My name is Bianca Wylie. I work in public interest digital governance as a partner at Digital Public. I've worked at both a tech start-up and a multinational. I've also worked in the design, development and support of public consultations for governments and government agencies.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about AIDA. As far as amendments go, my suggestion would be to wholesale strike AIDA from Bill C-27. Let's not minimize either the feasibility of this amendment or the strong case before us to do so. I'm here to hold this committee accountable for the false sense that something is better than nothing on this file. It's not, and you're the ones standing between the Canadian public and further legitimizing this undertaking, which is making a mockery of democracy and the legislative process.
AIDA is a complexity ratchet. It's a nonsensical construct detached from reality. It's building increasingly intricate castles of legislation in the sky. It's thinking about AI that is detached from operations, from deployment and from context. ISED's work on AIDA highlights how open to hijacking our democratic norms are when you wave around a shiny orb of innovation and technology.
As Dr. Lucy Suchman writes, “AI works through a strategic vagueness that serves the interests of its promoters, as those who are uncertain about its referents (popular media commentators, policy makers and publics) are left to assume that others know what it is.” I hope you might refuse to continue a charade that has had spectacular carriage through the House of Commons on the back of this socio-psychological phenomenon of assuming that someone else knows what's going on here.
This committee has continued to support a minister basically legislating on the fly. How are we writing laws like this? What is the quality control at the Department of Justice? Is it just that we'll do this on the fly when it's tech, as though this is some kind of thoughtful, adaptive approach to law? No. The process of AIDA reflects the very meaning of law becoming nothing more than a political prop.
The case to pause AIDA and reroute it to a new and separate process begins at its beginning. If we want to regulate artificial intelligence, we have to have a coherent “why”. We have never received a coherent why for AIDA from this government. Have you, as members of this committee, received an adequate backstory procedurally on AIDA? Who created the urgency? How was it drafted, and from what perspective? What work was done inside government to think about this issue across existing government mandates?
If we were to take this bill out to the general public for thoughtful discussion, a process that ISED actively avoided doing, it would fall apart under the scrutiny. There is use of AI in a medical setting versus use on a manufacturing production floor versus use in an educational setting versus use in a restaurant versus use to plan bus routes versus use to identify water pollution versus use in a day care—I could do this all day. All of these create real potential harms and benefits. Instead of having those conversations, we're carrying some kind of delusion that we can control and categorize how something as generic as advanced computational statistics, which is what AI is, will be used in reality, in deployment, in context. The people who can help us have those conversations are not, and have never been, in these rooms.
AIDA was created by a highly insular, extremely small circle of people—tiny. When there is no high-order friction in a policy conversation, we're talking to ourselves. Taking public engagement on AI seriously would force rigour. By getting away with this emergency and urgency narrative, ISED is diverting all of us from the grounded, contextual thinking that has also been an omission in both privacy and data protection thought. That thinking, as seen again in AIDA, continues to deepen and solidify power asymmetries. We're making the same mistake again for a third time.
This is a “keep things exactly the same, only faster” bill. If this bill were law tomorrow, nothing substantial would happen, which is exactly the point. It's an abstract piece of theatre, disconnected from Canada's geopolitical economic location and from the irrational exuberance of a venture capital and investment community. This law is riding on the back of investor enthusiasm for an industry that has not even proven its business model out. On top of that, it's an industry that is highly dependent on the private infrastructures of a handful of U.S. companies.
Thank you.