In early June, Ottawa unveiled AI for All, a strategy aimed at increasing AI adoption from about 12 per cent of Canadian businesses today to 60 per cent by 2034.
The strategy projects broader AI adoption will lead to $200 billion in economic growth and the creation of 250,000 AI-related jobs over the next five years.
Not everyone is so optimistic. Some say AI is likely to wipe out jobs, and that the government should create a guaranteed basic income to cushion displaced workers.
“I don’t think [AI has] changed the case for [a basic income],” said Floyd Marinescu, founder of the Canadian advocacy group UBI Works.
“I think it’s just made it more urgent.”
Marinescu says he hears regularly from people, including CEOs, about the need for a basic income.
“Everyone I meet … [says] ‘Wow, we’re going to really need UBI because … they’re already seeing a huge impact on their need to hire people,” he said.
Dario Amodei is one of those CEOs. In a June post, the CEO of AI giant Anthropic said that a universal basic income may be needed if AI-driven jobs displacement ends up being “large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor.”
A universal basic income could be financed through taxes on relevant companies or raising the capital gains tax, Amodei wrote.
An old debate
Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is a type of basic income that goes to everyone, regardless of their income or employment status (although proposals are often limited to adult citizens).
Guaranteed Basic Income, by contrast, is a form of support that is means-tested and aims to guarantee a minimum level of income for everyone.
Popular support for a basic income gained momentum in the years before the pandemic. Former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued a basic income would be needed as automation led to mass job loss, and governments launched basic income pilot projects.
In Canada, Ontario went farthest with a pilot project. In 2017, the province launched a pilot in five communities that paid single individuals up to $17,000 a year, and couples up to $24,000 (with payments reduced by 50 cents for every dollar of earned income). The pilot was cancelled the following year after the Ford government took office.
More recently, Senator Kim Pate has introduced a bill that would require the government to develop a framework for a guaranteed basic income for every Canadian over 17. The bill is currently at second reading in the Senate.
That bill follows a similar bill, introduced by Liberal MP Julie Dzerowicz in 2021, that failed when Parliament was dissolved and not subsequently reintroduced.
Mark Stabile, a professor of economics at INSEAD who has written extensively on social assistance policies, notes many jurisdictions around the world have toyed with the idea of a basic income.
“For better reasons or worse reasons, most of the pilots or attempts to vote through some form of UBI failed,” he said.
“One of the reasons that it failed is because at scale … it actually does require a lot of money to pull off. … Some kind of minimum level that phases out is much more doable. Still expensive, but much more doable.”
A 2025 report by the Parliamentary Budget Office has estimated a guaranteed basic income would cost about $107 billion a year. (For context, Ottawa’s current costliest social program is elderly benefits, which are expected to cost nearly $89 billion this fiscal year.)
Marinescu says existing work displacement programs such as Employment Insurance, which provide about six months of support to former employees, are unlikely to be adequate if AI eventually causes significant labour-market disruption.
“EI is very temporary … at most you can have time to search for a new job. … You need long-term income security to make the tougher, riskier decisions in life, like starting a business or taking a course or going back to school.”
“If we’re serious about having people able to retrain, we need something more than EI,” he added. “A guaranteed basic income is the best solution … It’s an insurance system for the modern, AI industrial age.”
Marinescu and Stabile both note that a means-tested basic income would be the most feasible, fiscally and politically. Targeted versions of it already exist in the form of the Canada Child Benefit and Old Age Security, they note.
“I think means-tested is the only affordable way to go right now,” said Stabile.
“If we see large amounts of unemployment then of course, means-tested support and universal basic income start to converge.”
‘AI For All’
For now, the data do not suggest high levels of unemployment from AI, some sources note.
There is “currently little evidence of job losses in Canada due to AI adoption,” a spokesperson for Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement.
The department noted that employment generally grew across occupations between November 2022 and December 2025, despite varying levels of exposure to AI.
Stabile notes that, in most sectors, AI appears to be “assisting workers with their tasks, augmenting workers, allowing them to focus on things that AI wasn’t doing.”
“So I would characterize the discussion about all the jobs that AI is going to destroy as still us looking forward, not looking back or seeing it yet.”
The earliest signs of disruption appear concentrated among younger workers entering fields such as software development and data management, he says.
“Those are jobs that we would have thought of not too long ago as high-skilled jobs less likely to be replaced, but that’s not the case now.”
For his part, Marinescu says AI is having an impact “across the board.”
“We’re seeing assistants being replaced with AI agents. We’re seeing accounting being done through AI. We’re seeing graphics artists suddenly not being [hired].”
AI may not be showing up as mass layoffs yet, he says, but rather slower hiring.
“The easiest people to fire are the people you don’t have to hire,” he said. “You just don’t have to hire in order to expand, to grow. You can just reach for AI.”
For now, Ottawa appears focused on helping Canadians adapt to AI rather than preparing for widespread unemployment.
Its new AI strategy focuses on training and workforce adaptation, including through AI literacy programs and workforce upskilling.
Whether that approach proves sufficient may depend on a question economists are still struggling to answer: is AI is merely the latest wave of technological change, or the first one capable of replacing large numbers of knowledge workers at once.
“For the last 120 years or more, technology has continually displaced some people but also created new work for others,” said Stabile.
“But we don’t have consensus by any means as to whether [AI] will be different.”
