Let's face it and be realistic, thanks to the great pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, Canada can play an important role in AI but not seriously monopolize the AI industry which is already well installed in USA. 

First, nothing can rival GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Micro$oft) the 5 most powerful American technology companies since data is the fuel of AI and data are already monopolized by those web giants businesses. 

Second, there are other strong research groups outside Canada at Stanford University,  MIT and CMU. Other pioneers like Yann LeCun, a French, works for Facebook, and NYU. Jurgen Schmidhuber is working in Swiss and Andrew Ng was working for Baidu and is prof at Stanford University.