Carney’s speech gives us a strong place to begin.
His defence of human dignity, democracy, the rule of law and the stewardship of our natural heritage was carried by the image of a living oak. I welcome these commitments, and the image he gave them, a resilient, self-sustaining ecosystem. I want Canada to carry both into its relationships at home and abroad.
The questions that follow come from wanting those commitments to succeed. How do they shape the decisions we make, the people we bring into them, and the authority we recognise? What would help those doing the work follow through, especially when time and capacity are stretched? I offer this provocation as an invitation to work through those questions together. They apply to government, and just as much to the partnerships and projects that we are stewarding ourselves.
The Acorn
In 1917, a Canadian lieutenant named Leslie Miller gathered acorns from the shattered ground of Vimy Ridge and carried them home. He planted them in Milliken, Ontario. A century later, trees propagated from those oaks returned to France.
Mark Carney told that story to the European Parliament on 17 September 2026. It is a story about what can travel between societies, people and ideas and commitments, and the possibility of renewal. It was a well-written speech, delivered as well as it was written, and it arrived at a moment when the world needed to hear it. However, we have to build the relationships and accountability that can carry its words into practice.
Read the speech once and it is about European Canadian relations. Read it again and its language of ground, roots and collective resilience asks something of us here. What relationships hold the ambitions we announce? Who has authority over the places, resources and knowledge on which they depend?
The speech turns those ambitions into proposals for cooperation on AI and compute, safety protocols and common standards. Each proposal will become a set of decisions. Those decisions will reach into land and water, public services and community life, because a conversation about AI is never only about AI. It is about all the systems AI sits within: education, the economy, healthcare, our watersheds and our response to climate change. These connections reach into every part of society.
I ask this with an obligation of my own. When I offer a land acknowledgement in presentations I host, I say that acknowledgement without action is ceremony without commitment. That standard belongs beside the partnerships I pursue and the projects I help convene, too.
We can welcome the speech and ask what its commitments require of the institutions that follow it, and to whom those institutions will answer when the words are tested. The opportunity is to make the words consequential, and accountable.
What changes in a decision because we have made a commitment?
The Word
Two months earlier, the Indigenous AI Gathering at Mila in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal brought Indigenous technologists, researchers, artists, knowledge-keepers and allies together over two days. Community-grounded approaches to AI were already being developed and shared.
The gathering also brought a familiar tension into view. Federal ministers, including Evan Solomon, spoke about Canada’s new AI strategy. In his account of the gathering, Robert Marinov describes participants challenging the treatment of Indigenous peoples as stakeholders rather than rights-holders.
The distinction matters because it changes the relationship a process recognises.
Stakeholder
A person or organisation with an interest in, or affected by, a decision. Their participation matters. The label alone says little about what authority they can exercise.
Rights-holder
Indigenous peoples and Nations whose standing rests on their own sovereignties: distinct laws, authority and relationships with land that precede the invitation to comment, and that Canadian law recognises rather than creates. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 recognises and affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. Treaty relationships carry obligations. The federal UN Declaration Act requires measures, developed in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous peoples, to make federal laws consistent with the Declaration. These are obligations a consultation must work within.
A word can be a mistake. It can also reveal an institutional habit of asking people for their views after the purpose, timetable and acceptable outcomes have already been set. Correcting the word opens a conversation about the habit. Whether that conversation changes the process is the more demanding test.
A friend and colleague, Vanessa Andreotti, writes about this deeper work in Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity. Her work asks us to face our complicity in harm without becoming immobilised by guilt or shame. In the latter book, she brings together compassion without complacency
and accountability without arrogance
.
My application here is to create conditions in which correction can be heard and responsibility can be taken. People need room to learn; those carrying the consequences should not have to make their concerns comfortable before they count.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity (2021) and Outgrowing Modernity (2025). The first link leads to her collective’s site, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures; the second to the publisher.
That requires care, preparation and a willingness to stay with disagreement. It also requires an answer to a practical question. What can the people in this conversation actually change?
Make room for correction.
Give it somewhere to go.
The Sprint
In September 2025, the government announced an AI Strategy Task Force and a national sprint. The online consultation ran from the 1st to the 31st of October, thirty days to contribute to decisions with consequences extending across generations.
The official record names 28 task-force members, with affiliations spanning business, research, labour and nonprofit organisations. Two open letters challenged the breadth and terms of participation. Civil society organisations bring relationships, public-interest expertise and community knowledge that a national strategy needs. The concern was whether those communities had a continuing role in shaping decisions, with the resources and authority to make that role count. Indigenous authority is a separate matter, with its own relationships and legal rights; it cannot be counted as another civil society seat.
The national online consultation window. The relationships needed to govern its consequences must last much longer.
1–31 October 2025 · ISED engagement reportMore than 75 civil society organisations signed our coalition’s open letter, Canada’s AI—Our Voices, Our Future. It welcomed the ambition and proposed a standing Civil Society and Communities Council, a public benefit and equity test, ongoing engagement, and a public record of what changed and why. The proposal was for a continuing role in governance.
Coalition open letter; supporting-organisation count reported by Sustainable Impact Foundation.A second open letter, published by PEN Canada, challenged the sprint’s framing and timetable, and its signatories declined to lend the process their legitimacy. Two responses to one concern, about how public choices were being made.
There is a human tension underneath this. Many public servants we work with are deeply committed to public wellbeing and share the values expressed in these speeches. They work within political deadlines, institutional pressures and a wider culture that prizes visible speed. Good intentions can be carried into a process that leaves too little room for anything but reaction.
Urgency is real. So is the risk of mistaking a rapidly completed process for a decision that people can carry together. When the timetable comes first, the people with established access and resources are best placed to respond. Others must find capacity, translate unfamiliar terms and organise a position while the clock is already running.
Moving at the speed of intention and trust means making time to establish the purpose, understand the rights and relationships involved, and agree how disagreement will affect the decision. That groundwork can let us walk together and, when the conditions are there, run together. It cannot promise agreement or eliminate risk. It can reduce the exclusions and avoidable failures that haste leaves others to repair.
There is a difference between planting trees quickly and growing a forest capable of enduring. Policy needs to account for the relationships between the trees. Research on second-growth forests shows how structural complexity and habitat diversity can take time to develop, and how stewardship can help. The comparison asks patience of us, and continuing care for the conditions in which relationships can mature.
The time spent building trust belongs in the work itself.
The Silence
The speech gives us words to work with, roots and sovereignty and shared values. The quieter question is what must happen beneath them. Look back over the year, and the distance between recognition and authority keeps returning.
- In a speech about roots and ground, no word for whose ground.
- In a gathering of rights-holders, a challenge to the language of stakeholders.
- In a process asking for public input, civil society organisations asking how that input would become a continuing role in decisions.
- In a strategy that recognises Indigenous self-determination, the work of agreeing how consent will govern what happens next.
That is where I hear the silence, in the distance between what we promise together, what we are prepared to let one another change, and how we hold ourselves accountable to the commitments we have made.
The Decision
Canada’s AI for All strategy makes commitments we can build on. It recognises Indigenous self-determination over AI in Indigenous contexts. It names civil society in public-interest work on open-source AI.
Those commitments deserve a response from us as well as from government. We can welcome them and help give them practical form. Who sets the agenda, who has the resources to stay involved, and who can require a decision to change?
- When sovereignty is promised, how will Indigenous data sovereignty shape the conditions for proceeding?
- When rights-holders enter a process, what authority is recognised beyond a stakeholder invitation?
- When public-interest AI is promised, how can communities shape its purpose, use and benefits?
- When people disagree, who can require a change, a pause or a remedy?
- When infrastructure is called Canadian, who governs what it does on this ground?
Indigenous rights and broader democratic participation require distinct arrangements. A civil society council should strengthen public scrutiny and community influence. It cannot substitute for the authority of Indigenous Nations, or settle matters that belong in relationships with the relevant rights-holders.
The consequences are already concrete. Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is challenging decisions concerning a water licence issued to the Municipal District of Greenview in connection with the proposed Wonder Valley data centre. An earlier appeal to the province’s Environmental Appeals Board was dismissed in April for lack of standing. On 13 August 2026, a court rejected the developer’s attempt to strike out the Nation’s judicial review application. The ruling allowed the challenge to continue; it did not reject the data-centre project. Reporting on 12 September records the developer’s appeal.
Standing decision: 2026 ABEAB 9 · Case record: 2026 ABKB 569 · Windspeaker reporting, republished by MBC Radio. Status described as of 18 September 2026.
The Nation has had to pursue through litigation questions that belong near the beginning of a decision. Similar questions about Six Nations of the Grand River were raised in The Loop, and they carry through here. Who can see upstream decisions, influence them, and require a response to their consequences? Across communities, those living with the consequences need a meaningful part in governing them.
A commitment becomes credible
when it can change an outcome.
The Practice
In the land acknowledgement I offer in presentations I host, I locate myself in Tkaronto and name the Indigenous peoples whose relationships with this place long precede my own. I recognise that those relationships carry obligations into the present.
As a Norwegian and a Canadian, I carry my own relationship to land, sea and collective memory. That gives me a place from which to take responsibility here. The paths of extraction, from land to labour to data, are part of the present I work within.
The test of that acknowledgement lies in what follows. Whose knowledge defines the work, whose time is paid for, whose conditions are respected, and what I am willing to change. The partnerships we build should make those questions answerable.
Acknowledgement without action is ceremony without commitment.
Co-development can shape the rules
British Columbia’s Anti-Racism Data Act, enacted in 2022, was co-developed with Indigenous Peoples in alignment with the province’s Declaration Act. Participation helped shape the law itself. Section 22 creates a process for Indigenous governing entities to express consent or lack of consent to data initiatives. It also requires reasons if an initiative proceeds despite that lack of consent. That distinction belongs in our conversation. Seeking consent and making consent a condition of proceeding carry different consequences. The example gives us a concrete process to learn from and questions to carry further.
Nation-to-Nation governance
In Yukon, the 1993 Umbrella Final Agreement provided the framework for agreements with individual First Nations. Eleven of fourteen Nations have Final Agreements and associated Self-Government Agreements. The Final Agreements are constitutionally protected modern treaties; the Self-Government Agreements set out law-making powers and responsibilities. Treaty-established boards and councils give these relationships continuing expression in governing land and resources. Their powers differ, and implementation takes sustained work. For AI, data centres and critical minerals, there is something to learn here: authority and responsibility need an enduring place in how decisions are made.
International commitments reach into the ground
The Canada–Norway joint statement issued in Oslo in March 2026 brings democracy, Indigenous rights, sovereign technology, AI and critical minerals into the same statement. The critical minerals memorandum of understanding it announces, signed by the two responsible ministers, commits Canada and Norway to sharing best practices on environmental impact assessments, sustainable mining practices, mine closure and reclamation protocols, and Indigenous and community participation.
That is the connection this piece is about. AI draws on minerals, energy and water, with consequences for forests and the people who live in those places. Democracy includes how those resources are governed and how competing claims are heard. Technology partnerships carry those questions with them.
Ursula Franklin, in her 1989 Massey Lectures, The Real World of Technology, argued that technology is a system of organisation, procedures and symbols and, in her words, “most of all, a mindset”. Taking that view seriously, we can place AI within the systems it depends on and changes. The arrows run both ways. That is why a compute strategy is a land decision, and why the room that makes it matters.
AI sits within
a connected world.
- Land and water
- Healthcare
- Education and labour
- The economy
- Energy
- Climate
- Democracy
- Critical minerals
What we acknowledge must shape how we govern together.
The Room
Being present is a beginning. A governing role also needs resources, clear responsibilities and the power to affect what happens next.
Recognise rights before designing participation.
Work with the Indigenous Nations and governing bodies to establish how their authority, laws and protocols shape the work. A general committee seat cannot do that work for them. Agree on the decisions requiring their agreement and the conditions under which activity can proceed.
Build durable civil society participation alongside those relationships, with a defined mandate, independent resources and a route into decisions. Representation needs a connection to authority.
Resource the relationships that hold the work.
Our coalition proposed a standing council and ongoing participatory governance. Make participation possible through paid time, accessible formats and independent advice. Publish what was heard, what changed, unresolved disagreements and who must respond.
In our work, one element of trust infrastructure is outlined: Standing Equitable Panels: Ensuring community voices persist beyond single-issue consultations.
That continuity gives people a chance to build understanding, correct a mistake and return to a difficult question without starting again.
Make public-interest AI useful and accountable.
In healthcare, a system must be evaluated against the needs of the people it serves, including whose experiences its data may miss. In emergency preparedness, local knowledge and trusted communication can determine whether an alert is understood and acted on. Community participation helps define those tests. Clinical validation, technical reliability and independent evaluation remain necessary.
Governance frameworks like OCAP® and CARE need to inform the arrangements around data and infrastructure, including at the hardware level: who controls access, where information is held and what uses are permitted. OCAP® is specifically a First Nations framework; other Indigenous peoples determine their own approaches. These frameworks require institutional commitments and community authority to give them effect.
Public-interest AI needs a public purpose that can be tested, benefits that can be accounted for, and people who can require changes when a system falls short.
The words are already delivered and appreciated. The trust infrastructure beneath them needs our continuing care and stewardship. We tend it through the relationships and actions that let intention take root.
Relationships need continuing
care and stewardship.
Whose Ground
The distance persists
- Participation begins after priorities and budgets are fixed.
- Rights are acknowledged, but the process cannot respond to them.
- Communities repeatedly organise to be heard.
- Speed is measured at approval; repair is left out of the calculation.
The commitments take root
- Affected communities help define priorities from the beginning.
- Indigenous authority has distinct, agreed expression in governance.
- Standing relationships have resources and influence.
- Progress includes trust, learning, public benefit and the capacity to change.
An acorn carried across an ocean holds a possibility. A forest grows through the conditions that sustain it over time. And once grown, it provides for everyone beneath its canopy, across generations. That is the standard a policy called AI for All should be designed to meet. Carney’s image invites us to think about the relationships beneath what we can see.
For our institutions, that is the work of trust infrastructure, meaning continuing relationships, supported participation, and shared practices for making decisions and dealing with their consequences. The mycelial image is a metaphor for that patient work. We build it through what we do together, especially when the conversation becomes difficult.
Whose ground? Long before these partnerships, Indigenous Nations sustained laws, responsibilities and relationships with the lands on which we now make plans. Those relationships continue. The ground beneath Canada’s ambitions already carries rights, histories, knowledge and obligations. For me, the question is what those relationships require of the work I help steward. Whose authority shapes it, whose knowledge changes it, and to whom do we remain answerable?
Acknowledgement without action is ceremony without commitment.
This is an olive branch, offered in the hope that we can make good on words worth saying. The opportunity to be intentional is still here, with seeds to plant, relationships to tend, and a future to shape together.
Every single day.