Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee members.
My name is Helen Hayes. I'm appearing today in my capacity as a fellow at Simon Fraser University's Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. My work at the centre supports the dialogue on technology project, which is the centre's flagship initiative on AI.
Prior to this, I held a series of posts at McGill University's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, most recently as its associate director of policy, where I led strategic policy work on AI and online harms. It's the combination of my experience in these roles that grounds my remarks today.
I'd like to begin with a simple proposition: The most important investment this government can make right now is in the conditions that make democratic governance possible. That means investing in the institutions, processes and forms of public engagement that allow Canadians to participate in the decisions that shape their lives. My remarks today are about why that investment matters, what happens when it's absent, and what becomes possible when governments choose to build it seriously.
We're living through a moment in which governments are being asked to make increasingly consequential decisions under conditions of economic, geopolitical and technological instability. AI is reshaping labour markets, education systems and public services faster than governments can adapt. Online environments are saturated with AI-generated content that makes it difficult to determine what information is trustworthy. With the growing concentration of technological power, Canadians have low confidence in the government's ability to regulate digital technologies.
Across almost a decade of my academic and practical work on technological change, I've learned that when people feel excluded from decisions about systems that shape their lives, governance begins to feel imposed rather than democratic, and trust in both the technologies and the institutions meant to govern them declines. This is especially true in decision-making about AI. Canadians have been told it is too technical or specialized to include them, but that logic fundamentally misunderstands what's at stake. These are not merely technical systems producing technical outcomes. They're systems that shape, and are shaped by, the social, economic and democratic conditions of everyone's everyday life.
Questions about AI are increasingly becoming questions about labour, education, privacy and access to information. Those questions can't and shouldn't be governed through technical expertise alone, simply because technology is involved. In my view, it's neither democratically sustainable nor normatively acceptable for technologies with such far-reaching social consequences to be governed without public representation.
Let me provide an example that works. Over the last eight months, I co-designed and led Gen(Z)AI, Canada's first national youth consultation on AI, which brought thousands of young Canadians together, both in person and virtually, to draft policy recommendations for the governance of AI systems.
Last month, after presenting those recommendations to ministers Miller and Solomon, along with a number of senators and MPs gathered there, I left convinced not only of the sophistication of the reasoning produced through the process but also of the appetite within government for democratic processes capable of producing that kind of reasoning consistently. Democratic societies will and should always contain competing values and visions of the future, but some may argue that this makes deliberative policy-making either unworkable or too slow for periods of rapid change.
In my experience, though, while people may not agree on every outcome of a process, they're often capable of accepting its legitimacy when they feel meaningfully included in it. In the long run, governance that's publicly trusted isn't slower governance: It's more durable and stable, and ultimately it's more effective. Applying this logic to the Canadian context requires institutional investment in democratic capacity, particularly for the governance of AI.
Therefore, in its 2026 budget, I urge the government to establish a permanent public deliberation capacity for AI and other emerging technologies, either within the federal government or through trusted arm's-length collaborators, to institutionalize the mechanisms through which Canadians are engaged on major technological and policy transitions. I likewise urge the government to prioritize the funding and institutional support of a standing national youth deliberation mechanism on AI and online safety, particularly in light of the government's stated commitments to youth engagement and technology policy.
In my view, by supporting these recommendations, this committee has the opportunity to invest in the health and democratic resilience of the country itself.
Thank you, and I welcome your questions.