The Canadian provinces of Quebec and Alberta have signed a five-year agreement to share AI knowledge and tools. The agreement includes no financial commitment. This announcement follows another recent press release from Anthropic about the Government of Alberta’s use of “Claude to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities across government systems”. Canadian readers will know that Quebec and Alberta are not natural bedfellows, which makes the agreement more interesting.
Every Canadian province has struggled in one way or another with IT and digital infrastructure. Quebec’s latest scandal is SAAQclic, a modernization project for the provincial automobile insurance system that is expected to come in more than half a billion dollars over budget.
I will choose to be optimistic. AI coding harnesses are powerful, and Claude Code might be just the tool for cutting through decades of unmaintainable spaghetti code. Of course, we might simply end up with an even bigger bowl of spaghetti.
Time will tell. But since every province faces versions of the same problems, I am glad they are finally agreeing to copy each other’s homework.