Industry Committee on April 5th, 2022

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Would you say that changing the structures of the workplace, along with recruitment and retention of talent to the quantum sector and STEM in general is needed, instead of just trying to change people as part of the solution?

[Dr. Shohini Ghose]

I think a whole spectrum of actions need to be taken, starting with recruitment and retention for sure, and also, as you said, building a classroom and a workplace environment that is inclusive.

There's lots of research about how this can be done. We need to bring experts to the table who have already provided recommendations on how, for example, to build an inclusive classroom. With my own team, for example, I find I often have students and researchers who want to work with me because they value this. There is a clear benefit to creating an environment where people feel heard and seen.

I think you're right that there are many different approaches. We need both policy level kinds of actions as well as changes in individual teams, cultures, classrooms and research environments.

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Dr. Ghose.

Mr. Lemire, you have the floor now for two and a half minutes.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Ippersiel, I'd like to know more about PRIMA Québec's vision. Your organization represents an industry that deserves to be fully recognized in the advanced materials sector. There seems to be a growing number of companies that gravitate to PRIMA Québec. The contribution of these companies to the advanced materials sector is more than $14 billion to the advanced, a sum that is obviously significant.

Do you think there is a role for the federal government to play in attracting more private investment in research and development, particularly in Quebec?

What do you think needs to be done?

[Marie-Pierre Ippersiel]

Thank you for the question, Mr. Lemire.

I see that you've read our documents carefully.

In Quebec, 450 companies—mainly SMEs—are associated with the advanced materials sector. That's 45,000 jobs. I'm talking about Quebec, but that gives you an idea of what that means across Canada.

Remember that the advanced materials sector is intersectional. There are applications in various sectors, whether it be the environment, chemistry, transport or energy. In short, it's very broad.

How can the Government of Canada, or a provincial government, increase private investment?

PRIMA Québec's approach is to promote collaborative innovation projects. It must be understood that a project will always receive funding from the Government of Quebec. It can also obtain funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, or NSERC. The company or companies also have to put money into the project. Thanks to this collaborative innovation formula, the domestic spending on research and development that businesses put forward increase this figure, which—as you are probably aware—has been trending downwards in recent years.

More recognition of the strategic role of advanced materials could most certainly help. What we often notice is that we will think in terms of finished products. Let me give you the example of clean technologies. Several of them could not exist without the use of advanced materials. Think of sensors, membranes and filters. I think that recognition is very important.

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, advanced materials have an important role to play in the quantum sector, in equipment production, in particular. Quantum materials have quite unusual properties. One example is superconductors, which allow no loss of thermal energy. I think that's very important.

I believe that advanced materials should be promoted more by governments, whether federal or provincial, but also in the various policies. Whether it's the national quantum strategy, the hydrogen strategy, or all approaches to net‑zero emissions or climate change, advanced materials have a role to play.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Ms. Ippersiel.

Mr. Masse, the floor is yours for two and a half minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Maybe I can get Mr. Chong involved in the conversation here.

With regard to quantum computing and artificial intelligence, can you give some practical examples of what people should expect in terms of progress on this?

I think that's part of the problem here. When I talk about the telecom industry, I often talk about the key of getting the spectrum auction under proper policy. People's eyes glaze over. They go to sleep, they don't understand and that's the end of the conversation.

Can you give us a little bit more of a taste of what this means for people's practical lives and perhaps their professions?

[Dr. Jaron Chong]

Yes, sure. Again, we constantly talk about the idea of acceleration. I think the technical term of NP-hard has been brought up a few times as well. The reason that we have such a difficult time communicating this computational part from an everyday perspective is that you really need to be almost on the front lines of development and training to understand how much time and energy it actually entails.

We can make the metaphor, for example, recently with COVID-19 vaccination, when you read those stories of Pfizer and AstraZeneca or any of the drugs that have been developed over there, as well. Some of those mRNA platforms were able to generate candidate molecules in the order of about 48 hours to 72 hours. Yet, if you look at our recent experience with the vaccine rollout, as well, that was on the order of months to years. A lot of that was spent in the validation phase of things.

For any of you who are not familiar with molecular or drug development, the idea that you could have a candidate molecule ready for potential trials within 48 hours is extremely unusual. If you look at the history of vaccines previously, we were always on the order of years. You can look historically at polio for example and at how long that vaccine development took. It's sort of that transformation. To many of us, from the medical establishment perspective as well, some of the developments that were done there have been extremely cutting edge in some sense.

So if I take that metaphor there of being able to develop a candidate molecule in about 48 hours for vaccination, you start applying it to nearly everything else as well. If we want to do chemical molecular testing right now, what we would ordinarily do in vivo or in vitro—meaning just on an experimental basis—takes years of development, such as for a new chemotherapy drug or molecule, and anti-microbial molecules as well. A lot of that takes a lot of coordination, effort, energy, investment by the private sector, and by the public sector as well. If you can transform that and take out this very difficult component and vastly accelerate it, the applications are going to change by quite a bit.

If I talk to voice recognition right now, I can say a trigger key word to my smartphone and start speaking to a computer there. I remember when I was in high school, as a kid, trying to get voice recognition to work on my computer. I would sit there, talk to my computer for three hours, and the accuracy would be abysmal. The idea right now that you can call out to your phone and it just automatically works all of a sudden...it was a gradual transition, but now you can actually see that application take place.

A lot of the discussion here in the committee room right now is focused on security implications, on the negative possible effects too, but that acceleration will work in both ways potentially as well. Some of those things that are taking so much time and effort to be able to do are going to be vastly accelerated, and if they are, there are going to be positive effects and negative effects. We hope to control the negatives and be able to empower the positives and make sure that they are equally representative of all the possible benefits and have Canada be part of that discussion. Some of those changes that you've seen in computing before, over the last 10 or 15 years, will hopefully, on the positive end of things, represent themselves as well, so you're going to get these massive innovations that we can hopefully harness and help many people with.

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

I'm sorry to interrupt—

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

That's okay.

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

—I know that interrupting is not the right thing to do in your committee, but I feel I need to say something, which is that there's this myth that quantum computers are so vastly more powerful than classical computers that they can solve everything, exponentially faster. That is not true. Quantum computers will solve some problems exponentially faster than classical computers—for instance, if you want to factor numbers and break cryptography, but for other problems, in particular NP-hard problems, there is strong evidence that quantum computers cannot offer a significant advantage in solving NP-complete or NP-hard problems, no more than quadratic improvement, which is not to be sneezed at, but is very, very far from being exponential.

So, yes, some NP-hard problems could be solved faster with quantum computers, but not as spectacularly as other problems like those that allow us to break cryptography. It's not a uniform speed up for all problems when you have a quantum computer. For some problems, yes; for some others, no.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you, Mr. Brassard. We appreciate your comments.

I'll now move to Mr. Kram, for five minutes.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll be mindful with my time, if I don't have that much leeway, apparently.

Dr. Brassard, some of your statements have really caught my attention. You said that if we don't take the appropriate steps, all of the cryptographic infrastructure will collapse and this is a disaster waiting to happen and even the apocalypse, if I heard you correctly.

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

I said that, yes.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

Okay. I just want to make sure I understand. Let's say we take absolutely zero precautions over the next decade or two. What does that apocalypse look like?

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

Well, it means that if nothing changes, then not only is the past an open book when a quantum computer becomes available...and as I said, there is nothing you can do to prevent that. It's gone. The past is gone. Forget about it. But if you take no action now, then in 10 years, whatever would have been sent so-called confidentially in the next 10 years will also become an open book. That's what I mean when I say that you cannot save the past but you can try to save the future.

Now, is it an apocalypse? It depends. For some things that are sent under the cover of confidentiality, if they are revealed in 10 years, nobody will care. If your credit card number becomes open in 10 years but you don't use it anymore, who cares? However, you might care to keep your medical history secret for the rest of your life. If you send anything that has to do with your medical history, and you care to have it secret for the rest of your life, forget it.

Of course, even more importantly, if national security data or whatever is sent without more protection, then yes, maybe it could be an apocalypse, depending on who the bad guys are who will use it whenever it becomes an open book.

[Michael Kram, Conservative, Regina—Wascana, SK]

Let's pick up on that. If you were the special adviser to the Minister of National Defence and your objective was to just make sure that the army, the navy and the air force could communicate securely, what recommendations would you make?

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

There are two answers. One is to use quantum cryptography, which is, again, provably unconditionally secure but requires infrastructure that may not be available for these applications.

The other is to use different purely classical systems that are currently being developed. Some of them are in fact fully developed but are still under scrutiny to assess their security. There is a very significant effort at NIST in the United States to try to standardize so-called post-quantum cryptography. A large number of proposals were sent to NIST from all around the world, and then there were several rounds where....

It was an open thing. It was totally open to the whole community. People submitted their proposal to NIST. All of these proposals were open. Other people, much of the same people, were taking a shot at other people's proposals, so many of them were shut down. There are still some surviving. NIST is expected at some point to make a recommendation not of one winner, as they did for AES, but in terms of “here are a few that we think look pretty good”. Again, that's knowing that there is absolutely no hope to ever prove security for these purely classical systems.

When NIST makes its recommendation of what to use, then the question becomes whether we just want to follow the recommendation given by a foreign government, even though friendly, or whether we want to have, as I think we should, more Canadian expertise. We should not take NIST's recommendation at face value and use that immediately. It would also be assessed at a Canadian scale.

But if it's urgent, I mean, still, it's not because NIST has not yet given its recommendations that security is not needed today. I guess the best thing to do is what Professor Simmons said, which is to use several of them. We don't know which ones are secure. Maybe none of them are secure. But if you use many of them for really high-security applications and use many of them to establish secret keys, and then you combine these keys in a secure way, which we know how to do, then the resulting key will be as secure as the strongest of these systems. Here's an unusual case where the security of the whole is as secure as the strongest, not the weakest, link, which is very comforting.

Now, you cannot do that on the Internet for the average person. It would take way too much time for a normal transaction. But for a national security application, that might be the way to go at the moment, until we have a better idea about which of these are more secure, really, and should be used.

At the moment, that's the best we can do—combined with quantum cryptography, if you can afford it, and if you have the infrastructure to do that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, MP Kram and Mr. Brassard.

We'll move to Mr. Dong for five minutes.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

First, I want to say thank you to all the witnesses. As we learn more about quantum computing from the past meetings, I see a significant improvement in quality of questions and quality of testimony. We're learning even more today.

Before I forget, I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Hall's point on a shared national training program.

On that point, Dr. Ghose, I think you said that you are currently teaching undergrads about quantum computing. Can you later submit to the committee some of the details of your program, like the curriculum and enrolment interest that you're seeing at your institution? That would be very helpful.

You also talked briefly about how there has been a lot of attention and discussion on AI ethics, but not enough on quantum ethics. Can you expand a little bit on that? What is the similarity or uniqueness of quantum ethics?

[Dr. Shohini Ghose]

Yes, sure.

Firstly, I'm happy to share my course details.

Secondly, a lot of the questions for AI ethics, technology ethics and the use of technology in general would of course also apply to quantum. I think that's important to keep in mind.

Additionally, I think that at this stage, quantum offers new kinds of potential applications that we perhaps haven't even dreamed of. We really need to have some kind of a structure to be able to not get taken aback by what will come in the future. We need to have a system in place to understand what we need to build into structures of how the technology is rolled out.

There's a second piece, which is on the security side. In fact, as Professor Brassard mentioned, quantum key distribution offers provably unhackable security. Let's say that at some point that happens and everybody has completely, one hundred per cent secure encryption. That means bad actors have that, too. I feel that there are a lot of questions around regulation and policies of how this kind of technology is used and what is acceptable and what is not.

Those are questions we need to really be careful of.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

I saw Dr. Brassard shake his head.

Do you want to share your comments with us?

[Dr. Gilles Brassard]

Yes. This is another myth that I want to debunk about security versus confidentiality, where security means law enforcement.

This is a false debate. It's security against security, by which I mean that citizens have a right to privacy that outweighs almost everything else. I said almost.

It's not true that police or law enforcement use so much decryption to catch criminals. They use what you would call metadata, which is who talks to whom, much more than what is said. This is not protected by regular encryption. This intelligence is available even when the communication is encrypted and even it cannot be decrypted by law enforcement.

I am a very strong advocate of privacy as a fundamental right for citizens. Yes, in some cases it could lead to a bad person not being caught, but it's a price to pay for something that is so much more important, which is privacy.