Man serving time on gun charges accused in 2007 slaying

Artificial intelligence is accelerating faster than the governance structures meant to contain it. Canada now faces a structural test — whether our institutions can protect autonomy, dignity, and continuity in an era when decision-making is increasingly mediated by systems we did not design, cannot fully audit, and do not yet constitutionally constrain.

This is not a technological problem. It is a governance problem.

AI systems influence how information flows, how institutions behave, and how decisions are made. They shape the conditions under which harm becomes predictable. They amplify both the strengths and weaknesses of the systems into which they are deployed. And they do all of this at a scale and speed that outpaces traditional regulatory tools.

Canada’s current approach to AI governance relies heavily on policy, guidelines, and sector-specific regulation. These are important, but they are not sufficient. What is missing is structural clarity — a constitutional-grade framework that defines authority, responsibility, accountability, and the minimum conditions under which AI systems may operate without undermining human dignity or institutional credibility.

For years, the Manitoba Association of Crown Attorneys (“MACA”) has been engaged in a dispute with the Manitoba government over the workload of its lawyers. That dispute is expected to come to a head at the end of November, when two weeks of grievance hearings are scheduled.

We remain hopeful that we can reach an agreement with our employer. But if we cannot, our union’s lawyers are prepared to make our case. As those hearings approach, we want to explain how we got here, what is at stake, and why this dispute matters beyond the working conditions of our members.

These problems are longstanding and predate the election of Manitoba’s current government. Our concern with the current government is not that it created these problems, but that it is now responsible for addressing them.

Despite the evidence before it, the government has not meaningfully addressed the workload concerns we have raised throughout its time in office.

Time stops for no one. It keeps ticking away like a perpetual motion machine erasing our youth. Aging is entropy inevitably moving us into a state of disorder.

We wake up one morning and say, “What happened?” Our friends ask us: “Are you living the dream?” Retirement is supposed to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Except it often doesn’t feel like that.

Suddenly, we are contending with hip and knee replacements, angioplasty or by-pass surgery, chemotherapy and cancer surgery, cataract surgery, emergency visits to the hospital, not to mention cognitive and physical decline associated with degenerative illnesses.

And then there are the numerous medications we are required to take to help us cope with these various medical disorders, all of which have side effects. To counter these side effects, we need to take a different set of medications. We live a life of neverending alarms going off telling us which meds we need to take and when.