Your dinner and your résumé have the same problem.
Two weeks ago I stood at a podium at the Rotary Club of Chilliwack Fraser, between the flags and the lunch plates, and told a room of business owners something I’ve been thinking about for a year: the two most personal things in your life, what you eat and what you do for a living, have quietly developed the same weakness.
What you eat and what you do for a living — neither one is really in your hands anymore.
Start with dinner. Roughly three quarters of the fruit and more than half of the vegetables on Canadian plates are imported. That works beautifully until it doesn’t. A trade dispute, a drought two countries away, a blocked shipping lane, and suddenly the produce aisle is a lesson in geopolitics. We all had a preview in 2020. I still remember standing in a store looking at empty shelves, thinking that the rarest thing in Canada that week wasn’t diamonds; it was paper and produce.
Now your résumé. AI is doing to knowledge work what machinery once did to farm work, and the honest version is uncomfortable: some of today’s jobs will not exist in their current form by 2031. But here’s the part the doom headlines skip. You are not a job title. You’re a person who can learn, and the gap between the people who use AI and the people who can build with it is becoming the most valuable career asset in the country.
What gives me real optimism is that Canada has noticed both problems at the national level, in the same year, with serious money.
In June, PM Mark Carney launched the National Food Security Strategy: over $3 billion across a decade, including $750 million specifically for year-round greenhouse and indoor growing. The goal is simple and overdue: grow far more of what Canada eats, on Canadian soil, in every season.
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The same government’s AI for All strategy commits $2.3 billion over five years to move business AI adoption from roughly 12 percent today toward 60 percent by 2034, targeting 250,000 AI jobs and a $200 billion economic lift by 2031. The goal there is just as simple: make AI capability a national skill, not a Silicon Valley import.
Food sovereignty and skill sovereignty. Two strategies, one instinct: stop outsourcing the essentials.
Here’s where it gets personal for me, because I accidentally built my life at the exact intersection of these two policies. My AI school in Chilliwack, Lampstand School of AI Transformation, teaches working adults to build with AI in twelve weeks, evenings and weekends, no tech background required. And The Boaz Club, born from a backyard garden a squirrel destroyed, rents fully managed greenhouse plots where families grow their own food year-round while AI watches the humidity, spots infestations before they spread, and tells you the day your tomatoes peak. When the federal food security team invited The Boaz Club into their policy consultation this month, the point was made better than I could make it myself: the future of Canadian food is consumer-led, technology-powered, and local. A greenhouse with a neural network is both federal strategies standing in one building.
Policies don’t change lives. People acting on them do.
And this is the part of the Rotary talk I most want to repeat here.
“The worst time to learn to swim is in the flood”. The worst time to learn AI is the week your industry finishes changing. And the worst time to think about where food comes from is an empty shelf.
Waiting is also a decision. It’s just one that someone else’s timeline makes for you.
So here’s my unapologetic practical ending, the same one I gave Rotary. Two doors, pick one, or both. Behind the first: our founding cohort is in session right now, students from two continents already building their first AI applications on evenings and weekends. Watching them work this week, I can tell you the gap between using AI and building with it closes faster than people fear. The next cohort begins in February, and applications are open at lampstand.school. Behind the second door: rent a greenhouse plot at boaz.club and grow food no tariff can touch. And if you do neither, do this at minimum: pick one skill and one habit this year that make you less dependent on systems you don’t control.
The decade ahead belongs to countries that build. Canada has decided to be one. The only open question is individual, and it’s yours: proactive, or waiting?
#FoodSecurity #CommunityFarming #FraserValley #CanadianAgriculture #PMCarney #BuyCanadian #NationalFoodSecurityStrategy #MarkCarney #TradeWars #careerchange #AIForAll
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
