In today’s News and Commentary, Jeff Bezos argues AI will create a labor shortage rather than mass unemployment, and Canada moves to overhaul its forced labor import laws.

Jeff Bezos predicted last week at a conference in Paris that AI will create labor scarcity, not mass unemployment. Bezos argued that AI-driven productivity gains will allow companies to pursue far more projects than the economy has workers to execute, and that rising productivity will lower costs enough for some dual-income households to drop to a single earner. The optimistic forecast sits uneasily alongside current data. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm that publishes a monthly report tracking announced layoffs across U.S. companies, has countedroughly 87,000 AI-linked job cut announcements in the U.S. since January, already exceeding the full-year 2025 total. Amazon itself has planned to trim around 30,000 corporate roles, in part due to AI. Bezos’s prediction also sits in tension with a warning published recently by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who wrote that AI-driven job loss may be an intrinsic feature of the technology and that traditional economic adjustment mechanisms may not keep pace with the speed of displacement.

Canada’s House of Commons held the first reading of Bill C-35, legislation that would overhaul the country’s forced labor import ban. The bill would replace the current customs tariff provision with a standalone law carrying stronger enforcement tools. The bill would authorize the government to publish a list of high-risk goods, allow customs officers to detain shipments for up to 90 days, and shift the burden onto importers to prove their goods were not produced with forced labor. The move comes after mounting criticism that Canada has failed to enforce its existing rules. Between 2020 and 2026, Canadian authorities intercepted only 50 shipments on suspicion of forced labor, compared to nearly 24,000 denied entry by U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act since 2002. The U.S. has also threatened an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods over what it considers weak enforcement. Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged recently that Canada has been “less effective” in enforcing its existing legal framework, though the government insists American pressure is not the principal reason for the legislation.