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

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

Thank you all for your testimony today. It's been very interesting.

I am learning an awful lot and trying to keep up with all the things we are learning throughout this study.

Ms. Lister, I appreciated your observation, toward the end of your opening comments, when you were talking about adoption before governance and how that is where we tend to be. It was also the adoption, perhaps, not only before establishing the framework guidelines and guardrails, but even before having a clear understanding of what AI is and how we can harness all the tools available to us in a really responsible way. I thank you for this observation.

Ms. Crisan, I want to follow up with you in regard to the work that the Insights Lab has undertaken. While there has been a huge focus on AI and its technological capabilities, I think we're also learning that it can have a huge impact on culture and society. I'm particularly interested in the work around human-centred AI. Could you explain to us the design principles around human-centred AI?

[Dr. Anamaria Crisan]

Yes, the design principles around human-centred AI.... It's not just my lab and the work we are doing. There is a larger research community involved in this area, which is trying to define precisely what that is. It involves both academic institutions and industry partners that are focused on responsible AI.

A lot of the idea of human-centred AI is basically to keep people in the loop and provide information and levers of control for them, so they are able to steer, guide and contest these systems or understand failures within them. A set of concrete principles has been articulated. For example, when a system fails, make it clear what failed. That's pretty straightforward. There are others that are much more complex, which can result in a kind of whack-a-mole situation. Something is now broken; how do we fix it?

Human-centred AI is trying to advocate for not just focusing on the technical aspects. Look at where a bunch of research money and industry money is going. It's basically building what we call state-of-the-art models—more capable models and focusing primarily on the technical parts. There are considerably fewer resources dedicated to understanding the impacts and understanding whether there are better human avenues for input or such things. This is what a human-centred AI agenda is focusing on.

As I said in the beginning, it's developing these technologies for human needs and with human benefits as the end goal.

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

I think it was Mr. Deveaux who commented on the human resources that will be needed to ensure the very thing you've highlighted. Can you tell us how much human oversight of these systems is needed to ensure that we still have a human-centred system?

[Dr. Anamaria Crisan]

Yes. It depends on the application. I talk about this a lot with my students and in the work I do.

For something that is well known, well understood and easy to verify, it might be perfectly fine and perfectly safe to allow automation through an AI or an even simpler system to persist. Then there are more complex scenarios, in which the risks of getting it wrong are much more consequential. You can break down trust. It can cause a national misunderstanding or situation. In such a case, humans have to be in the loop because of the consequence of the decision. It can require significant human effort and resources to evaluate.

We see this already in research. We are getting inundated by submissions, publications and things like that. The effort of human researchers to verify these is immense, and we're already seeing the consequences of that.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

I'll turn to Mr. Caley for five minutes.

[Braeden Caley, Liberal, North Vancouver—Capilano, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses today.

To Mr. Deveaux, first, I was struck by some of the responses you gave to MP Jeneroux regarding a few aspects of this. I want to touch on that quickly.

You mentioned the way the technology and our thinking about it have evolved over the past three years. That strikes me as interesting. I imagine the things Excel formulas do might have seemed quite novel at first, in terms of adding up calculations and formulas in some extraordinary way. Asking or demanding whether someone had used a calculator instead of doing it by hand.... As we talk about these things, I wonder if, 10 or 15 years from now, these might be viewed in a similar manner. I'm curious about whether you see any reflection.

There were reports that have been referenced in the committee's past sittings. I think it was an Economist article—there might have been others—around AI use in remarks in the House of Commons. You touched on that, similarly.

Is it a concern for you? Do you have any comment on the EU requirement of watermarking text that's being put across entire models, OpenAI and others, and having to comply by marking text samples and proving that they have AI as an input? I wondered, from the previous testimony, if Hansard is being entered in that way—if perhaps, in cleaning it up, such watermarks could accidentally appear and cause a loss of faith.

I'm curious about whether you have any comment or thinking on that.

[Kevin Deveaux]

Thank you for the question, sir.

I think watermarking—assuming it's technically possible—is a good thing. I am a bit old school. It's been a number of years since I was in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, but I was always a fan of getting up and giving speeches off the cuff or with notes, not necessarily handed to me. There is value, always, in the human element in the discussion that can be had in a chamber, in a committee or with constituents. That was slowly eroded long before AI came along. AI may expedite this to some extent.

In the end, as an MP, you're accountable, as is any other person elected every four years. Deciding how you do your job impacts your ability to get re-elected. In most cases, it probably won't, unless, of course, there is some sort of error created. As you said, along with Excel and calculators, in the end, someone's name is on that. A motion put before the House that was developed with AI is going to have the name of the MP who moves it, so there is that accountability. You would hope that, if someone is at this level.... It's a position of gravitas. As a member of Parliament speaking in the chamber or in a committee, you want to ensure that all your i's are dotted and your t's are crossed. If someone handed you numbers, you would want to make sure they are accurate before you speak on them.

Using this human-centred approach to AI that one of the other witnesses talked about.... As long as the tool remains one in which humans have to be the ones endorsing or presenting what is determined from it, AI will, in the end, allow that accountability loop.

[Braeden Caley, Liberal, North Vancouver—Capilano, BC]

Thank you.

How much time remains, Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

You have a little over a minute.

[Braeden Caley, Liberal, North Vancouver—Capilano, BC]

Okay.

Maybe I'll phrase this quickly for Madame Lister.

In the surveying you've done internationally, what level of concern was already being expressed over cyber-threats in the administration of elections? Are there any good practices you could furnish the committee with on that so far?

[Dr. Sarah Lister]

There are enormous levels of concern—enormous—and, every year, in our support to some 50 countries, cybersecurity and information integrity issues are highest up there on the concerns we have. In the meeting I referenced in Canada, the Nigerian official, with upcoming elections in Nigeria, was suggesting that was at the top of his concerns.

We also had excellent input from your own colleagues at Elections Canada in relation to how they deal with the cybersecurity threats, the running of scenarios and so forth. They shared a figure of how many threats they get daily against their systems and said that doesn't cause them to lose sleep.

There are good practices out there. From my perspective of supporting institutions globally, it's about sharing those good practices.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Once again at the five-minute mark, that was a wonderful answer. Thank you so much.

My thanks to the witnesses. We will suspend for five minutes to get the next panel in.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Welcome back.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses for the second panel of today's meeting, especially since they are in a different time zone. Thank you for participating.

From the United Kingdom House of Commons, we have Sarah Davies, clerk assistant and managing director, chamber and participation team, and Luke Hussey, director of digital value, parliamentary digital service. From the Scottish Parliament, we have Alistair Stoddart, senior participation specialist.

I don't want to cause an incident, but we'll start with Scotland.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

You can go first, for five minutes.

[Alistair Stoddart, Senior Participation Specialist, Scottish Parliament]

Thank you very much, Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to contribute today and to contribute first.

My perspective comes from a background in public participation and democratic engagement rather than as a technologist, but I want to focus today on how legislatures can use AI to strengthen relationships between citizens and parliamentary institutions while also protecting trust, legitimacy and democratic integrity.

The starting point for the Scottish Parliament is that AI should support democratic participation, not be a substitute for it. Our approach emphasizes human oversight, accountability and transparency. Responsibility for decisions must always remain with people, not technology.

From a public engagement perspective, there are clear opportunities with AI.

AI can help legislatures manage the growing volume of public input that they receive. Parliamentary consultations can attract thousands of responses, and AI can assist officials in summarizing findings, organizing evidence and processing qualitative information. When AI is used appropriately, it can improve efficiency and help institutions engage with more evidence and more people than would otherwise be possible.

Alongside this, however, come significant risks.

One of the most important challenges is authenticity. AI lowers the cost of producing content at scale, so that creates or magnifies the possibility of coordinated campaigns generating large volumes of submissions that appear to represent widespread public opinion but that actually originate from a small number of actors. This risks distorting the evidence-gathering process and undermining confidence in democratic institutions.

At the same time, we should not treat all AI-assisted contributions as necessarily problematic. Many citizens have strongly held views based on their own lived experience, but they might lack the confidence, the time or the writing skills to respond to a parliamentary consultation. AI can help people organize their thoughts and express themselves more clearly.

There's a tension there. The challenge is not simply determining whether AI is being used; what's more important is whether the views being expressed are genuine and authentically held. Therefore, there's a key challenge for us in distinguishing between AI being used to support participation and AI being used to manipulate participation.

This is particularly important because parliamentary consultations should not function as opinion polls. Their purpose is to gather evidence, expertise and lived experiences from across society. Their value lies in the quality and diversity of the evidence received, rather than in the volume of responses supporting a particular position.

A second challenge that we face is the analysis, as was mentioned by other colleagues earlier. AI can help identify patterns quickly, but democratic institutions also need to understand nuance, minority perspectives and experiences of groups that are under-represented. An overreliance on automated analysis might privilege volume over significance, for example.

There are also security and governance concerns. Public engagement exercises involve personal information and people's sensitive experiences, so we need to be really robust around the safeguards on how data is handled and how AI tools are deployed in that context.

Finally, I want to touch on deliberative democracy.

Deliberative processes, such as citizens' assemblies, encourage people to engage critically with evidence, hear competing perspectives and reach considered judgments together. Some would argue that an overreliance on AI would weaken those democratic muscles by encouraging people to outsource their thinking. There is also emerging work suggesting that AI may have a role in supporting deliberative processes, but the important point is that it should complement human deliberation and human facilitators rather than replace them.

For those reasons, I would encourage the committee to think about AI through the lens of augmentation rather than automation. Just remember that the most resilient forms of public participation remain those that place genuine human interaction at their centre. Whether through community-based engagement, deliberative processes or face-to-face workshops, democratic legitimacy is built through relationships, dialogue and trust.

AI can process information, widen access and improve efficiency, but it can't replace democratic judgment, authentic human participation or the trust that sits at the heart of representative democracy.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

I will now turn it over to the OG House of Commons.

You have five minutes in total for both of you, however you wish to divide it.

[Sarah Davies, Clerk Assistant and Managing Director, Chamber and Participation Team, United Kingdom House of Commons]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to address the committee today.

I'll introduce both myself and Luke. I've started my stopwatch, so I will endeavour to come in under time.

My name is Sarah Davies. I'm the clerk assistant in the U.K. House of Commons. In that capacity, I'm the second most senior procedural adviser. As you mentioned, I'm also the managing director of a team of 500 people who lead all our procedural services, chamber services including Serjeant at Arms, Hansard, publishing and U.K. parliamentary broadcasting, as well as all the U.K. Parliament's public engagement, visitor services and education provision.

I work really closely on the executive board with Andy Smith, who is head of what we call our PDS—parliamentary digital service. My colleague Luke Hussey is here from PDS. His role is particularly to support both Houses in thinking about how to get the most out of digital to support services, including how to test and try new technologies and ways of working. Luke and I work together on the Commons Speaker's steering group on AI and on a lot of other work, alongside a wide network of colleagues in all parts of the Houses.

We see a set of distinct factors affecting decisions on AI adoption in parliaments. We see this from global adoption processes, really. Parliaments very clearly have their own particular decision-making mechanisms, depending on their constitutional and financial relationship with government, among other things. We all operate in complex risk ecosystems, as I would describe them. We have multiple functions as legislative, scrutiny and representative bodies.

Another challenge that I think we share is that there's often intense public and commercial interest in our work. There are a lot of complex reputational risks in using and not using these new technologies.

We all worry about cyber-resilience and cyber-risk. We know, from the events of just the past 24 hours, how much AI is changing that landscape.

We're often large-scale broadcasters and publishers, with complex, multi-purpose websites. I think this was mentioned during the previous session. There are opportunities in terms of guiding people to the things they want to find.

In all these aspects, proportionate and useful adoption of AI is a strategic priority. Parliaments do have a fundamental role to play in ensuring that the information used to inform scrutiny and that is provided by a parliament to its citizens is accurate and relevant.

We've done a lot of work on governance before using AI at scale, focusing on where we can get good evaluation. We have a focus, as many parliaments probably do, on building AI skills and capability among all our different constituent groups—members, members' staff and staff. We have distinct guidance, particularly for members and their staff, that we have developed and evolved over time.

We are—this has been touched on already—very aware of the wide and deep effects of this technology on the way members work, so I very much recognize the comments already made about the increase in volume of what members' offices are handling right now, in terms of both the number of pieces incoming and the length of those individual pieces. We've had some particular trends in the number of written parliamentary questions, on which our procedure committee has recently reported.

I'll just touch briefly, in the minute that remains, on the fact that we are also aware of the challenges of AI-generated content, deepfakes and disinformation. We're exploring perhaps new methods of content authentication using the C2PA standard.

We're also aware—as I think all your witnesses have been—that there are particular opportunities for parliaments around accessibility in all its forms, such as for simultaneous translation, although of course accuracy has to be borne in mind. Then, in the U.K. House of Lords last week, a peer with a long-term degenerative health condition was able to have her voice heard in the Parliament using AI for the first time, supporting her continued participation—critically—in her own voice.

I'm happy to answer questions on transparency and sovereignty. We widely use Microsoft, but we're also very aware of the need to use open-source platforms. One particular area that we see as quite promising is the use of model context protocol as a potential use of an open standard to enable better and more intuitive access to parliamentary information.

I look forward to expanding on any of this in the questions.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

We'll now turn to questions.

We will go to Mr. Calkins for six minutes, please.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing here virtually. I appreciate that it might be the end of your workday already. We appreciate your sticking around here. We're just getting rolling here in Canada.

Because we have similar Westminster-style parliaments, a question that's come to my mind, my first question—I think this is the third or fourth meeting that we've had on this particular topic—is on the fact that for members, committees and staff who work at our Parliament, there might be actors out there who are attempting to manipulate us in the course of our duties by using artificial intelligence to generate information with false identities, or whatever the case might be, in order to move public opinion through the democratic process.

I wonder, does either of you have any experience dealing with this? It would be considered, basically, contempt of Parliament, if you took a look at the rules by which we govern ourselves. Have you had any rulings in your parliaments dealing with this type of manipulation or deception and contempt of Parliament?

That's to both witnesses, to whoever wants to go first.

[Sarah Davies]

I'm happy to kick this off.

In the narrow field I'm talking about, which is really the core parliamentary processes—parliamentary questions, legislation to bills and committee scrutiny—I would say that the main trend we see is this volume question. This is both for committees and for procedural processes, for e-petitions as well, in which we see increases in volume. The main challenge is to work out what the guardrails are in terms of managing the different sites that we have in order to ensure that there are, for example, verification checks applied at the various levels. Whether somebody is setting up an e-petition or somebody is submitting evidence to a committee, we have certain rules. For example, if you are contacting a member, the member will typically only take your case if you can provide evidence that you are a constituent, by providing a postcode in the relevant constituency, for example.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

If I may, I'll just interrupt you right there. We have e-petitions here as well. If AI is being used to generate fake signatures on an e-petition, how would your Parliament handle that?

[Sarah Davies]

Something we've just gone through is a process of redevelopment of the e-petitions website in order to make the verification checks stronger. I can follow that up. I probably want to go to the team who are involved in that development process, if I may, just to make sure that I get the particulars right.

It is, I know, a particular issue for members, in terms of making sure that for the vast volume of stuff that they're getting in, there are adequate checks in place to check the people who are contacting them.

Luke may be able to add a bit more about this, but there's been a project to work with members and their offices in order to strengthen the kinds of verification measures you're talking about.

If I may, I can come back to you, particularly on the e-petitions question, if it's of interest. I know there has been a process of redevelopment in place, but I'm very happy to come back with some further details on what was involved in that project to address your specific question.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Okay.

Alistair, do you have anything to add to that?