Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 20th, 2026

[Natalie Foster]

I can start by answering, and Mr. Henry can add to that.

The closed captioning in the House and in committee is provided by our partner, the translation bureau. As a result, the use of artificial intelligence tools to support this work may be a question for the bureau.

As I mentioned, the only aspect that might make us consider this is accessibility. For in camera meetings, private meetings, artificial intelligence could be used to provide closed captioning. It wouldn't be to replace the expertise of our partners; rather, it would be an accessibility measure for the people taking part in those meetings.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

I have one last question, which is a bit more technical. The guidelines you provided recommend not using a House address to create an external account on an artificial intelligence tool. However, we use a House address for Copilot. I would like to hear your comments on the reasons behind that. Why is it acceptable for Copilot but not for other tools, for example?

[Natalie Foster]

I would ask Mr. Henry to answer that question.

[Christopher Henry]

This policy existed before the age of artificial intelligence. When it comes to using a cloud-based tool, the rule is always to not use parliamentary accounts. The general idea is that our parliamentary identity and the data associated with that identity are not used by software outside Parliament. The difference between Copilot and the Copilot pilot is really our control of the tool. By managing the data in this tool, we have more opportunities to guarantee and see how the data is used and managed by our teams here, to help you.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you.

Mrs. Block, you have six minutes, please.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of you for being here today.

I want to circle back to some of the questions that my colleague, Ms. DeRidder, was asking.

Mr. Henry, you said something that I found very interesting when we were talking about Canadian sovereignty and Canadian-owned, and keeping our data within our borders. You talked about there being trade-offs when we are looking to ensure that we own our data, that it's being housed here and that it's sovereign. Would you be willing to share with us what some of those trade-offs might be?

[Christopher Henry]

Yes. Thank you for the question. I'm happy to answer it.

For trade-offs, in this aspect, I meant capabilities, features and usage of the tools insofar as they offer value in the work. Obviously, risk and opportunity or value are things we constantly balance when we look at the risk of data sovereignty, which is data independence and an aspect of control. With regard to some elements, the companies that are, let's just say, offering these advantages may not have all of the capabilities that some of the frontier companies offer in terms of advanced capability.

That's what I was inferring a little bit around when it comes to trade-offs. It is from an example I've been hearing coming out of the European Parliament because there have been some discussions there regarding sovereignty and the spectrum of sovereignty. It's not a binary switch. It's a gradient, a continuum. If stakeholders are seeking greater degrees of sovereignty.... There's been an observation in the European Parliament. They've seen trade-offs insofar as capabilities they had enjoyed previously with some of tools that may have been less sovereign.

Again, this remains early days in our exploration. It's something we're keen on investigating further; hence, we're doing a lot of these proofs of concept.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you.

A question I have is this: How do you create digital sovereignty and protect your data when a handful of multinationals are creating the technologies and building the service?

[Christopher Henry]

I'll jump right into that. Essentially, there are companies within Canada that we have been in contact with, and with which we are exploring further, as I mentioned, plans to begin, in parallel, offering proofs of concept so that we can observe the trade-offs together while also being able to observe the advantages from a sovereignty perspective.

Again, sovereignty isn't simply data residency or Canadian-owned companies. It's really the degree to which Parliament can maintain some independence on its information and its data, so can we observe that this is actually something we can achieve?

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

As you mentioned, the European Union.... Surely there are countries around the world grappling with the very same issues that we are as we look to implement AI on a much broader basis. Are we having dialogues with other like-minded democracies that have started implementing AI technology? Have we started them? Are we part of them? Are we leading in any way?

[Christopher Henry]

In this aspect, especially when it comes to risks of AI in general and how we can work together, the Five Eyes organization recently published—a few months ago—a call to action around the risks that it is observing around AI and its threat landscape. That's why this committee is very timely in terms of our coming to participate and share some information so that we can understand and protect better as we continue our use of AI responsibly.

[Natalie Foster]

I might also add, if I can, that we do have partnerships with other legislatures. We are speaking with other legislatures more from a parliamentary business perspective. What are they doing? What are they not doing? What are they avoiding? We all share, very freely amongst each other, guidelines, things we've learned and things we'd like to avoid, so we're building that community as well.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

That raises another interesting question for me. Are we leading here in our own country, with the provinces and the legislative assemblies here in Canada as well?

[Eric Janse]

We actually have excellent relationships with all the provincial and territorial legislatures. There is an association of the clerks. There's an administrative group. Also, the sergeants-at-arms of the different legislatures have a network.

Through those networks, there's been quite a bit of discussion on AI, because of course it's such an important topic, very much so. There's a lot of discussion so that nobody is reinventing the wheel. We hope to and intend to be leading that charge given the resources we have.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

The last question for me would be this: Are there other parliaments and other governments around the world looking to or coming to Canada for support in doing the very same thing that we are?

[Natalie Foster]

In general, I would say that other Westminster parliaments have been frequently in contact with us. We've been sharing our guidelines and even aspects of our strategy with them, so that we can build and learn from each other. In particular, I would say that the U.K., Australia and New Zealand are key partners, beyond our provincial and territorial partners.

We also have connections with other parliaments throughout the world. Some are forging ahead and building all sorts of AI tools. I would say that most are more in the posture that we're in of trying to be cautious and trying to determine the right balance between risk and innovation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

For our last questioner, we'll go to Madame Mingarelli for six minutes, please.

[Giovanna Mingarelli, Liberal, Prescott—Russell—Cumberland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today.

My first question will be for you, Mr. Janse.

As we've discussed today, of course, Parliament is built not only on rules and information, but also on judgment, debate and human relationships. In order for AI to be trustworthy to the people it is serving, it has to be reliable and verifiable.

How do we ensure the proper verification of the data being submitted? Is it human or AI or both? Then, how do we account for hallucinations in the data when, basically, AI is making stuff up and presenting it as real. We believe it's real, but it's not. Sometimes it's very difficult to determine.

[Eric Janse]

Maybe I'll start. My colleagues can jump in.

It's a very good question.

Natalie mentioned committee submissions from witnesses. Sometimes a committee can get inundated with all sorts of submissions if people feel strongly about a certain study or a certain bill that the committee is looking at. Nowadays, you could get 1,000 to 10,000 submissions from one person in his basement, so we are looking both from a technical perspective but also from a guidelines perspective at how to try to control that or at least flag it for members.

One option would be to insist that as part of the submission process, they have to tick off a box saying that it was in part AI-generated but always verified by a human before we hit “send” to the committee. Maybe our technical team could be asked to take a deep dive into all these submissions, if you notice that there's a bit of a spike in submissions, to see to what degree we can determine, as best we can, whether or not they've been AI-generated or whether they're all genuine. There are opportunities for us to assist in that manner.

Natalie, I don't know if you have anything to add.

[Natalie Foster]

Yes, maybe I could just add on there.

On the responsibility front, the approach that's been taken in the U.K. and in Australia is to have witnesses attest that the information is theirs that they're submitting, and they're responsible for that information. That's the way those parliaments have chosen to address that question.

We will have a proposal for the Liaison Committee, but to reassure this committee, we have not seen levels of abuse or submissions that are concerning to us. Our excellent teams of clerks and analysts are always there to support the committee should there be concerns.

[Giovanna Mingarelli, Liberal, Prescott—Russell—Cumberland, ON]

That's great. Thank you.

That somewhat answers my next question: How do you ensure that only verified content is being presented as responses?

We would be pursuing the U.K. and Australian models for that.

[Natalie Foster]

I think that's something we'd like to put before the Liaison Committee for their consideration. I think the question for members is, what is it that you need to know in order to ensure the submissions you're reviewing are appropriate? It would be up to the members to tell us what you need. Then we'd be happy to support.

Our online submission form for briefs also has a CAPTCHA, which allows you to check “I am a human” when you're submitting that information. It would prevent abuse from bots, for example. We also have process protections. Those same protections apply to our e-petition process, which is also one of our other major interactions with the public in terms of parliamentary tools.

[Giovanna Mingarelli, Liberal, Prescott—Russell—Cumberland, ON]

Thank you.

Therefore, CAPTCHA content, the mechanism for verifying the individual, can be helpful, but it does have its own obstacles because it does not verify who the human is. You could have a person who is a spammer, who's sitting there in their basement for 10 hours one day submitting whatever they feel like for any number of reasons and clicking the CAPTCHA's “I am a human”.

Has any thought gone into the verification of the individual submitting the content so that if there are abusive claims or content that is submitted, or questionable content—foreign interference type of content—that individual can be traced to its originator by tracking IP addresses, these kinds of things, while maintaining privacy? How do we account for that?

[Natalie Foster]

We have been discussing with our technical colleagues some of these protections, so maybe I'll let Chris elaborate on that. I think it would be quite difficult to detect whether something is AI-generated, but there are safeguards and things we could put in place to determine if the same individual, let's say, were submitting multiple briefs from a similar IP address or within a short period of time. We would be able to exercise some of those technical controls.

I don't know whether you want to add to that.