Unions say federal AI strategy does not adequately address job loss risks

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Labor leaders have expressed concerns about Ottawa’s new national artificial intelligence strategy, saying it fails to address the risks posed by AI and includes few details on how the government will protect workers who lose their jobs to technology.

The federal government’s long-awaited AI strategy document released Thursday morning includes plans to accelerate AI adoption in businesses, provide free training and literacy skills to Canadians, and expand funding options for startups.

Ottawa’s AI strategy includes more than $2.3 billion for training, hiring and startup

But while the strategy sets a clear goal of increasing AI adoption in the workforce from the current 12% to 60% by 2034, it does not address the prospect of job losses across a range of sectors, nor does it suggest how the government could reduce the risk of redundancies.

“This strategy is severely lacking in detail, particularly measures to address the risk of AI harm to workers,” said Sarah Ryan, a senior researcher at the Canadian Union of Public Employees, who is part of the government’s AI Strategy Task Force.

“This document has a lot to say about job creation, but nothing about legislative action to address job losses or stronger income protections for workers affected by AI,” Ryan said.

CUPE president Mark Hancock told the Globe and Mail that AI talks about the strategy “feel like it’s just cosmetic.”

“None of our major proposals seem to have been considered,” he added.

The City of Ottawa aims to create up to 90,000 AI-related employment and career opportunities for young Canadians by 2031, and expects 250,000 new jobs to be created by the same year due to increased adoption of AI by companies.

“The benefits of AI will come from leveraging AI across the Canadian economy and developing pro-worker industrial AI technologies,” the strategy document states, emphasizing that AI will augment human expertise, not replace it.

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However, there are no actual legislative proposals to require employers to reskill workers who have lost their jobs to AI, or to prohibit employers receiving public funding from making layoffs (recommendations proposed by CUPE), and this strategy effectively assumes that employers will also adopt pro-worker AI approaches.

“This feels like the strategy that companies wanted,” said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labor Congress (CLC), an umbrella organization representing dozens of provincial and federal unions. “Our particular concerns are who regulates how employers make decisions about AI and workers, and how much information workers have about AI technologies used in the workplace.”

Bruske added that the CLC and other unions met with Federal AI Minister Evan Solomon on June 8 to discuss this strategy. “We look forward to receiving more detailed information and hope to reiterate our concerns to the minister next week,” she said.

CLC’s position on AI is that this technology can be used to improve the quality of work and economic insecurity, but its development requires appropriate transparency and accountability.

“AI, introduced with the aim of eliminating workers, lowering costs, and exploiting profit opportunities at the expense of privacy and human rights, will only lead to greater inequality and dire consequences,” the union argued in a 2023 submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology at the time. At the time, the committee was considering Bill C-27, the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act.

Unions, academics and AI companies themselves have also warned that the technology could cause significant disruption to the white-collar workforce, changing jobs or eliminating them altogether.

But so far, there is no clear evidence of widespread job losses due to AI in Canada.

In a recent speech, Bank of Canada Deputy Governor for Foreign Affairs Michel Alexopoulos suggested that some jobs could be replaced by AI and that the bank is closely monitoring employment data for signs that AI is having a significant impact on the labor market. If it starts to have a major impact, the bank believes younger workers will be affected first.

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A research report released this week by TD Economics predicts that in the short term, AI will reshape jobs by changing tasks within jobs rather than eliminating entire roles.

“AI adoption itself is unlikely to cause a recession in Canada,” the report says. But the report suggested that to support displaced people if they lose their jobs, the government should provide “easy retraining paths to the specific skills that employers are hiring for.”

The AI ​​strategy document mentions that the government will provide training and upskilling for mid-career workers and expand employer-led training, but does not provide specific details about who the training will specifically target or how it will be delivered.

The study’s author, TD Senior Economist Ranella Billie Ochieng, also said that policies such as wage subsidies for employers and work sharing (in which governments give subsidies to businesses to retain employees) risk increasing long-term unemployment. This reduces incentives for workers to acquire new skills to find work in a structurally changing economy.

Tony Boonen, executive director of economic research at Ottawa-based think tank Signal 49 Research (formerly known as the Canada Conference Board), said concerns about job losses are valid, but the idea of ​​putting restrictions in the form of regulations on how and why companies can fire people, as unions like CUPE have proposed, is unwise.

“Especially now, it’s hard to pinpoint why companies are laying off workers. Is it new technology? Is it uncertainty due to trade relations? All of those reasons are possible.”