Canada's national AI strategy, released June 4, 2026 with $2.3 billion in new and expanded funding and a target of 250,000 jobs over five years, made no mention of copyright, drawing sharp criticism from news publishers, music, book, and film groups on June 25. The omission heightens licensing and litigation risks for organizations using Canadian content to train AI models, as industry associations demand the government close the policy gap with procurement levers and explicit legal guidance.
Industry calls for copyright accountability
News Media Canada CEO Paul Deegan said the 50-page strategy's silence on copyright is "troubling to news publishers but it's also troubling to music publishers, book publishers and others." He urged the government to use procurement policy to require companies on its supplier list to pledge they won't use content without permission, pointing to Canadian AI firm Cohere as an example.
Marie-Julie Desrochers, executive director of the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, said creators are still seeing their work used by tech firms to train AI platforms without authorization or compensation. "That needs to change because it's the foundation of our ecosystem. If creators don't get paid for creating, then it's a huge problem," she said. The coalition represents more than 50 organizations across book publishing, film, television and music.
A conspicuous gap in the strategy
Taylor Owen, founding director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University, called the copyright omission "conspicuous." His centre's March 2026 report found that AI systems depend on Canadian journalism for information but provide no compensation or attribution in return. The strategy was similarly silent on new privacy regulation details, BetaKit reports.
Industry groups want the government to state it will not introduce a broad text-and-data-mining exemption - the opposite of positions Google and Cohere took during 2024 consultations. That divergence keeps compliance teams guessing about the legal boundaries for ingesting Canadian content.
Government response and legal pressure
Parliamentary secretary Taleeb Noormohamed described the strategy as a "living document" not meant to be "a catch-all for everything" and told stakeholders to "stay tuned," noting ongoing consultations between AI Minister Evan Solomon and Culture Minister Marc Miller. Miller said in March that current copyright law "does and should protect those that have created material and people need to be compensated properly," though his office reported no updates on plans for a text-and-data-mining statement.
Separately, a coalition of Canadian news outlets - including The Canadian Press, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and CBC/Radio-Canada - has been pursuing a lawsuit against OpenAI in Ontario since 2024, alleging their content was used to train ChatGPT without consent. The case adds a direct legal dimension to the policy vacuum. For public-sector leaders who must align procurement and compliance with evolving federal signals, resources tracking these developments can be found in AI for Government.
What to watch
- Whether federal follow-on legislation or guidance explicitly addresses copyright and text-and-data-mining exceptions.
- Outcomes from the Canadian news coalition lawsuit against OpenAI, and whether any precedents shift industry norms on consent and compensation.
- Industry positioning on licensed datasets and provenance workflows as legal uncertainty persists.
Why this matters for Executives and Strategy
For teams sourcing training data from Canadian content, the absence of statutory clarity means every ingestion decision carries potential litigation exposure, licensing costs, and contested fair-use interpretations. De-risking supplier agreements and tracking legislative shifts in real time is now a boardroom concern. Decision-makers must evaluate data provenance and contractual safeguards; deeper analysis tailored to this audience is available under AI for Executives & Strategy.
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