Canada's AI transparency consultation is open. The strategy behind it is not.

Governments are now setting the strategic direction of AI policy first and asking the public to comment on it after. The pattern is familiar enough to name: the public window opens on the technical scaffolding, not on the direction itself.

Canada's version is the consultation Solomon's department opened on July 23, with comments due Sept. 23. The federal AI for All strategy, launched June 4, already set the strategic posture: Canadians should be able to tell when they are dealing with a model, when content is synthetic, and when an AI system has caused real harm. The consultation's four scope items all sit downstream of that posture. The genuinely open questions are operational: what counts as a "serious" AI incident worth a mandatory report, what provenance watermark survives compression, and at what capability threshold an AI agent must identify itself. Those are the levers public input can still move.

Solomon's line that AI adoption moves at the speed of trust names the rationale. The speed of trust in this consultation will be set by what counts as trustworthy, not by whether the public is heard on whether to pursue it.