roughly 80% of the world’s unicorns are built on AWS. There’s a reason for that. Its range of services, global reach and ability to support rapid growth are difficult to replace.

Forcing these businesses to give it up on ideological grounds would do little for their independence. It would slow their growth, raise their costs and leave them at a disadvantage against American and European competitors free to use the tools they need. For some, it would call the viability of their entire business model into question.

A Quebec business should be able to buy what works best for it, at the best price, so it can compete. That includes buying from an American provider. Our countries are not at war; our governments are in a trade dispute. We can, and should, keep our heads.

3. AI fears deserve a better response

I’m not going to dismiss the concerns raised by Yoshua Bengio or Jacob Coxon. When people who have spent years building these systems sound the alarm, we should listen. Coxon himself says AI is safe to use today. His concern is where it could take us. Nor is he arguing that we should stop everything. His point is that we need regulations that ensure everyone develops these systems safely.

Quebec is exceptionally well placed to contribute to that work. We have Mila. We have LawZero, the nonprofit startup Bengio founded last year to develop ethical AI systems, which will work closely with the Canadian and German governments. This year’s ALL IN summit focused on safety, with Germany as the featured country, as Quebec companies sought partnerships that would help them compete with the world’s AI superpowers.

We have a say in how this technology develops. People working here are involved in decisions with consequences far beyond Quebec. Few places in the world can say the same.

That’s why I don’t believe slowing down is the answer. We need to put serious effort and resources into making AI development safe, quickly. Slowing down on our own will accomplish very little while development continues in China and elsewhere. If Quebec retreats out of fear, the world won’t be any safer. We’ll simply have given up our influence over the rules being written.

Smashing Mila’s windows shows just how badly that fear can be misdirected. As Bengio said at the summit, violence is not an answer.

We should also keep a critical eye on the companies themselves, because the picture became more complicated again this week. On September 18, a lawsuit was filed in a California federal court named Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, and Google. It alleged that their joint call to slow development could amount to an anticompetitive agreement, rather than simply a shared concern for safety.

The plaintiffs are not challenging an individual company’s right to slow its own development for safety reasons. They allege that direct competitors coordinated their actions, publicly on September 12 and behind closed doors as early as July, to slow the pace of development across the industry below what competition would otherwise produce. Their argument is that paying customers would get less value as a result. Sam Altman responded that OpenAI remains open to a federal safety framework but does not need to wait for an antitrust exemption to act.

None of that makes Bengio’s or Coxon’s concerns any less serious. It does, however, remind us that a company can be concerned about safety and protective of its market position at the same time. Both motives can sit behind the same public statement. We should keep asking what these companies are choosing to tell us, what they’re leaving out, and why.

4. Trump’s tariffs and Canada’s choices

As for the trade dispute itself, I’ll be blunt: I cannot make sense of Donald Trump’s tariff strategy. He is isolating his country, making life harder for businesses that trade with the United States, increasing his own citizens’ cost of living and fuelling inflation. Other countries are moving in the opposite direction.

Canada is strengthening its relationships with the European Union and the rest of the world. A formal alliance with the EU was launched in Strasbourg, and an agreement with the United Arab Emirates was reportedly reached in just 47 days. Canada has 15 free trade agreements that provide preferential access to 1.5 billion consumers in 51 countries. The federal government aims to double overseas exports within 10 years.

We’re also finally tackling barriers within our own country. According to the IMF, interprovincial trade barriers amount to an implicit tariff of roughly 9%, fragmenting the Canadian market. We put up with that for 150 years. It took a dispute with our neighbour to make us deal with it seriously.

I think Mark Carney is right to diversify our markets. On retaliatory tariffs, I’m not at the negotiating table, and I won’t pretend to know whether a dollar-for-dollar response was necessary. If he decided some damage to our own economy was the price of showing that Canada would stand its ground, I can understand that. Personally, I would have preferred proportional, targeted counter-tariffs. But I trust his judgment.

What I am sure of is that our best response to events south of the border is to use every means available to help Canadian businesses become more competitive and efficient. When companies can choose their partners without tariffs getting in the way, they can grow faster and offer better prices. Over time, that is how we come out ahead.

5. Canada is doing better than the headlines suggest, but the damage is real

This is where nuance matters most, because neither extreme gives us an honest picture.

At one end is the claim that Canada’s economy is collapsing under the weight of tariffs. It isn’t. Domestic demand has held up, and the country avoided the recession many predicted at the start of 2025. Canada leads the G7 in foreign direct investment inflows per capita, and the IMF expects it to have the G7’s second-fastest growth in 2026 and 2027. Sectors exposed to U.S. demand are still losing jobs, but those losses have not spread across the rest of the economy. Canadian businesses’ hiring intentions have also improved. A recent study forecasts better economic conditions across all provinces in the second half of 2026.

At the other end is the suggestion that everything is fine. That doesn’t hold up either. Ontario and Quebec form the core of Canadian manufacturing and are the most exposed to U.S. tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper and lumber. Quebec’s manufacturing output trended downward through most of 2025. Unemployment reached 6.7% in February 2026. For the businesses and families affected, the disruption is very real.

At the national level, Canada is holding up, adapting and diversifying. Within particular industries and communities, people are facing serious difficulties and need support. The government has a role to play in helping businesses that were profitable before this period and can be profitable again once it has passed. Supporting them preserves the country’s productive capacity for recovery. There is a sound economic reason to do it.

What do we do with all of this?

As an entrepreneur, I spend my working life weighing decisions that have no obvious answer: how much to invest and how much to hold back, how quickly to move without cutting corners, how to reconcile what we’d like to do with what we can actually do. The best decision is the one we can make with the information available today. Certainty is rarely part of the deal.

Looking at the current situation that way, I see more than a crisis. I see an unusual opportunity to make our businesses stronger, better able to withstand disruption and more competitive. The figure I keep coming back to has nothing to do with tariffs. According to the IMF, Canadian labour productivity is about 30% lower than in the United States, and that gap has widened in recent years. Thirty percent. We should be far more concerned about that.

We can do something about it without waiting for Washington. We can automate, adopt cloud technology and AI safely, modernize how we work, and invest in our people. The best technologies available, wherever they come from, can help us build Quebec businesses that are more productive, more independent and better equipped to succeed.

I’d rather put our energy into making those businesses stronger than into finding ways to hurt whoever we’re at odds with this week. Long after this dispute is over, we’ll still be living with the results of the choices we make now.