Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 5th, 2026

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Wait a second, please.

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

We scheduled an hour here.

By the way, I'm very happy to appear, but it was scheduled for an hour on my schedule. Unfortunately, I have other events, but I very much appreciated the questions today.

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

All right.

Sorry, Mr. Thériault.

I'm going to suspend for a bit until we get the next panel up.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I call the meeting to order.

We're continuing our study on challenges posed by artificial intelligence and its regulations.

You're going to be up first, Mr. Majumdar.

Before I start, and before we start resuming questions, I want you to know that my understanding is that the House leaders did not discuss at any point this week the need for concurrence for this committee to study the lobbying report. I'm asking members to push their House leadership teams to make sure they do that. It's just a simple UC motion presented in the House, among agreement of all parties, to give us the authority to do the study on the lobbying report.

Thank you.

Mr. Majumdar, you have the floor. You have six minutes.

[Shuv Majumdar, Conservative, Calgary Heritage, AB]

I'd like to move a motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Is this related to the motion that is on notice?

[Shuv Majumdar, Conservative, Calgary Heritage, AB]

I believe so.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Go ahead.

[Shuv Majumdar, Conservative, Calgary Heritage, AB]

I move:

That, having regard for the recent reporting that characterized the state of access to information in Canada as “dismal” and noted that the Privy Council Office is “among the worst offenders”, and having regard for the Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines for the public service that allow for the deletion of instant messages after 15 days, and emails after 30 days, the committee undertake a two-meeting study on the state of access to information in Canada, and, for the purpose of this study:

a) Invite Caroline Maynard, Information Commissioner of Canada, for one hour;

b) Invite Leslie Weir, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, for one hour;

c) Invite the appropriate officials from the Privy Council Office, for one hour;

d) Invite the appropriate officials from the Treasury Board Secretariat, for one hour; and

e) At the conclusion of this study, the committee report its findings and recommendations to the House.

I'd like to provide a copy of this to the clerk if it's of use.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

It's already been distributed to members.

The motion is duly moved. The notice was on.

Do I have consensus among the committee members to deal with that motion?

[Leslie Church, Liberal, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

No, Mr. Chair. I think we'd like to propose some amendments to the motion, at least for consideration.

In particular, we would like to propose striking:

having regard for the recent reporting that characterized the state of access to information in Canada as “dismal” and noted that the Privy Council Office is “among the worst offenders”, and having regard for the Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines for the public service that allow for the deletion of instant messages after 15 days, and emails after 30 days,

In its place, we propose:

In light of recent reporting on the state of access to information in Canada, the committee undertake a two-meeting study on the state of access to information with particular attention to the deletion policies for instant messages and emails;

Then, after “for the purpose of this study”, we invite Caroline Maynard, Information Commissioner, Leslie Weir...that's fine, but at the end of the motion, we would add, after the words “the committee report its findings and recommendations to the House”, the words “and request a government response”.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I'm going to take a quick suspension on that, because I need the clerk to ensure she has the proper wording. If you can share that with her, we'll make sure that we share that with the committee members.

I'm going to suspend for a couple minutes. Let's do this quickly, please. We're suspended.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I call the meeting back to order.

Are there any questions on the amendment? Let's go to a vote.

It is a tie, so I will vote. I vote nay.

(Amendment negatived: nays 5; yeas 4 [See Minutes of Proceedings])

On the motion of Mr. Majumdar, we have Ms. Church.

[Leslie Church, Liberal, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Mr. Chair, I am disappointed that the amendment was rejected, and I would urge committee members to consider a few things.

First of all, if we do take this seriously as a study that the committee wants to weigh in on, I think it's important that we ensure that there's a government response to any study this committee does. I think that's an important part of any motion and any study that we do as a committee. If we are going to take the time to assess access to information and to encourage the appropriate interventions by the commissioner, the librarian and archivist and others, I think it's not only important that we report our findings to the House but that the government has an opportunity to respond.

Second, I do think it is worth ensuring we're on the record in this committee that we recognize that part of the rationale for an amendment was to ensure that we were not misleading Canadians with Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines that are misstated in the body of this motion.

Even in the last hour of this committee's work, we've heard about the different types of guidelines that exist in record-keeping within government and within the public service, the difference between records that constitute a permanent record, a record that encapsulates a decision within government and a record, for example, that is transitory. Unfortunately, the motion as it's worded now serves to substantially mislead Canadians on guidelines for the public service that in no way, shape or form demand the deletion of emails after 30 days. There is a lack of nuance to the way this motion is currently recorded to reflect that. I think that does an injustice to Canadians. I think it does an injustice to the House.

This committee has been through this before as a team of parliamentarians concerned about access and ethics when we presented incorrect information to the full House of Commons. That has reverberated in the work of this committee. I would urge us to recall the lessons of this committee's work before the holiday break and think carefully about how we present a motion to the House in a study that touches an appropriately serious issue like this one.

Mr. Chair, I would urge us to reconsider. As I've moved a motion, perhaps other colleagues might consider further amendments. I think it's very important that we add a government response here and consider rewording that first paragraph of the motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I appreciate the intervention. I want to clarify that, regardless of whether the amendment was accepted, any time the committee does adopt the report, we will ask at that time whether the committee does, in fact, want a response from the government. We will have that opportunity when and if the report is adopted by the committee.

I wanted to clarify that.

You have your hand up, Mr. Sari.

[Abdelhaq Sari, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Yes, I'd like to speak to the amendment and the motion itself.

Mr. Chair, I've said over and over again that our non-partisan role as members of this committee is simply to communicate accurate information to the public and, above all, to reassure people about the things our government and public service are doing. However, it is clear from the text of the motion that we are misleading Canadians, as Mrs. Church pointed out.

How can an ethics committee go…. What if a researcher were to reuse the text of this motion and the inaccurate information it contains? Because of that, as committee members, we will be voting against the motion, even though I know it will pass since you have the majority. Nevertheless, I want to say again that members of the committee are putting forward information that is not entirely correct. We need to be very careful about that. We are not here for sound bites. First and foremost, we are here to reassure Canadians and show them that the work we are doing is going to help them and give them accurate information about government operations.

For that reason, Mr. Chair, I wholeheartedly agree with what Mrs. Church said about the motion's content, which is not completely accurate.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Monsieur Sari. I appreciate that.

There are no other speakers on the list, so I am going to call the vote on the motion. We don't have unanimous consent, I assume, so I'm going to call for a recorded vote.

It is a tie, so I will vote. I vote yea.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 5; nays 4 [See Minutes of Proceedings])

We have about 20 minutes left with the officials. We have a hard stop at 5:30.

Thank you for your patience, gentlemen.

We're going to have three five-minute rounds with officials.

Go ahead, Mr. Majumdar.

[Shuv Majumdar, Conservative, Calgary Heritage, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome, officials, to this committee. It's a pleasure to see you here. Thank you for the work you do day-to-day in a field that's largely ungoverned in a regulatory world that's not really well written.

I want to talk for a minute about accountability, not censorship by proxy, especially when it comes to AI. Without ironclad free speech protections, a lot of regulatory watermarking can be technically useful, but it can also become a tool for pre-emptive censorship. I am referring to the AI governance frameworks we see coming out of the UN, the ITU or any body where China or Russia have a veto power. I'm very skeptical of the kinds of regulations that are proposed for sovereign regions to adopt.

What's your perspective on establishing binding red lines against authoritarian AI practices while rejecting EU-style precautionary regulation that actually kills innovation?

[Mark Schaan, Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Industry]

Thank you for your question.

It's a really interesting one that I'll try to tackle in a couple of ways.

One is that it's super-important that we recognize the import at this time of pursuing research into AI safety and evaluation mechanisms to be able to understand the underlying mechanisms and potential for harms within algorithms. That's at the heart of the Canadian AI safety institute and at the heart of our work with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in their role in the Canadian AI safety institute: It's to be able to advance the science that's helping us know how actual AI algorithms and advanced AI systems are playing out and to help create evaluative mechanisms that are going to assist developers and deployers to test effectively what the potential vulnerabilities and harms are in relation to their systems. That's one important piece.

The second is that it's super-important that we also continue to advance international efforts toward the ways that standardization can assist industry and provide certainty to industry in ensuring that there are effective mechanisms they can readily tell their users and their customers that they are complying with to ensure that they're not actually deploying systems that have the capacity to harm their customers. Canada is participating in a number of those efforts, whether it's within our standards bodies themselves or within the safety institute and some of our research communities that are pursuing some of that effort.

It's increasingly important that we also set out some of the ways in which industry can commit itself to being able to do some of that work in their own development and deployment. That's where the voluntary code for industry on the use of generative AI is extraordinarily helpful. It provides assurances to the market as well as to industry about their ability to assess whether or not they've met the basic terms by which they are doing things like ensuring transparency in the development and use of their algorithms or their work as it relates to things like red teaming, actually testing whether or not they know the potential outcomes and are creating mechanisms for some sort of feedback mechanism when actual risks and harms are adjudicated. I'd say that's one of the ways that we're going to be able to find that space.

The other, which I'll just briefly mention, is that there's an assumption that the only way we're going to get to good outcomes in artificial intelligence is through generalized AI legislation or generalized AI regulation. That's an open debate, but one of the things it misses is that there's extraordinary room within sector-based and existing verticals of regulatory efforts to be able to get at potential AI harms, whether that's capacities for our medical device examiners to know how to effectively interpret the safety of a medical device that utilizes artificial intelligence or whether it's the use of our private sector privacy laws to ensure that when an automated decision-making system makes a decision on the basis of someone's personal information, they get to know which aspects of personal information were used in that decision.

[Shuv Majumdar, Conservative, Calgary Heritage, AB]

Thank you.

With the time left, I'll ask this question because I also think carefully about how Hamas, Iran and Qatar spend tens of millions on TikTok and Instagram influence operations. We're not entirely confident that we see how these algorithms are multiplying things that radicalize aspects of Canadian society and distort truth or history.

Particularly in the information space, how do we establish a system that actually respects free speech but also exposes the presence of some very bad actors in our information market of ideas that are trying to deeply polarize our communities, go after minorities and make life intolerable for people?

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I'm sorry, Mr. Majumdar. We're over the five minutes. I actually miscalculated. We can have six-minute rounds, so you have half a minute to answer that, sir.

[Mark Schaan]

Thanks. I'll be super-quick.

There are a couple of ways that come to mind as I think about that question.

One is that there are a number of civil society efforts under way to look at verifiability of information and provide for mechanisms to assist people in knowing the provenance of the information that they're looking at and how it can be authorized.

The other is that we do have concerns about certain actors and their role in our systems. One of my other jobs is as the director of investments under the Investment Canada Act. We have guidance on things like electronic media and video games, and we have asserted guidelines about the ways in which those can be used for other purposes.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, sir.

Ms. Lapointe, please go ahead. You have six minutes.

[Linda Lapointe, Liberal, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Mr. Schaan, for being with us today and helping us advance our work on access to information, among other things.

I have questions for you about the AI ecosystem. Ideally, it should be in Canada, but I'd like you to talk about how our government, how Canada, is making sure that our AI research ecosystem remains competitive on the world stage.

[Mark Schaan]

Thank you for your question.

To my mind, it's really about creating stability in Canada's research system and ensuring its continued success. Canada provided a tremendous foundation for AI research. It's no exaggeration to say that Canada contributed to the emergence of the technology now used in the field of AI. That is thanks to the work of Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Rich Sutton and all the other godfathers of AI.

It's important to note that 130 researchers are in Canada today thanks to the CIFAR AI chair program. CIFAR helped develop the pan-Canadian AI strategy, launched in 2017. It's more than 130 researchers; it's 130 researchers with their labs and student teams. It's really an ecosystem.

Today, the challenge for the government is figuring out how to leverage, and build on, that success. Global competition in the field of AI is fierce. One good strategy is probably to make the necessary investments to ensure that the CIFAR chairs can continue their work. Other strategies exist as well, such as the $1.7‑billion investment in attracting talent, and initiatives to connect the community, industry and research ecosystem. Commercialization is the area Canada wants to focus on now.