André Côté of the Dais Institute joins me on MLI’s Inside Policy talks for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of Canada’s digital economy.

Over the past few years, Ottawa has tried to move quickly on competition law, online harms, and AI. The greenwashing elements of competition policy were dialed back and both the Online Harms agenda and the AI & Data acts were paused after significant criticism. The government should have no business regulating the content of political speech, and the AI act risked stifling innovation and was a solution in search of a problem. Now both are likely back on the table.

There are three main issues in this space, as I see it, and they are in tension.

First, there are real harms in the digital ecosystem, especially for children – excessive screen time harming health and connectivity, algorithmic amplification of extreme content driving polarization, the ubiquity of obscene and degrading pornography and trash content, and an attention economy business model that aims to foster addictive engagement.

Secondly, Canada has tepid productivity and lagging innovation that’s increasingly divergent from the United States – a thriving tech sector can help address this.

Third, we’re now in a volatile geopolitical environment where digital capacity, access to cutting edge AI & other tech, as well as digital supply chains are now tied to economic and national security.

In this discussion, we try to ensure we cover these issues as they relate to one another, so we get a sense of what’s at stake for Canadian digital economy policy.

We cover:

• How should Canada address the threats from the attention economy – the commodification of attention, and business models aimed at fostering addictive consumption through psychological manipulation – while steering clear of political speech?
• What would a disciplined online harms approach look like—one narrowly focused on child & public safety and not content control?
• Should Canada pursue general pro-business regulatory reform to make our tech sector more competitive, and industrial strategy to improve data infrastructure capacity, energy, and semiconductors?
• And after the last AI bill’s collapse, what approach should Canada take toward AI policy?

I argue that we want a policy framework that is not tech-naive, avoids importing failed digital market regulation models from the EU and UK that stifle innovation, and still ensures technology serves human flourishing, social cohesion, and economic renewal, rather than undermining them.

Check out the recording in multiple formats here.