Canada has celebrated its role in inventing modern artificial intelligence for the past decade, but the next chapter of AI leadership will belong to the nation that graduates engineers, scientists, business leaders, and policymakers who know how to design, deploy, and govern AI that people can trust, according to an opinion piece by Dr. Mary Wells, the dean of Waterloo Engineering, first published by The Hill Times. Governments worldwide are asking how to accelerate AI adoption while protecting citizens from risks, and the debate often presents a false choice between innovation and regulation. Canada can reject that false choice by making trust a competitive advantage. Canadian engineers have earned public confidence by designing bridges, aircraft, nuclear reactors, and medical devices, with safety, ethics, and public welfare as foundational principles. Artificial intelligence should be no different, teaching students to build AI that is trustworthy by design, including fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, cybersecurity, and human oversight. Canada’s greatest AI challenge is no longer invention but helping thousands of organizations adopt AI responsibly, as small and medium-sized businesses, municipalities, hospitals, manufacturers, and non-profit organizations lack the expertise to implement it safely. That expertise gap is one of Canada’s greatest economic opportunities, turning its education system into an AI adoption strategy. At the University of Waterloo, researchers and students are demonstrating this future through a regional AI coalition embedding students within organizations.