Industry and Technology Committee on June 1st, 2026

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Richmond East—Steveston, BC]

Okay.

Could I get that answer quickly?

[Ewan Reid]

The opportunity for us to develop and send MoonNet to the moon was a foundational moment for our company and an enormous learning experience. When it comes to things in space, we're doing a lot of things for the first time. We just saw the first non-American, Jeremy Hansen, fly around the moon for the first time. It's amazing, and you learn so much just going through that process.

I should state that while we sent the first deep learning AI to the moon, we did not do inference on the lunar surface. The lander that we were part of on the mission did not successfully land. It landed too fast, so the computer with our AI was not operational. No lander was.

Being able to get to that point was an enormous technological achievement for us in maturity, as a company. It has enabled a whole bunch of international partnerships that we could never have made without it. It was still a massive success for us, and now we are among the leaders that continue to deploy AI in space.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

That's great.

You have only 20 seconds left.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Maybe I'll ask another colleague to share.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

Do you want to come back? Okay.

We'll now go to Monsieur Ste-Marie for six minutes, please.

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

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. It's always a pleasure to see you doing such a great job as chair.

I would like to welcome our three witnesses and to thank them for joining us today. It is very helpful.

My first questions will be for Mr. Gallant.

I think you have already answered my question, because Mr. Bains brought it up. Nevertheless, I'd like to hear from you once more.

This week, Minister Solomon and the Prime Minister are expected to unveil their artificial intelligence strategy. What do you expect from this strategy? What would you like the strategy to include?

[Brian Gallant]

In my opinion, we are very lucky in Canada to have the basic elements that will help us achieve success in this sector. We have researchers and capacity within our institutions, and I am convinced they are superior to those in other countries.

Nevertheless, I have the impression that we are not moving as fast as other countries. That may well be because of the many changes that have taken place recently, including a change of government, a change of prime minister, changes in plans, as well as geopolitical tensions. However, even if we know the reasons, the end result is the same. My colleague gave examples of countries that are moving at a very fast pace on these issues.

As I said at the beginning, I fully support the idea of deploying artificial intelligence to increase our competitiveness and productivity here in Canada. At the same time, we need a regulatory framework. I think we need to have ways to protect ourselves and to mitigate potential challenges. This is a very complex topic.

I humbly submit—because you have heard this from many experts—that the most important thing is to act quickly and to consult experts on a regular basis. I'm not an expert, but I can speak for the space sector. Many experts are willing to help us, as a country, to work through the various challenges that could catch us off guard during this journey.

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

You have made repeated references to the need for proper consultation. So far, do you think that your industry has been sufficiently consulted about the industrial artificial intelligence strategy?

[Brian Gallant]

I think there is a fresh momentum on the part of government concerning the space sector, even though this is fairly recent. I would say that people really started knocking on our door around a year ago. We are very proud to see that people are starting to understand just how important the space sector will be for our economy and for many other areas that are important for the quality of life of Canadians. That includes the defence strategy, artificial intelligence and protecting our sovereignty.

I was not prepared to say that before. I think there has been a real change in attitude over the past year.

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

You said that your members would use artificial intelligence in a number of different ways, from language models to more specialized artificial intelligence systems, as Mr. Reid seems to have explained when he spoke about his company. You also spoke about productivity challenges in our economy.

In your sector, do you think integrating artificial intelligence in different ways across businesses could lead to exponential productivity gains?

[Brian Gallant]

For sure. I don't think we're an outlier. I think we fall within the norm.

Language models can help businesses achieve productivity gains. However, people in strategic sectors have to look at ways to use such models appropriately and how data will be protected, and make sure that Canada's sovereignty and our economy are protected to the greatest extent possible. That is what you are looking into now.

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

Thank you very much.

Mr. Reid, you spoke about OpenAI, which had disrupted your operations, if I got you right. Can you take us through the main points again, in one minute?

What can the government do through legislation to ensure that your operations will not be disrupted should a similar situation arise in the future?

[Ewan Reid]

Sure. To add a bit of context, we have an entire technology stack in what we call our machine learning operations pipeline to be able to take a theoretical algorithm and deploy it in a space-rated embedded system. Along the way, we have to ingest a whole bunch of data, label the data and train the algorithm with that data, etc.

To make that tech stack work, we use a bunch of third party technologies. In this case, we were working with an American firm and its technology to make that happen. When OpenAI acquired it, they basically shut it down because it was a strategic advantage to them. We were left with very little warning and a need to ultimately change how our tech stuff operates. If we'd had the choice of going with a competitive Canadian variant of that technology in terms of cost, I'm sure we would have liked to do that. That then gets back to whether there could there be a Canadian start-up that's doing that piece of this AI tech stack.

As Brian alluded to, the answer is yes, in the sense that with the researchers that come out of AMII, Vector, Mila and our universities, there's this great talent pool. It's not necessarily an AI thing, but the classic thing that we talk about in Canada about how we incentivize a domestic industry to have people stay here and have them start companies, and actually have expats come home. Some of the things we've been seeing recently are good directions towards that, like the defence industrial strategy and accelerated procurement approaches. Those things are going to help make Canadian businesses more competitive, writ large.

Potentially, there could be an AI company that would solve this one piece of our tech stack for us.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, I'm going to relinquish my chairmanship for a moment to Mr. Ste-Marie so that I can ask a round of questions.

I have a few more follow-up questions on that same question, Mr. Reid, about the impact on your workflow of using a third party that was bought by an American company. We're very familiar with OpenAI.

I'll allow you to elaborate a bit more on what Canada could be doing so that you have more options to buy Canadian-owned companies to safeguard yourself and other companies like yours from something like that in the future.

[Ewan Reid]

It's expanding, really. When it comes to these deep technologies—quantum is another example—it takes a whole ecosystem, especially here in Canada. I don't see there being a monolithic firm that has the capacity to invest in and own a whole end-to-end technology stack to create a product or service of the scale that we see in the U.S. It takes this ecosystem of technology solutions and, therefore, firms to enable the ones you might hear about downstream to sell something to a user or improve somebody's day-to-day life.

Again, it goes back to whether we can create that environment where a whole variety of different technology firms can be founded and reshored and can ultimately thrive here in Canada. That goes back to the things that folks like my colleagues at Space Canada and I have talked about in terms of the government being an anchor customer for technology firms and creating an environment where regulation is balanced and there is consultation on it so that firms can be innovative and grow.

The important piece about investment is being able to have the capital required to grow. That comes from the right signals from the government. Especially in our sector, in space, the government is a major stakeholder and a major customer. Having strong signals from the government that there is a long-term need and demand signal can enable capital, and then capital can flow and companies can start up and thrive. It's all interlinked in this ecosystem.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

A lot of the technology you're developing is quite dual-use. That is my understanding. You talked about wildfires, but you're also developing your lunar utility rover. Can you talk a bit more about the advantage? We've heard from a number of defence companies and others that talk about how they could do defence and security, but they could also do climate change monitoring and all types of things.

Elaborate a bit more on when the government contracts your company to provide some dual-use or triple-use capability.

[Ewan Reid]

There's no question that all of the technology we work on as a company can be applied to solve a bunch of different problems. The example of wildfires is a really good one.

In certain communities in Canada, that's what we call it. We call it a wildfire. There are communities in Canada that would call that a hot spot. That might be coming from trees or underbrush burning. It might be coming from an aggressive manoeuvre from an adversary. Ultimately, the technology to detect that is the same. That becomes a really good example of how an investment that would support our targets could also actually go to support a tangible benefit for a Canadian citizen who says, “I was affected by the smoke last summer. I want to see that dealt with. We want to find those fires quickly and put them out quickly.”

That's one example. Like I said, everything we do in my company has that dual-use application.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

I believe a lot of what you're working on, as well, will allow these utility vehicles for the moon to drive around on their own. There's a huge AI piece to that, of course, and it has a lot of applicability in defence and security spaces, but I imagine it could also trickle down to everyday use among people here on earth.

Could you speak a bit more about the technology you're developing for that?

[Ewan Reid]

It's a group within AI called physical AI. You have a robot that is collecting information around it through various sensors, and then, based on the algorithms it's been programmed with and has learned, it's able to then observe, orient itself, decide what to do and act on it.

In the case of a robot on the moon, it's perhaps helping do the job it's trying to do—unload a spacecraft or create a berm for a landing pad or whatnot—and that's possible because it has that autonomy. Having a human in the loop to try to control that would be almost impossible because of the time delay and all of those things.

That technology becomes highly relevant in other scenarios here on earth, where there might not be GPS, where bandwidth is limited or where there are significant communication delays. The Arctic would be a really good example. For us to deploy autonomous systems to those places to ensure that we can maintain sovereignty, I think, is a really good use case for this kind of technology.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

That's great. Thank you so much.

I believe my time is up, so I'm going to take back the chairmanship.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Gabriel Ste-Marie]

You have one minute left, Ms. Dancho.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Raquel Dancho]

There's a bonus minute. I'll give it back to the committee. We're a little over anyway.

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

Thank you very much.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, witnesses.

Mr. Gallant, you spoke about a coordinated approach in your opening remarks and about a change of attitude in response to a question from my colleague.

Can you tell us a bit about what the government is doing now and what it was not doing before?

[Brian Gallant]

Thank you very much.

The first thing I would underscore is the defence industrial strategy. A reading of the strategy clearly shows that the government has put a lot of emphasis on the space sector, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and cybersecurity. These terms, these industries and these capabilities come up multiple times in the strategy. This tells me that the government understands that they are important. That might have been the case before, but it may not have been this clear.

Obviously, there was a change of government and prime minister, but the context has also changed. There is no doubt about that. The geopolitical changes that have taken place over the last couple of years have put defence at the forefront, and the space industry is critical to our ability to defend our country and our sovereignty.

I am also very proud to see that, as my colleague mentioned, a number of governments and departments want to work with and consult us. That is going to be extremely important for your committee. Obviously, the matter of artificial intelligence is not limited to a single department. It calls for a whole-of-government approach to strengthen the sector and the regulatory framework, boost investment and so forth.

The same goes for the space sector, cybersecurity and many other sectors. Many departments have a role to play to help them move forward.

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

I'm going to ask you a second question, and then I will turn the rest of my time to my colleague Mr. Bardeesy.

How can we protect data generated with artificial intelligence, bearing in mind that the data comes from existing datasets?