Industry and Technology Committee on June 15th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Good morning, everyone. I hope you had a good weekend.

I hope you were able to get home for a little bit and spend some time with family and constituents.

We are joined today by Minister Solomon, who is here to talk to us about artificial intelligence here in Canada and a variety of things in relation to that file.

Minister, as you know, you'll be afforded the opportunity to make some introductory remarks, followed by lines of questioning from our colleagues around the table.

Accompanying the minister is associate deputy minister Mark Schaan, who's been here before in this capacity with Minister Joly.

Welcome back, sir.

With that, Minister Solomon, the floor is yours for some introductory remarks, sir.

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation]

Thank you, honourable Chair.

It's great to see you, members of the committee. Thank you for having me.

Hello.

As you know, I'm joined by officials from my department, including Mark Schaan, my deputy minister, and others. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today.

On June 4, the Prime Minister and I launched the AI for all strategy.

It's Canada's national AI strategy. It's based on three principles: trust, opportunity and sovereign control.

AI for all means no Canadian—wherever they live, whatever their economic position—should be left behind by this technology. It means AI must serve Canadians, not the other way around. It's AI that helps make health care better and AI that makes public service faster and more effective.

In Halifax, Dr. Robert Chen, who is a Canadian doctor, is helping to build an AI-powered stethoscope to screen heart murmurs in babies and children. That means faster answers for anxious parents, fewer unnecessary specialist referrals and shorter wait times for children who need care the most. It's a Canadian doctor and Canadian innovation.

In Saskatchewan, Jonathan Adams farms with his parents and his brother. With Croptimistic's AI soil mapping, they treat each part of their field differently, using fertilizer where it helps and where it needs more, and using less where they don't need it, to improve yields with less waste. It's a Canadian innovation and Canadian workers.

AI is helping workers, farmers, entrepreneurs, researchers, students and small businesses improve and strengthen their lives. Right now, they're doing it with technology that basically didn't exist two, three, four or five years ago.

We know that while some Canadians are optimistic about AI and what it can do, others have real concerns. There are real concerns about job loss. There are real concerns about privacy, personal information, children's information, our democracy and our sovereignty. We take those concerns very seriously.

We should be open to the massive upside of opportunities for AI, but very candid about the real concerns. In a sense, Chair, there are two teams here. There is team pompom, which is the AI cheerleaders who think any regulation might be bad for the economy. Then, there's team pitchfork, which believes we should just stop it altogether—stop building any of the infrastructure and stop investing in Canadian innovation.

Our government is not team pompom or team pitchfork. We are team pragmatic. This is a pragmatic, pro-worker, pro-innovation, pro-safety and pro-trust strategy. We're building reliable, safe, human-centred Canadian AI that serves Canadians.

We have a choice here. We can let others build the AI infrastructure and then rent it from them. We can let someone else create the jobs, control the innovation and set the rules, and we'll have to follow them, or we can build here. We can set our own rules here. We can create the jobs here. We can keep the innovation here.

That's the choice. We've made ours. That is our plan: AI for all.

It begins with the first pillar, which is trust. We made a promise to Canadians that we will protect your children, we will protect your privacy and we will protect your personal information.

Within a week of launching our AI strategy, we acted on that promise. Last week, the government introduced the safe social media act to make digital services safer for children and hold platforms accountable for the risks their services create.

Today, we tabled the protecting privacy and consumer data act. This bill gives Canadians more control over their personal information. It protects children's data by treating it sensitively. It gives Canadians a right to deletion, so they can take down deepfakes. It aims to combat surveillance pricing to avoid price gouging. It brings more transparency to those automated decisions. When an algorithm or a computer makes a decision about your mortgage or your job, there should be transparency. There will be with this law. It gives a new regulator real power to hold bad actors accountable.

Together, these bills do what we said we would do. They protect Canadians. They build trust. They create the conditions for responsible adoption.

It's a simple approach: protect Canadians and build confidence for the future.

Trust and protection are not separate from AI adoption. Trust is what will make adoption possible, but AI for all is not just about trust. It's about opportunity. It's about sovereign control. Opportunity means helping Canadian workers gain the skills to use AI confidently.

Opportunity means that Canadian businesses are helped to adopt AI so they can become more competitive.

AI for all will create and support up to 90,000 AI opportunities for young Canadians. We will create those and support those. It includes a national AI literacy push for free, so all Canadians have access to AI literacy and are not left behind by this shift.

We want to increase the adoption of AI by Canadian businesses from about 12% today to 60% by 2034.

Our strategy includes AI missions targeting health especially, so that Canadians can see how AI can reduce paperwork for doctors, improve patient flow in hospitals and emergency rooms, support clinicians, support drug discovery and deliver better care.

It will expand our safety capabilities around AI. Because innovation has to be matched responsibly, we're doubling the budget for the Canadian AI safety institute, and it strengthens Canada's sovereign infrastructure so that systems that power our economy are not entirely dependent on decisions made elsewhere but here.

AI for all is artificial intelligence that Canadians can trust, can use and can benefit from.

That's why leaders across the AI ecosystem have welcomed the strategy. As Yoshua Bengio, the Turing prize winner and maybe the most famous scientist in the world, who is here in Canada, said when we launched, “The Canadian AI strategy...advocates for the development of technology that is safe, ethical, trustworthy, and that benefits society as a whole” and “This is essential to preserve Canada's technological sovereignty”.

This is how Canada will lead: by protecting Canadians, creating opportunities and building the technology of the future under Canadian sovereign control.

Chair, thank you so much. I look forward to the committee's questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you very much, Minister. We'll go right into that.

Ms. Dancho, the floor is yours for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for being with us today.

As I'm sure you may be familiar with, Canada's Communications Security Establishment has warned that AI is, of course, transforming the cybersecurity threat faced by Canada, and leading cybersecurity experts have argued that governments need to invest specifically in cybersecurity talent that is really capable of defending against AI-enabled attacks on and threats to Canadian critical infrastructure.

Certainly, what we've heard is that AI supercharges cybersecurity attacks and cyberwarfare, as I'm sure you're familiar with. Really, it's representing a very grave threat to the individual, to business and, again, to our critical infrastructure, which, as I have heard over the years from cybersecurity experts, both internally and externally, is in fact the most likely and immediate threat that Canada faces—a cyber-attack on our critical infrastructure such as, for example, the Northeast Power grid in the middle of winter.

I was surprised to see that your AI strategy did not focus on cybersecurity. It was not a dedicated pillar. It wasn't emphasized. Can you explain why that is?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Thank you for the question.

We take cybersecurity risks absolutely seriously. I want to thank the member for raising an absolutely critical question. As the member knows, in our strategy, first and foremost we doubled the budget of the Canadian AI safety institute. We work closely with Canada's cyber-safety institute on threats that are on the horizon: threats from AI models and cybersecurity threats.

Shared Services Canada, for our critical infrastructure, has multiple layers of cybersecurity defences—cyber-walls, network defences, anti-denial of service measures, antivirus measures and virtual private networking—but one of the key protections is investing in Canadian sovereign AI and Canadian infrastructure.

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

If I may interject, you did raise the AI safety institute. Again, I do appreciate that the strategy does have an AI safety focus, but of course that's not the same thing as cyber-defence. AI safety is, of course, focused on things like deepfakes, and I know that the AI safety institute focuses on model evaluation, governance, transparency and responsible deployment—all very important—but that's not the cybersecurity defence emphasis that I'm asking about.

Specifically, even if it did, out of the $2.3 billion you committed, only $50 million is going towards the safety institute, which is about 2%. Again, that's not solely dedicated to cyber-defence. In fact, that's not the focus of the safety institute. Can you identify a specific funding stream in your AI strategy announced the other day that is specific to cyber-defence?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Again, thanks for the question. It's a really important question. Obviously, we take the safety of Canadians, their privacy and cybersecurity threats really seriously.

The defence industrial strategy, which we have also made public, makes major investments in high-security organizations and in our most important cybersecurity organizations, as you know, through CSE and other organizations. Our defence industrial strategy has made significant investments in that.

I want Canadians to know, Chair, that these strategies are working side by side. On the defence industrial strategy, we are working very closely with the AI strategy to make sure that all elements of defence and security are taken care of.

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

Thank you very much.

Again, you have a lot of emphasis in this strategy on the opportunity, which I think we've all heard. There's great opportunity with AI, but again, we have heard at this committee and others that the cyber-threat is very real, very rapidly evolving and growing. Again, these cyber-attacks can now act and evolve on their own, which is a great difference from hackers in their basements or bad government actors, for example.

Unless you can correct me, there isn't a dedicated talent stream for cyber-defence, but there are for the positive aspects of this, which I find concerning. Is there a talent stream for cyber-defence in your strategy? I couldn't find one, but maybe I'm wrong.

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Chair, the member will find, in the defence industrial strategy, a major focus on security and cybersecurity. I would also just say a couple of things.

We are working very closely with Canada's cybersecurity centre on some of the models that the member is right to bring up, for example, Anthropic's Mythos model. This is a very powerful large language model that Anthropic created. There's concern that it could have cybersecurity implications.

They created something called project glasswing to allow certain governments and organizations within those governments to get access to Mythos. For Canada, I am happy to say we've worked closely. We have access, and we are part of project glasswing to make sure that our critical infrastructures.... I will assure you that I'm in close touch with my U.S. counterparts on that. I've had meetings with our national cybersecurity and our top security officials with the U.S. to make sure that we are co-operating on fortress North America.

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

I appreciate that you are taking meetings on this. It sounds like you're having some discussions, but again, you're the first AI minister this country has ever had. I do feel that you have a responsibility to make this a primary pillar of your AI strategy, given the gravity of the situation regarding cyber-attacks and their evolution by AI-enabled infrastructure.

I think we're out of time here, but I would just urge you to reconsider your strategy and ensure that if you evolve it or bring forward a 2.0, cybersecurity is a main pillar. It's a grave enough threat and a serious enough matter that the first AI minister in this country should have it as a primary pillar. It is concerning that it was not a primary focus in your strategy.

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Cybersecurity remains absolutely vital, and security is vital. One of the reasons we are investing so much in Canadian sovereign AI is to make sure that we have control over our systems, that Canada's personal information and our sensitive workloads are held by Canadians under Canadian law. This is vital and central to our strategy to build sovereign AI for the very reason that the member rightly brings up: to make sure that we are safe and that we have control.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Okay.

Thank you, Ms. Dancho.

Mr. Ntumba, I understand you're going to share your time with Ms. O'Rourke. I'll let you decide how you want to split it up.

You have the floor for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, minister.

Recently, the government introduced a bill on youth and social media. Next, there was the digital strategy, and today, you introduced another bill.

For my part, I would like to take a much more youth-focused approach. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly realistic and accessible, particularly on platforms that young people use, posing significant risks of disinformation, cyberbullying and reputational harm.

What concrete steps are you taking to protect young people from the creation and dissemination of deepfakes, and how do you plan to hold the platforms in question accountable?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Thank you for that very important question.

I'm going to have to switch to English. I used slightly simpler sentences in French, but trust is very important.

Safety is also important. Our strategy focuses on trust, opportunity and sovereignty.

It makes sure, first and foremost, that we are investing in young people. As I said, we are creating a national AI literacy program. Every single Canadian will have access to literacy. We will be providing every young person and post-secondary student with a reliable, safe AI tool they can use, so they have access to these tools. That's very important.

Third, we're going to be creating jobs. Working with Canada summer jobs and Mitacs, we will be supporting 90,000 job placements so young people have paid job experiences in the workforce and skills for the economy of the future. In the same way—per the spring economic update—we are training 100,000 skilled workers in Red Seal trades. This way, in the technological and the digital economy, we are training 90,000.

You asked specifically about deepfakes and trust. I am very proud that we just tabled legislation today on protecting privacy and consumer data. One of the elements of that would give citizens the right to combat deepfakes. It's about having a right to deletion. If there is something posted that they don't want up, they can demand that it be deleted or taken down. This is a very important step that works hand in hand with the legislation we tabled last week on safe social media. That's absolutely important.

Again, there are other ways we are investing in young people, like CanCode for young people. I know the honourable member has some young kids. I have kids. It's about skills training from K to 12. Mine are a little older, but not yours. They will benefit from that CanCode training. We are investing in skills, in literacy and in giving them power with a right to deletion, and we're protecting them from the harms of social media with our safe social media act, restricting access to kids under 16.

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

Thank you very much.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Minister, and welcome.

I have a couple of questions. I attended a session with ParlAmericas, where people from all over the world were talking about data being the new oil. People are concerned about the sovereignty of their own personal data and their ability to control it. I'm wondering how this new piece of legislation allows Canadians to feel confident that their own data is secure and that they have control over it.

Then, in a broader frame, the Munk school talked about different levels of risk and how we need to protect different types of data differently. I'm wondering if you could speak to that.

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Thank you. It's an excellent question, and I appreciate it.

Data sovereignty is core to this strategy. We want to make sure Canadians' most sensitive data are protected here in Canada under Canadian law, and that it's also not subject to the coercion of other laws. We need the infrastructure to build that. We need to build the infrastructure to make sure we have all aspects of what they call the “ecosystem”, whether it's about building data centres or building them the right way. There will be questions about sustainability—water use like closed-loop water or making sure we're reusing the heat. We're being very transparent about it and building with our values. All the way up, we need Canadian compute. Computers are the fuel of the innovation that companies need so they can buy Canadian. That's very important.

I often say that sovereignty is not solitude. Canadians have access to all the tools of innovation from countries around the world. Many of those countries are here. They employ Canadians. They employ engineers. They've been here in communities for a long time. We welcome that, but Canadians also want a sovereign option. That's why we're investing.

Let me read how we're building that. It's not only by investing in SMEs. This is one of the largest investments in technology innovation for small and medium-sized businesses and Canadian innovators in Canadian history. We have $1.5 billion through the BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada, and their LIFT program. We have a $500-million tech growth fund to invest in innovators and reward people starting businesses here. We'll encourage them to do that. We have another $500 million that will be invested through regional development agencies because there's great innovation on the ground. Then we have about $700 million in what's called the compute access fund, so small companies are incentivized and subsidized to get compute and to buy compute from Canadians. That's really important. We're investing in our researchers as well.

I'll read you a quote from the CEO of eStruxture, Todd Coleman. He said, “The federal government's AI strategy is a positive step that recognizes Canada's AI ambitions and the data economy depends on secure, resilient, Canadian-based digital infrastructure that gives businesses, governments and communities confidence in where data lives and how it gets used”. He also said, “Building value for Canada needs to be done with Canadian values”.

We're really happy to see that kind of support.

[Dominique O'Rourke, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ben Carr]

Thank you, Ms. O'Rourke.

Mr. Ste‑Marie, you have the floor for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, minister and deputy minister. Thank you for being here.

I find your policy very interesting when it comes to promoting the development of artificial intelligence and its adoption by businesses, accelerating its use by government and fostering productivity. As far as oversight is concerned though, there is nothing.

Do you intend to introduce a bill on artificial intelligence that will accompany your strategy, similar to what was in the part 3 of Bill C‑27?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

I'm just trying to make sure that I'm answering the right question here.

I want to inform the honourable member that the AI for all strategy is structured around trust, opportunity and sovereign control. I want Canadians, as well as the honourable member, to know that there's a page of clear results of what we expect if we follow the investments in this strategy, such as creating, in five years, 250,000 new jobs; driving adoption rates from 12% to 50-plus per cent; creating 90,000 jobs for kids; an AI literacy strategy; and an AI tool. There's a lot of framework there, and there are almost 50 action items. I'm just trying to be clear.

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

Thank you.

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

There's an enormous amount of detail.

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

Minister, with all due respect, there are a lot of things to develop the industry, but when it comes to oversight, for example, how do you intend to protect creators whose works can be used by artificial intelligence models when your strategy doesn't address the issue at all?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

In fact, just on the creatives, there is.... Again, I appreciate that for the member, it's a long strategy. We have $50 million dedicated immediately to the creative technology program to support Canadian creators using AI on their own terms, which is very important. I've also had a two-day summit with culture leaders and stakeholders, and we are setting up an AI culture advisory group—both myself and the minister of heritage—which is absolutely critical.

We are investing in, obviously, our culture makers in a very profound way, and we're pretty clear about that in the strategy.

In terms of protections—as the honourable member asked about—again, within 10 days of the launch of our strategy, we have launched comprehensive safe social media legislation that restricts access to social media for kids 16 and under, among many things—