Black Futures by Design: Advancing Racial Justice in Canada’s AI Governance

Artificial intelligence (AI) is neither neutral nor purely technical. It is a socio-legal construct that reflects and reinforces the power structures within which it is developed. As critical scholarship continues to demonstrate, AI systems have inherited and amplified historical inequities, particularly racial biases embedded in data, design, and deployment processes. Even in the Canadian context, the systemic marginalization of Black communities across sectors such as criminal justice, employment, and financial services is increasingly reproduced through algorithmic technologies that lack transparency, accountability, and community oversight. Given this technology landscape, it should come as no surprise that Black voices have remained largely absent from shaping AI governance in Canada. The conference, Black Futures by Design: Advancing Racial Justice in Canada’s AI Regulation, offers a small but important corrective to this lapse. The conference marks the first National community-centered forum in Canada dedicated specifically to examining AI regulation through a Black racial justice lens, intervening in this exclusion by centering Black scholarship, activism, and community knowledge at the heart of AI policy deliberation. The conference provided a necessary forum for Black Canadians to articulate a collective vision for the governance of AI that is anchored in the traditions of intersectionality, critical race theory, and epistemic justice, especially one which upholds equity, justice, and democratic participation. In doing so, the conference reflected the core mission of the Law Commission of Canada’s Living Law, Pursuing Justice, Renewing Hope. The conference offered an opportunity to re-understand that Black communities cannot afford to be mere subjects of AI systems but should also be architects of a future in which these systems serve all equitably.