I would like to ask this of perhaps all of the witnesses, maybe starting with Ms. Strome.
We've had a great debate about Dr. Bengio's saying that having an imperfect bill is better than not having a bill. The challenge for parliamentarians is in two aspects of that.
One, I never like passing an imperfect bill, especially one as important as this. I don't think there's any merit in sort of saying that we're number one because we got our first bill through. The way Parliament works is that it's five to 10 years before legislation comes back.
I also don't like giving the department a blank cheque to basically not have to come back to Parliament on an overall public policy framework of how we're going to govern this. This bill lacks that. It just talks about the specifics about high-impact general purpose and machine learning. It doesn't talk overall, such as the Canada Health Act does in referring to five principles.
What are the five principles of AI, such as transparency and that kind of thing? The bill doesn't speak to that, and it governs all AI. I think that's an issue going forward. I also think that it's an issue to give the bureaucracy, while maintaining flexibility, total control over future development without having to seek approval from Parliament.
I would like to ask all of the witnesses about the five things, four things or three things that are high-level philosophies about how we should govern AI in Canada, which this bill does not seem to define.
I'll start with Ms. Strome, and then we'll go from there.