AI: Rome Asks the Question Ottawa won’t
The Carney government’s new digital safety legislation — the Safe Social Media Act — is a step in the right direction. Ottawa now acknowledges that digital technologies can cause real harm and require public guardrails.
But it would be a mistake to view this week’s announcement as the last word. If anything, it should mark the beginning of a national conversation.
The federal government’s AI Strategy and its online safety legislation reveal a blind spot that must be addressed in the way Canada is approaching this technological revolution.
Over the last three weeks, Ottawa unveiled two relatively coherent digital policy frameworks. The first focuses on AI adoption, productivity, economic competitiveness, skills development, investment and digital sovereignty. The second focuses on risk: child safety, harmful content, exploitation, cyberbullying, problematic online behaviour and platform accountability.
Both matter.
But what remains unanswered — and unacknowledged — is a third question: how will our institutions, communities and democratic culture adapt to a technology capable of fundamentally transforming the flow of information, the exercise of judgment and the very forms of civic participation upon which democratic life depends?
This question is far from theoretical. And it’s one that Ottawa doesn’t seem prepared to entertain.
For more than a decade, social media has transformed the Western public square. Algorithmic polarization, emotional amplification, fragmented narratives and the weakening of shared informational authorities have all contributed to undermining our relationship with a common reality.
Artificial intelligence does not arrive in a vacuum. It enters an ecosystem already shaped by business models that reward outrage, emotional escalation and attention capture.
The danger is not limited to misinformation, disinformation or toxic content. It also lies in the gradual isolation of individuals within increasingly personalized information environments. Ever more sophisticated systems are already learning to anticipate our preferences, validate our biases, flatter our emotions and present us with the content most likely to capture our attention.
The threat is not merely deception, error or manipulation. It is the gradual erosion of a shared conception of reality itself — the common ground that makes democratic life possible.
A society cannot remain cohesive when its citizens increasingly inhabit isolated and personalized versions of reality.
It is precisely here that Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on artificial intelligence deserves attention.
By dedicating his first major encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to AI — and by releasing it on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the influential text through which Leo XIII confronted the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution — the Pope is sending a clear signal. He views artificial intelligence as something far more consequential than a technological innovation.
The parallel is not accidental.
Rerum Novarum was not primarily about machines. It was about their human, social and political consequences — how a technological revolution was transforming work, communities, institutions and the conditions of collective life itself.
One can reject the Church’s religious foundations outright. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the question the encyclical raises: what becomes of a society when the technologies that structure information, attention and collective judgment increasingly escape civic control?
Where Ottawa primarily sees issues of innovation, adoption, safety and economic competitiveness, the Vatican is asking what AI means for human dignity, social cohesion and the conditions that make collective life possible.
The Carney government deserves credit for beginning to address some of the risks associated with digital technologies.
But the central question is not simply how to make artificial intelligence safer for one demographic or another. It is what kind of common world we can preserve — or build — as these systems become increasingly powerful intermediaries between citizens and their understanding of reality.
If the social media revolution taught us anything, it is this: the most profound consequences of a technology are often the ones we discover too late.
It should be telling — and troubling – for Canadians, that Rome, rather than Ottawa, has chosen to place those broader social questions at the centre of its reflection on artificial intelligence.
