It’s hard to know how to feel about AI when its capabilities advance seemingly by the hour. One day, it’s solving Canadians’ online-banking snafus and patiently robo-splaining the origins of our anxious attachment styles, and the next, we’re dating the chatbots themselves. AI monitors our real-time forest-fire emissions while its data centres furiously guzzle our water. It disrupts our jobs and, every once in a while, creates them: just ask Evan Solomon, Canada’s very first minister of AI and digital innovation.

A few months in, Solomon—a veteran journalist whose previous political involvement was hosting CBC’s Power and Politics—is still in the honeymoon phase of his portfolio. He’s trumpeting the economic upsides of AI to the country’s private sector and calling this our “Gutenberg moment,” a nod to the intellectual superbloom brought on by the printing press. Whether it turns out to be more of a Pandora moment for the rest of us is, at least partly, on him.

You were based in New York before you announced your MP campaign on LinkedIn a few months ago. During the race, you lived out of two suitcases and crashed on couches. Are you back-back in Toronto now?

I was working as a publisher at GZero Media when Justin Trudeau stepped down. Mr. Carney called and said, “We’re in a crisis. I’m going to run. I’d like you to run if you can.” My wife looked at me and said, “The kids are in university. We should do it.” While campaigning, I stayed at my brother’s house, then my buddy’s—now we’re looking for a place. My family’s here, so I know the city. But it’s like: welcome to the real estate market in Toronto! We’re renting and searching for a permanent home, like everybody else here.

That Carney call has strong superhero overtones. Captain Canada taps you on the shoulder and says, “We need you, Evan.”

Living in New York, you have a front row seat to what this crisis is about. There’s no default toward democracy; it requires a fight. Months ago, I was at my constituency office and met a volunteer—an Asian-Canadian man in his 60s—who was a pathologist at SickKids Hospital. It was a Friday at 10:30 p.m.—he must’ve been exhausted. But Canadians want to connect and defend this country.

You and Mark Carney used to jog together when you lived in Ottawa. Any plans to resurrect that outdoor-run club?

I live in Toronto now, so…. We ran the London Marathon together, the Ottawa marathon—it was just a group of guys who love running.

AI has more or less become a race against Trump, who literally said he intends to “win the AI........

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