AI is not this sort of fantastic, magical hat we pull a rabbit out of and whatnot. I mean, AI is just math. It's just fancy, sophisticated math and its applications. While the government has invested significantly in various applications of that, the irony is that the government has not made an investment in the cybersecurity side of those applications.
We're generating lots of highly qualified personnel—“HQP”, as we call them in academia—but we have a massive disconnect between the cybersecurity side of generating the people who are in demand and our ability to have programs that will generate those in universities. We're doing lots of great, fun research, but it's not directed at generating cybersecurity talent.
I would bring up Australia again. They have nine different centres now that deal with cybersecurity. In Canada we really have none. We run our Smart Cybersecurity Network, SERENE-RISC, which we stood up with a colleague at the University of Montreal, but that's about it. I think we need to do a lot more. We can buy all the technology we want and we can make all the investments we want, but if our adversaries are simply going to steal all of our R and D investments, at billions of dollars a year, what's the point of putting money into R and D? And why, as a foreign company, would you invest in R and D in Canada, or in our AI investments, if you knew that we couldn't keep secure the intellectual property generated?