Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 22nd, 2026

[Alistair Stoddart]

Yes. I could talk about it in terms of consultation aspects. I won't go into specifics about which bill or whatever, but we have had occasions when, maybe, there's a discussion about a particular piece of legislation and, for whatever reason, there's a use of automated processes—some would say bots—to create the feeling that there were more and more people either for or against the piece of legislation.

With some of the participation technologies we have, there is the ability to cut that off at source, really, using not just things around IP addresses and user agents but also other broader aspects that can analyze the data and check for patterns that would not be consistent with genuine participation. For example, can you complete a parliamentary consultation in three seconds? I don't know if many people can, but there are lots of things that you would look at in the round to make sure that what we're getting there is authentic.

My core point would be that, while volume is a big challenge, you need to think about how participation is taking place so that people can put their views across in a range of ways that are effective and you end up with a situation in which members are able to get access to quality information from their constituents and beyond.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

I'll turn to Madame Mingarelli, please, for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us today.

Ms. Davies, parliamentary institutions exist partly because democratic legitimacy requires more than efficient decision-making, as we know. As AI tools become better at processing information and generating recommendations, are there aspects of parliamentary deliberation and scrutiny that should remain intentionally human, even if AI could perform them faster?

[Sarah Davies]

What an interesting question. From the experience I have of working, both in terms of the legislative responsibilities that we have here in Parliament and in terms of the scrutiny roles.... Absolutely, citizens vote for representatives to represent them. Citizens vote for those representatives, who are sitting on committees and scrutinizing these technologies, to be, as it were, exercising that degree of personal judgment, viewing the mood and viewing what the public is telling them about how to judge that and how to apply it to proposals that are coming forward.

I see, both in committee work and in legislative work, that our role as officials is to ensure that, when there are these important new tools that we can deploy, we are using them to provide better information and to support elected representatives, to enable Parliament to fulfill those roles. Our role is to provide the tools.

We already heard such a lot in the previous session about the human-centric point, the importance of critical thinking. We're seeking, in all of this work, to exercise our own critical thinking skills so as to enable the elected representatives we're working for to then have the information they need at their disposal. That may be assisted through use of these technologies, but the final decision point, for me, is always going to be the elected representatives.

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

Thank you so much.

Along the same line of thought, many AI projects are justified on the basis of efficiency. In your opinion, is there a risk that democratic institutions become so focused on measurable efficiencies that they overlook values that are harder to quantify, such as transparency, deliberation and public trust?

[Sarah Davies]

That's a great question. I will pass it over to Luke in a moment because there's been a study here that, even on financial efficiency alone, some of the gains of these technologies are quite hard to quantify.

You added something else as well, this intangible point. This was raised in the last session as well, about how important it is for us to develop skills in these complex...the skill of human judgment, the subtleness, what the human brain can do in its critical thinking way that sophisticated AI cannot do.

Even just on the general economic picture about what advantages these are, careful evaluation is still needed. The broader points that you make are arguably even more important, and this is why careful, proper governance around this and agreed evaluation measures at the start of these projects are critical.

If I may, I know Luke's been doing a lot of thinking on this, so I'll invite him to come in. Thank you, Luke.

[Luke Hussey, Director of Digital Value, Parliamentary Digital Service, United Kingdom House of Commons]

Thank you.

It's a really important part of our work that we do not deploy AI based on a value-for-money concept. It has to be valuable for staff, for members and for citizens that we do not replace work that we would be expected to be done by a member or by a member of staff. Our watchword is an intentional use of AI in all our evaluation, which is maturing.

We are in early days, and it's very much based on combining the factors for which one asks what the cost is, what the productivity benefits might be and what the overall experience improvement for staff and for people using the tools is. Is their day going to be made better, or are we pushing the problem to the right and creating something wherein they're going to have to do lots more checking or have to learn a tool, which gets in the way of very busy people.

We all work in organizations in which there's more and more demand on members and less time in the day. Getting the balance right and realizing the [Inaudible—Editor] impact of AI and what it brings is really important in our work.

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

Thank you so much.

I'm going to move over now to you, Mr. Stoddart.

In your experience with digital democracy initiatives, have you found that the greatest challenge is getting citizens to participate or ensuring that institutions genuinely listen to and act on what citizens say? How might AI change this balance?

[Alistair Stoddart]

That's an amazing question.

First, it would depend on the topic at large. If there is a topic that is of strong public interest or is quite polarized, then it may be the case that we're hearing a lot. Especially in a scrutiny context, people might come to consultation as quite a transactional activity and say, “I want this to happen”, “I don't like this bill” or whatever it might be. Part of a healthy democracy is people having that discussion and being involved and supporting the scrutiny process. We then need to look at what the outcome of that is and what we are doing as parliaments. The strong thing to do in that situation when we have a lot of participation is through digital means.

What we've done in the past is, rather than focus on the numbers, this many people said yes, this many people said no, because there's a sort of bias towards people who are most engaged in that subject matter..... Some may say that people like this bill for these reasons or people are against this bill for those reasons. That's where the critical thinking comes in, thinking about the trade-offs between those things.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I'll have to cut you off there, Mr. Stoddart.

I apologize; we're a bit over time.

For witnesses, I'm sure you've been briefed on this, but you're about to receive questions in French. If you require interpretation, please make sure you're on the proper Zoom channel.

Madame Normandin, you have six minutes, please.

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

Thank you very much.

I'd like to thank all the witnesses.

My first question is for Mr. Stoddart.

You mentioned that public consultations are not the same as opinion polls and that, when we receive a large number of submissions from our constituents, volume doesn't necessarily reflect quality. You also said that AI could help members identify patterns in the type of communications they receive, so as to avoid assuming that quantity automatically equals genuine public opinion.

Have you also encountered situations in which members used AI to generate answers from their constituents that suited them, so that they could then tell the House, for example, that 3,500 of their fellow citizens agreed with them?

We can hardly blame artificial intelligence in that context. It's not AI's fault. It's not something that occurs spontaneously among the population.

Have you ever encountered such situations, in which members exploited artificial intelligence?

[Alistair Stoddart]

The short answer would be no.

Normally, the work that I do is from a committee perspective. It could be that they dig into the data. It's a political prerogative, and I'm working with impartiality in the work that I do to support all members.

They may pick and choose certain aspects, but they wouldn't generally get access to—or I've not seen them—harvesting all the data that is available and making decisions based on that.

There's still a fantastic support service that we have here with our clerks and our researchers, the same as you would have here, that can help members get a grip on that type of situation. I've not seen it being, for want of a better expression, manipulated in that way, here at least.

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

Thank you.

Ms. Davies, I saw you nodding a bit while I was asking my question. Would you like to add something?

[Sarah Davies]

I was genuinely thinking about the use we've seen.

What we see are members' offices working out ways to deal with the volume of information they are receiving, as are we all. Through work with the Commons Speaker's AI steering group, we've had extensive conversations with members about how they are using AI to try to mine and use the information on what they are seeing from their constituents. I think Luke will be able to speak a bit more to that.

I will say that it is not necessarily manipulation. Members must be—in this age, when they're getting so much in—working out ways of how they can summarize all the submissions they're getting on so many topics. There are legitimate uses for that, which AI can help with. If you have 50,000 or 60,000 constituents, you're getting all these kinds of submissions.

There are points about bias. There are points about accuracy. They're not the same, necessarily. This has to be done with caution. When I talk to members and members' staff here, they can see some potential for using some of these summarization tools, as it were. It's almost like sentiment analysis of what's coming into the inbox. Of course, if you then go in and it's very transparent—we talked about transparency—that it is being used in this way, may have bias or may have selected things a certain way.... There are potentially some uses there if it's done with the right level of transparency, the right guardrails and the right degree of critical thinking.

If there's time, Luke could say a little more about the work we've done with members' inboxes.

[Luke Hussey]

To comment on members' inboxes, it's not necessarily an AI solution, although we're seeing AI cause a lot of challenges for the inbox.

We're looking at ways of getting query and contact away from email and into a contact form so we can verify that someone is a genuine person and that they are a constituent. We can use Captcha to show that it's not a bot. This is proving really promising, but it means we have many channels of communication, which we need to consider.

The biggest challenge is looking for a shortcut. You don't necessarily consider the bias that might be present in the models and how they're trained. It's our obligation and responsibility here in the House of Commons to be thinking about how we can provide tools and training to make sure you can use the tools but that you're doing so in an informed way.

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

I have 40 seconds left.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

We'll do three minutes in the next round.

Mr. Cooper, you have five minutes.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have some questions for the witnesses from Westminster.

Our House of Commons administration is currently conducting a proof of concept for Copilot, regarding the need for a secure generative AI tool.

I understand that Copilot has been used at Westminster. Am I correct?

[Luke Hussey]

Yes, we're currently evaluating it as well.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Okay.

On the whole, has it been a success?

[Luke Hussey]

Given the scale of the user base in Westminster—you have everyone from librarians and clerks, who are knowledge-based workers, all the way through to security, chefs and catering—we're thinking about which roles and which persons might get it. Cost-benefit has been the subject of most of our evaluation. We are trying to weigh up the benefits, because it comes at a premium for us at the moment.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

Okay.

Ms. Davies spoke about members using publicly available AI tools for their parliamentary work in addition to Copilot.

Has any analysis been done to assess how Copilot is being used relative to other publicly available AI tools?

[Luke Hussey]

We had a suspicion that AI tools that were not secure within our secure data environment might have been used. From what we can tell from the systems data, it's not as prevalent as we had assumed, which is reassuring.

We are keen to make a decision on Copilot. The horse hasn't quite bolted out of the gate for us, so we are trying to get there as soon as possible.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Sturgeon River, AB]

What about in terms of the Microsoft 365 Copilot? There was a pilot of the more advanced AI tool as well.

[Luke Hussey]

To clarify, everyone in Parliament has Copilot Chat, which is a more rudimentary, web-based generative AI tool. At the moment, we are piloting 1,000 licence-holders on M365 Copilot, with a view to taking a decision before Christmas about our longer-term position on that.