Human Resources Committee on Nov. 1st, 2023

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's true, I only have two and a half minutes.

Good afternoon, Mr. Roberts. My first question is for you.

When I think about AI, I'm inclined to look at Quebec's union movement. Some Quebec unions are also affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress, the CLC. There's a move toward creating models for working groups in some sectors in the collective agreements.

The issue before us is AI, but we've gone through automation already, especially in big corporations. Look at the auto industry, where AI has brought up new things.

You talked about social dialogue models, if I understood you correctly. In Quebec, we're very fortunate to have had the Commission des partenaires du marché du travail, the labour market partners commission, for 25 years now. It's a tripartite organization that brings together the major players, and we have looked at these issues. It's a great model.

Still, I do have some concerns. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the union movement can play a major role where members of collective agreements are concerned. Skills and training are part of it, but we know the rate of unionization in the private sector can be quite low. Fortunately, we're doing better than some other places, such as the United States. How can we make sure workers who aren't represented have what they need and can find their way?

Take Uber and Airbnb, for example, two companies that operate according to a low-pay, worker exploitation model, I would say. They have self-employed people from coast to coast to coast. That's a problem too.

Would you agree?

[Chris Roberts]

Yes, I would agree, and I think the problem you're pointing to is very important. I do think that collective agreements can sometimes set the pace for public policy and statutory innovations that affect all workers. Expanding access to unions is critically important, for workers who want them, so that they themselves can lift their voices and play a role in shaping technological developments at work.

For many ride-hail workers working for digital platforms, the question of misclassification of those workers is fundamental, and gaining access to the existing employment standards is the first step to getting some basic protections that are reserved for workers in an employment relationship. I think there is a combination of statutory, regulatory and workplace-level changes that can improve the circumstances for non-union workers, as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Chabot.

Madam Zarrillo, you have two and a half minutes.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to ask this to Mr. Frenette from Stats Canada. One of the things I would like to have testimony on in this study is just around income protection for workers and improving the equitability of the workforce. My question is really around the information that's collected because, of course, as we always hear, “If we don't measure it, we can't reach our goals.”

I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing what information StatsCan has now in relation to income and an equitable workforce as it relates to changes with AI in the workforce. What would you recommend they collect, in terms of data?

[Marc Frenette]

We don't have a regular program of AI and income per se. In addition to what I talked about in my opening statement, there is some earlier work that I did, which looked not at AI but at automation risk. It found that workers who are in more vulnerable positions in the labour market tend to be more at risk of having their job tasks automated, and that includes low-wage workers.

That was a one-off, and I don't know if my colleague, Mr. Dale, has anything else to add to that. We do have a regular program of income, I will say, but linking that to AI is not a regular program that I'm aware of.

[Vincent Dale, Director General, Labour Market, Education and Socio-Economic Wellbeing Statistics, Statistics Canada]

If I may, I'll add a few thoughts and ideas.

I might encourage the committee to think in terms of upstream and downstream types of data. If we think of the upstream as being the extent to which AI technology is being adopted in Canada, there are some significant challenges around that, as you've discussed. There isn't necessarily a commonly accepted definition of AI. That being said, we are working with the OECD and other international partners to make progress on what we would call a measurement challenge. We have a couple of surveys that we have conducted, with some partial results that we can share with the committee in writing if you would like.

On the downstream effect, which is more pertinent to the question of income, through the labour force survey, other labour market information systems that we have and the census, we can look at the evolution over time of employment by occupation and income by occupation. We can see the downstream impact of technology. It's challenging to separate the specific impact of technology from other factors that influence labour market conditions.

The short answer would be that we have good, robust information on the income of Canadian workers.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you so much.

I would ask to get that information you offered to the committee. That would be wonderful.

StatsCan witnesses were here recently. They said 60% of....

Is that my time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Zarrillo. We're over your time.

We'll go to Mr. Aitchison for five minutes.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I actually wanted to ask a question similar to the one Mr. Fragiskatos asked.

I'm the critic in the Conservative Party for housing. It's been a passion of mine. I used to be a municipal mayor. I recognize there are a lot of delays at the local level, particularly in building and planning departments and so on.

I wanted to give you a bit of time to elaborate more on how we could use AI in this technology to accelerate the process of getting things approved and built.

I'll let you run with that.

[Laurent Carbonneau]

To some extent, I might not be the best placed to speak to the specifics of this.

Ultimately, if the issue is municipalities having throughput issues and they are able to get an AI product or service from a provider that enables them to do this kind of work much more quickly, I think we should have frameworks that enable that.

As I mentioned earlier, the way in which procurement typically works is quite inflexible. There is a lot of needs definition that happens up front, and the specification tends to be very ironclad in that it doesn't change once it's been established. If you're a smaller company or if you're an innovative company that's trying to do something new, it might not look exactly like what the specs said at the beginning, but you're locked into it, even if it wasn't the best idea or the best way to approach the problem.

I think a really big piece of this, as I said to Mr. Fragiskatos, is that we have to find ways for government to become better at buying innovation, and there are a lot of different ways we can do that. CCI is going to have a report on this in the next month or two. I'd be very happy to share it with you.

I think that's very key here. The public sector has access now to a lot more tools than it used to, but the procedures it uses to get access to them have not really kept up with that. Different countries, like Finland and the U.K., have developed new procedures and offices that are tasked with doing what's called public procurement of innovation in the literature, and we are just not quite there yet.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

This is one of those areas where—I'm not sure if it's a demographic issue, but it's certainly a skills issue—a lot of municipalities are facing this mass exodus of building professionals, for example. In Ontario, I met with the building officials association. A lot of them are getting close to retirement, so there are not a lot of people coming up through.

This is why I wonder about it as a tool. It's because what is an existing problem is only going to get worse if there are fewer people. Of course, you then lose institutional memory and those years of experience in the community and in the industry. I see the concern that some people may have that it's going to displace people, but I also wonder if it's not, in many ways, the natural progression of technology changing how we do things.

I think back to a speech I heard when someone was talking about innovation and the economy. The point they made was that when they invented CDs, nobody cried big tears for the vinyl record industry, because we stopped making those kinds of things. There are things that we just don't make anymore because technology has changed. There are many jobs that exist today that didn't exist before. There are lots of careers that exist today that no one had even dreamt of 20 years ago.

Could you speak a bit more about this? It seems exciting to me, yet I also feel very much like the conversation around this is edged with some trepidation or something.

Am I reading that correctly?

[Laurent Carbonneau]

I think that's true, and I think that's fair.

I will say off the top that vinyl has made a huge comeback. People love vinyl again.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

It has; it's true. That's very good point. It's cool again.

[Laurent Carbonneau]

I think that's right. I think what Mr. Roberts has said about the social licence piece of this is really important. I mentioned in my opening statement that we had electrification and industrialization, and those didn't always work out great for a lot of people.

In many ways, Luddites had a point; they had a very good point. They were broadly correct about their specific critique, which was that, as skilled artisans, as weavers, they were very affected by early industrial technology, and that was all fair. Perhaps they didn't deal with it in the way that was most productive, but, you know, that's all right. I think it's very normal and natural for people to be concerned about potential displacement around this.

Like I said in my opening statement, I think we're far from that being really live. I don't think that's necessarily going to be true forever. I think that's on the order of decades here, and the earlier we start talking about this and we start talking about how we want to use technology as a society, the better. I think that gives people room to do things that are productive, add to our wealth as a country, make us richer and add to our standard of living in a way that people can feel confident in.

I'm really glad that you guys are doing the study for that specific reason. I think it's really good to have these conversations in Parliament that you guys can take home and have at barbeques, really starting to build a bit of a social consensus around what's appropriate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mr. Aitchison and Mr. Carbonneau.

Mr. Van Bynen, you have five minutes.

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

There were a couple of comments you made earlier that are a bit of a concern to me, which were that for people to adopt or adapt and implement AI, they need to be global, and that's largely because of the level of investment that's required. To some extent, I guess that would influence the timelines for adaptation. What type of a timeline do you see for adaptation and implementation?

[Laurent Carbonneau]

It's very hard to put an exact timeline on this, but I would say that we will probably.... Mr. Aitchison mentioned earlier these gaps in workforce and how you'll have people age out before new people are ready to come in. I think that we might be looking at a mismatch if we don't get serious about this in the next couple of years, because we're starting to see the foot go on the gas of AI adoption worldwide.

Historically, technology adoption among businesses in Canada has been slower than in other countries. If we continue along that historical path, we will end up behind in critical ways in AI in adoption, and I think we won't have the kinds of companies anymore that will be able to really grow here, because the market just won't be there. It will be very tough for them.

We have a bit of an edge right now, and, if we don't do the right things in the next couple of years, we may very well lose it.

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

You mentioned that another constraint would be our computing capacity, and I think you referenced the Canary set-up. What types of investments would the government have to make to make sure that we improve that computing capacity in order to create the industry that we want to grow?

[Laurent Carbonneau]

That's a very good question, and I can't speak to exact numbers here. Something I've heard from companies is that they're looking at computing capacity, access to computing, and this is starting to become quite expensive for a variety of reasons. I think this is something we should look at closely and maybe get a bit more of a feel across the industry for what those numbers look like. I can't speak to exact numbers, but it's definitely something we're hearing.

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

A government-sponsored sandbox that would enable industry to open some of that capacity could be an answer.

[Laurent Carbonneau]

Yes.

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

My next questions are over to Stats Canada.

Do you have data on the share of businesses in Canada that work with artificial technologies? What's their contribution to the GDP, and what percentage of the labour market do they employ?

[Marc Frenette]

We did have a few surveys conducted on this recently in terms of technology adoption, including artificial intelligence. We're not experts, neither me nor Mr. Dale, in that particular area. That's on the business side, and we would like to circle back to the committee with more precise information on those very questions, if you don't mind.

[Tony Van Bynen, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Again, my concern that is the genie is out of the bottle, and we're seeing that the pace of innovation and the level of impact are going to be quite significant over a very short period of time. I would like to see some type of measurement that would give us the scope and the scale of the issue and allow us to monitor progress in terms of reaching our goals. What elements would you be monitoring to provide the government with the kind of information it would need to make fact-based, future policy decisions?

[Marc Frenette]

Right now we're monitoring technology adoption, again including artificial intelligence. I think to have consistent data in order to establish trends is important. That word “consistency” is very important. If we can add more information to that, if there's the possibility of looking at the extent of the usage of artificial intelligence, that would be useful, in my opinion, from a researcher's perspective. Again, though, I would circle back to the experts on business surveys at Statistics Canada. We could definitely touch base with them.