Carl Mercier

We have Carney putting up to $1.6 billion of taxpayer money into Cohere, an AI company, "on a commercial basis." Simple question here that nobody seems willing to ask: If it's such a good commercial bet, where's the commercial money? Remember six weeks ago? Carney's Investment Summit? The one that was supposed to bring in all those international asset managers with trillions of dollars under management but ended with Canada's banks pledging about $325 billion and pension funds about $100 billion to "build Canada"? And RBC launched a $1.4 billion fund for high-growth tech? And Radical Ventures, already a Cohere backer, launched a $4 billion fund so Canadian AI companies could "scale up and stay Canadian"? Guess who's leading the new Cohere funding round here that Carney joined in? Germany's Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl. Who's ending up the backstop? You the taxpayer. So why is Carney playing with this? Because that Canadian money is going to the American labs: • RBC is in the bank group behind OpenAI's credit facility • Ontario Teachers' put their money into Anthropic • Brookfield, Carney's old firm? Joined Anthropic's recent $65 billion round In other words Bay Street is placing bets on Silicon Valley because they like the odds more. So taxpayers get to roll the dice with the domestic one. Also look at the scale because outlets like CTV News sure will not. Anthropic just raised US$65 billion at a US$965 billion valuation. OpenAI raised US$122 billion. Cohere's whole round targets C$7 billion. AI is very "frontier" and with that, like a lot of the sphere, is a capital furnace. Ottawa's $1.6 billion won't even come close to closing that gap. It's amount is equivalent to a rounding error on a Silicon Valley term sheet. And this is on top of the $240 million Ottawa already gave Cohere in 2024. And, of course, the detailed terms are undisclosed as per Carney's "School of Trust Me Bro". And Cohere had to sign a pledge to stay Canadian after merging with a German company a few months ago. When the banks and pension funds Carney toasted in September won't write the cheque, that's Mr. Market doing the talking and the answering at the same time.