Industry and Technology Committee on May 28th, 2026

[Doly Begum, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'll quickly ask this of Ms. Brown. I think MP Falk actually talked about it as well. There is a famous example in South Asia, from I think a year or two ago, where a movie song from one of the legendary singers of the past was reintroduced—this is somebody who's no longer with us—and it broke people's hearts because they thought it was an old song somebody missed. It had millions of views. It was obviously monetized. To me, there's something so wrong there. It was almost nostalgic as well.

Where would you find that balance, that respect and that dignified way of doing something so the right people are benefiting? How can we do that?

[Jennifer Brown]

I think it's exactly what you said. It's about looking for respect.

We work on the composition side—so the songwriting, the creative side—but this also impacts the artists. I can't really speak to the artist you're speaking to, but there are definitely requests about names and likeness. That goes beyond music. That's personal. That's privacy. Making sure that words being put in their mouths by AI—things they would say—or a song being sung by somebody.... These are things they would want their voice towards. I think the principle that remains true for all artistic elements is consent at the beginning to make sure that they're giving over the ability for this to be generated.

[Doly Begum, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you very much.

[Bienvenu-Olivier Ntumba, Liberal, Mont-Saint-Bruno—L’Acadie, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Mullin, in which sector are Canadian artificial intelligence industries showing the most promise? Is it health care, advanced manufacturing or public administration?

What specific example demonstrates strong Canadian leadership and export potential?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

Unfortunately, we have just 15 seconds, but go ahead.

[Sean Mullin]

Are you talking about the potential for AI?

[Bienvenu-Olivier Ntumba, Liberal, Mont-Saint-Bruno—L’Acadie, QC]

Yes.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

I'm so sorry to cut you off, but we are out of time. Perhaps we can get to it in the next round. It's always a five-minute time slot.

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Monsieur Ste-Marie for two and a half minutes, please.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ms. Brown, the Prime Minister announced that the artificial intelligence strategy would be unveiled next week.

Do you feel that the cultural sector has been sufficiently included, so far, in the discussions aimed at developing this strategy?

[Jennifer Brown]

The cultural industry was part of heritage and those conversations. I'm not sure exactly how much input the cultural industry had in this overall strategy. There were a couple of meetings, but I'm not sure. I guess we'll see in the strategy's output where the messaging landed.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

We're going to hear from Hon. Evan Solomon in committee next week. If the strategy is unveiled by then, we'll be able to ask him about it.

Can you explain to us what is being requested for the additional protocol to the 2005 Convention in the digital environment, that is, the protocol recommended by the Reflection Group on the diversity of cultural expressions in the digital environment?

[Jennifer Brown]

Really, where we've been at is the exact same request. All creative industries have said, “Please do not create an exception, and please put transparency first and foremost.” We're using transparency as the first principle right now, because we need to know what's been used so we can act.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette—Manawan, QC]

Thank you very much.

I have a lot of questions, but I see that time is running out. Since I have 40 seconds left, I'll let Mr. Mullin answer the question from my colleague Mr. Ntumba.

[Sean Mullin]

One of the areas where there's a tremendous amount of potential for applying AI in Canada.... We tend to think of this on a sector basis. There's lots of opportunity in things like health care, our energy sector and financial services. There's also another way of thinking about it. The latest round of large language models has the potential to impact knowledge work as a horizontal consideration. That's a tremendous way of thinking about how to improve the productivity of a huge swath of the Canadian workforce. That could also include, obviously, the government and public sector workers.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

Thank you.

We'll go back to Mr. Falk for five minutes, please.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Mullin, getting back to you, do you think that AI models should have restrictions placed on them?

[Sean Mullin]

There's an emerging debate as to how much we should regulate AI models. I think the completely unbounded and unrestricted approach is not responsible. We should be careful about stifling innovation in terms of how to put on the restrictions, particularly when we're talking about frontier models. We've heard in the news about things like Mythos. It has extraordinary capabilities. To have absolutely no restrictions or no types of regulations whatsoever would be irresponsible.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

What types of restrictions or regulations would you suggest?

[Sean Mullin]

You would want to have a balance between the ability to innovate and the ability to ensure that some of the most egregious harms that could come from these models are mitigated. That would be in areas like national security, personal privacy and catastrophic risk. There are many other experts out there who are much more familiar with the existential or catastrophic risk aspect of these AI models.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

You mentioned in your comments that we've had a good relationship in working with our friends to the south, but you also talked about friendly allies potentially coercing us. Can you square that hole for me a bit? What do you mean by all of that?

[Sean Mullin]

I'd just refer to what's been happening in the past 18 months with the administration of President Trump. Many of the policies and actions taken by that government are trying to secure leverage against Canada, including using the fentanyl tariffs as a way to extract leverage, so—

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Can you specifically, though, connected the dots to AI, where we've seen coercion there?

[Sean Mullin]

Our paper doesn't say that there's actual evidence in the AI space. The point is that if you increase your dependency on the United States and on U.S. tech companies, does that increase the risk that a lever could be used against us in the future? If you're running a data centre with national security-level service and the President says to shut it off as part of an acrimonious trade deal or a negotiation, I don't think Canada should put itself in that position. Avoiding being coerced is the point of our recommendations.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

What is your suggestion for avoiding that?

[Sean Mullin]

We've essentially gone through all the layers of the AI stack and have found different vulnerabilities. Our point is that anything you do with any one of these different vulnerabilities.... Some of them are worse than others, but you don't have to solve them all at the same time. You can work at mitigating exposure. On cloud, for example, building sovereign compute for the most highly sensitive national security is one way of making sure we don't get exposed to that type of vulnerability.