I'm systemically concerned about the attention on these issues. The AI act has it being operated by the promoter of AI, who is also the regulator of AI within a ministerial discretion.
There are issues where the Competition Bureau is seeking more independence. We're looking at issues for strengthening rather than weakening the Privacy Commissioner. You have granting agencies under ISED that have not done any governance of the AI and the data elements, and now you're wanting to task them with a bigger role in this. What's the governance of that? What are the expertise issues? What are the resources? What's the transparency of it?
We have to build expertise in the form of some kind of economic council to distill these things. We have to start creating agencies with transparency and with accountability on that, which could then be called before Parliament to explain the rationale.
These kinds of informal, non-transparent, generalist approaches have not served Canada well in this era of the knowledge-based economy. That erosion is going to keep happening at an increasing rate. If we don't stop this before a tipping point, then all the issues we're seeing around polarization, economic erosion, compromised security that we've heard of, and being bullied in trade agreements and so on, are just going to get worse.
It has to be a structural, systemic commitment to the expertise in a crosscutting realm. As Einstein said, make it as simple as possible and no simpler.
The character of this stuff is tricky, so don't pretend it's not. It's just like we shouldn't pretend that China is not going to be here. It's only going to get tougher.