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

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you.

It feels as though we're in this uncertain transition. I'm thinking of automobiles that are self-driving, and people are grappling with what type of human intervention and oversight has to be in place. Some of them make sure that your eyes are looking forward. Others make sure you have one hand on the steering wheel, but it feels as though we're just marching in a direction that leads to full automation.

When we look at the democratic parliamentary context and the human oversight, how do we ensure that it's legitimate and real and not just dotting i's and crossing t's as more and more of our material is generated by AI?

[Alistair Stoddart]

One thing would be to have a range of participation infrastructure so you're not relying on just machine learning in, machine learning out and a digital aspect via a consultation thing. As I've mentioned, there are deliberative democracy opportunities, being in communities and having conversations with real people about those issues. Then the trade-off is that it used to be that social media was going to lower the barriers for an age of the public square that Habermas thought about. Some could argue that AI does that, too, in terms of lowering the barriers for people, but now we have a situation in which there are positive aspects of it and then negative aspects at the same time.

For me at the minute, it comes down to this: If you're looking at the data, you can't just feed it into AI and hope it's going to come back with the answers you need. You need to know the data too. Sampling is also just as relevant a methodology as other things and being transparent about how the analysis has taken place so people can trust the judgments that elected members are going to make off the back of these types of things.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

You have five seconds.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Thank you for joining us. It's been informative.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much. That was exactly five minutes. That's wonderful.

We'll turn to Madame Brière for five minutes, please.

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Sherbrooke, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the three witnesses for being here.

This really is a very interesting discussion. It's fascinating to see the dual use of artificial intelligence, which can be both beneficial and risky.

Over the summer, we saw various examples of AI use during which humans were losing control over it. In a context like the one we all find ourselves in today, governments and public institutions must be resilient and able to adapt.

Despite the speed at which advanced AI is developing, what safeguards do you think should be implemented to ensure that those breaches are reported—in incident reports, for example—and that the use of AI is beneficial for our respective institutions, but also more broadly speaking, internationally?

Mr. Stoddart, you can answer first.

[Alistair Stoddart]

I'd defer to my colleagues in Westminster, as my background is more in democratic participation rather than general governance.

[Sarah Davies]

In that case, let me begin, if I may, and I'm sure Luke will continue.

This time last week, I was at Imperial College in London. We were talking, as part of some work I've been doing, about the Hugging Face incident. We've seen the development of what these tools can do in the last 24 hours in terms of the rapid evolution of some of these threats.

We have an excellent cyber team here in Westminster. We recognize that the U.K. Parliament website, like other websites, receives all kinds of attention. There's a huge amount of work that is done in collaboration with other parliaments globally and across other institutions to share information about these things. There is the importance of parliaments' having that technical capacity and talking to each other about how they are responding to these challenges to our systems.

There is also a really important point about making sure that our committee staff are upskilled so that they can advise members as the members try to navigate this. We have various evidence sessions ongoing with relevant AI ministers and so on to chart the landscape. It is a big job for us to make sure that the staff are involved. We've had various partnerships with academics to have kind of embedded academics with deep subject domain knowledge on this working with committees to share that knowledge with the committee teams and the members so that the members can scrutinize this effectively.

It's those two aspects. First, we need to have the internal expertise within parliaments in order for our websites to still be up when all this is going on. Second, there is the really important issue of upskilling the committee staff so that they can be advising legislative scrutiny staff as legislation comes and evolves through the system.

That's a partial answer to what is a really big, challenging question for us.

[Luke Hussey]

If I may, I would just add that we work really closely with colleagues in the Canadian Parliament, as well as with other nations, mirroring the Five Eyes structure, sharing intelligence. It really does come down to investing in resilience, having your information secure and managed properly, and thinking about zero trust as your default architecture.

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Sherbrooke, QC]

Do you think developers of AI models should be involved in the solutions?

[Sarah Davies]

This is probably going to a question that a clerk would be cautious to answer. However, I think it's something our committees are very interested in—about the relative roles, particularly when we're talking about the challenges of this in terms of regulation: the international nature of these companies, which operate across multiple jurisdictions and multiple legal situations. The key question is.... We know our legislators are interested in this, and they want to explore the issues, including with the companies involved. I try to see how we can get our staff involved to equip those members to ask those, shall we say, sometimes poky questions of these companies to ensure that accountability is there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

I want to thank our witnesses, especially given the time change. We truly appreciated your continuing of the discussion on this topic.

The clerk would like me to remind the committee that the subcommittee on private members' business will be meeting here. You're welcome to stay, but there will be another committee meeting shortly.

Seeing no further business for this committee, we stand adjourned.