Thank you, Chair.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for their opening testimony.
I think I'll begin by highlighting the fact that artificial intelligence clearly has some enormous potential. This committee is no stranger to some of the major productivity issues facing this country. Adopting and deploying AI can certainly help companies become more competitive. It can help us with our productivity issues. In telecommunications, AI could help with outages, improve network reliability and strengthen cybersecurity, something that will be very important as we go forward. The question for this committee is not whether we should be adopting AI, because that's obviously the case. The question is whether we're going to harness AI for our strategic capabilities and our strategic industries, or whether it's going to become another tool for offshoring Canadian jobs, offshoring Canadian data and really allowing Canada to lose its control over its own infrastructure and security.
Ms. Blais, I'll start with you. CUPE has criticized the federal AI consultation process as overly relying on corporate voices and not capturing enough union voices or voices of privacy experts and researchers who study AI. In sectors like telecom, where the adoption of AI could affect jobs, personal data, personal network security and national sovereignty, what risks would you say would be created if the government designed AI policy without capturing these voices?