Prime Minister Mark Carney made artificial intelligence a major plank of his keynote address to a buoyant Liberal Party convention in Montréal on April 3. Punctuated by several rounds of rapturous applause, Carney declared that “our goal is AI for all. AI accountable to Canadians; AI that serves Canadians. AI for all can make the jobs of Canadians more interesting and rewarding.”

This rhetoric of technological utopianism coupled with unspecified guardrails provides a major political opening for the NDP under its new leader Avi Lewis. All the more so because Carney’s approach directly contravenes a cornerstone belief of one of his supposed intellectual anchors—Czech dissident intellectual Václav Havel.

Polling shows that a significant majority of Canadians are deeply concerned about the harmful effects of AI and want government to proactively regulate it before it may be too late. Havel provides a vocabulary to ground AI policy in humanist values, providing moral urgency to an issue that governments remain unwilling or incapable to grasp in such terms.

No small part of the triumphalist mood at the Liberal convention derived from Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos back in January. That speech drew plaudits from around the world, significantly boosted Carney’s domestic polling, and contributed to putting the Liberals in a strong position to poach floor crossers en route to a parliamentary majority.

The centrepiece of the speech was an invocation of Havel’s concept of “living within a lie,” used to underscore the futility of any further pretence that the rules-based international order remains intact under the second Trump presidency.

But Carney clearly didn’t read all of Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” the work from which he borrowed the tale of the greengrocer who plays along with the hollow rituals of the “post-totalitarian” communist regime despite not believing in them. Had he read to the end, Carney would have seen that his own big bet on AI would have appalled Havel, who saw technology as the biggest threat to the existential revolution he deemed necessary to save politics in both the communist East and the capitalist West.

This presents a significant political opportunity for the New Democrats. Turning Carney’s now world-famous invocation of Havel against him could grant the NDP ownership of an issue that will give them the offensive initiative going forward.

Simply put, there is moral outrage to be harvested for righteous political gain on the downsides of AI. Elements of this strategy have already shown their value: Lewis’ opening salvo on Parliament Hill, a call to ban the disturbing practice of AI surveillance pricing, garnered significant media attention, including positive reviews........

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