As a co-founder of an AI-based technology company, I opened it with a rare feeling: optimism. Here, at last, was a federal announcement that seemed to be sincerely trying to bridge the gap between Ottawa’s tech ambitions and the capital-starved reality of Black entrepreneurship in Canada. FedDev Ontario, the press release declared, was investing $15 million (a meagre sum) to strengthen opportunities for Black entrepreneurs across southern Ontario —money to help founders like me build, grow, and scale.

Then I read past the headline and took a look at where the money actually goes. 

It funds nine non-profits to run training programs, mentorship streams, business advisory services, and "ecosystem navigation" for Black entrepreneurs. If you read the project descriptions on the government's own page, a pattern emerges: accelerators, cohorts, advisory services, capacity-building. What you won't find is a single dollar flowing as capital into a founder's business to spend as they see fit. The money builds programs around Black entrepreneurs. It doesn't reach them.

Effectively, the government has announced $15 million in capital for Black entrepreneurs while carefully filtering it through non-profit programming rather than landing as capital that Black founders can control. That $15 million reaches entrepreneurs only indirectly, if at all.

Compare that to how this same government treats everyone else. In May, Solomon announced $66 million from the $300-million AI Compute Access Fund, going to 44 small and medium-sized companies. No intermediaries. No mentorship modules. No capacity-building seminars. The money went straight to the founders to buy the compute power they need to build and scale. One recipient, Vancouver's Variational AI, put it plainly to the CBC: the funding is a big help and lets its scientists "get access to compute they desperately need." That's the difference. Mainstream founders got money routed directly to their businesses. Black founders got nine non-profits running programs about their businesses.

This is pretty straightforward, give entrepreneurs the funds they need and they’ll decide how and where to spend it, because they know their business best. They don’t need a layer of people who don’t know their business nor have proven track records in entrepreneurship, wasting their precious time. 

So what we see here is that the ‘mainstream’ tech founders in the AI Compute Access Fund got infrastructure capital to scale. The Black founders got no cash, non-profit administrators and pretend VCs. Welcome to the babysitters club, I guess.

This is not a lapse in judgment by government; it is a pattern of paternalism in the legacy of colonialism so deeply embedded that it masquerades as benevolence. But Black entrepreneurs don’t need benevolence. They need equity capital, like everybody else, and then get out of their way! 

Founders who are ready for investment need capital, not coaching. Treating support programs as a substitute for money assumes a fragility that the founders themselves haven't asked for.

The government/non-profit programs also reveal that they don’t believe in, trust or see Black entrepreneurs as capable enough to be given the cash directly, and not at all. It believes that they need a “more connected and resilient entrepreneurship ecosystem” to help them. This, however, puts the cart before the horse: how can you develop an “entrepreneurship ecosystem” when you provide such little money to invest in entrepreneurs in the first place?   

And in that condescension lies the entire tragedy of top-down, government—institutionally led Black economic development in Canada, which effectively reinforces systemic biases and dependency. 

It is a relentless substitution of institutional administration for actual capital, and a stubborn refusal to treat Black business owners as economic agents worthy of the same direct investment that builds wealth for everyone else.

Too often these grants fund the infrastructure of a program (coordinators, seminars, reports) rather than the actual businesses the program is meant to serve. The money sustains the organization delivering the help. Whether it builds a single scalable Black-owned company is a question nobody in this ecosystem seems eager to answer.

Here’s the hard truth: no alternative universe or safe space exists specifically for Black people. And no non-profit administrator, institution, government grant, harmful loan program or pitch competition has ever created a billion-dollar company. Because wealth is not built by creating dependency and managing poverty; it is built by boldly pursuing and owning the future.