CIFAR's Canadian AI Safety Institute has positioned itself as Canada's flagship AI safety program, but a closer look reveals a modest operation: $1M spread across four alignment projects at $165K each, all awarded to researchers already holding Canada CIFAR AI Chairs within the existing Vector/Amii/Mila network, with sixteen total projects and no mechanistic interpretability work whatsoever — none of the circuit-level analysis, sparse autoencoders, or activation patching that defines the frontier of the field. Meanwhile, a single co-working space in Shoreditch — LISA — houses Apollo Research, ARENA (now on its eighth iteration), LASR Labs, Pivotal, and the MATS extension phase, running overlapping programs that produce actual alignment engineers and mech interp papers, feeding talent directly into UK AISI, Google DeepMind, and frontier safety orgs, all on roughly comparable funding from Open Philanthropy. Even BIRS in Banff has been quietly convening international researchers on the foundational math behind AI safety — interpretability, reliability, uncertainty quantification — for years through intensive workshops that generate recorded talks and real cross-pollination, without the branding exercise. CAISI isn't useless, but it functions more as a coordination layer for existing CIFAR-affiliated researchers than a serious national safety program, and the gap between its press releases about "global leadership in responsible AI" and its actual output in talent, papers, and technical depth is significant.