Science and Research Committee on Jan. 26th, 2026

[Gail Murphy]

I believe you're referring to the Canada Impactplus+ research chairs and the ability of that program to help recruit faculty, post-docs and students into Canada. The response at UBC has been great. We've had over 900 expressions of interest from around the world to join our faculty. Those expressions of interest come from many different countries, and people are representative of a broad section of fields. From the viewpoint of interest in coming into the country, it is great. UBC is responding to that interest. I can't speak to government decisions on where they're putting their money, but we know we are reacting to the opportunity that is put in front of us to bring great researchers into our community and have Canadians benefit from that.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Still from your institutional point of view, what are your thoughts on the fact that research being abandoned in federal research centres may have to be sent to universities? Unless you tell me that you have plenty of money to invest in new labs and new infrastructure, that's my fear. If researchers no longer have places to conduct research, where will they go? Are you ready to take them on board right away? Will the government close all of its research centres, and will those researchers end up at universities? Is that what you see happening?

[Gail Murphy]

We're reacting to the opportunity that's been put in front of us. The program carries infrastructure funding that can be applied for, along with faculty and students who come. That allows us to create greater areas of research strength and build upon the research strengths that our institution has. Those are, as I said, across a broad number of different fields. We're looking forward to being able to attract these researchers and have them come and collaborate not only with researchers within the university but with those in the ecosystem around us and with industry.

Universities undertake a lot of collaborative research with different industry sectors, and we're looking to places where we can build upon those collaborations to be able to further them within Canada.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Okay.

There may be a language barrier, so I'm going to make my question more direct: Do you have an opinion on the fact that the government is dismantling research centres?

[Gail Murphy]

I'm not aware of the centres you're referring to. It would take further investigation to be able to answer that directly.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Gupta, Canada dropped from fourth to eighth place in the world in AI capacity between 2021 and 2024, according to the Tortoise Media index. In your opinion, is this a structural symptom of the way we support research and innovation?

[Arvind Gupta]

It is both a concern and an opportunity that our AI adoption has been slipping.

I've been asked this a lot. I would say that we're still at the very early stages of understanding AI adoption. There's a huge opportunity in front of us, if we can get this right, to disproportionally benefit from this AI revolution.

I'll remind everyone on the committee that many of the foundational techniques were invented by Canadians, in Canada. Even when I look at generative AI, much of the training of the people who invented LLMs was done in Canada, so we are really at the forefront of AI research.

I would encourage the committee in their study to think about the infrastructure we need to build to fully benefit from this research that's being done. It's true that some countries have moved more quickly than we have—I don't think we can deny that—but we're just at the early stages of this race. It's not lost.

Most industrial sectors have not adopted AI. Even in the tech space, people are trying to figure out how to use AI. The university system at large is very interested in helping build industrial AI ecosystems. We want to deploy our students into the system. We want to understand the kinds of challenges businesses face.

I think this is a good conversation for us to have with all of you about what we can do so that we can more rapidly invent and, just as importantly, adopt AI into society.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski—La Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Gupta.

Ms. D'Agostino, the rise of AI threatens Quebec creators and culture. In your opinion, how should Parliament intervene to protect the creative sector in response to these technologies?

[Pina D'Agostino]

Do you mean in the creative sector?

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Give a quick eight-second answer.

[Pina D'Agostino]

First and foremost, clarify author-centric legislation to protect creators,

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

The time is up for MP Blanchette-Joncas.

We will now start our second round of questioning with MP Vis for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. It's a real honour to be here today.

In the last Parliament, I was on the industry committee, and we extensively studied Bill C-27. I believe some of you may have appeared in the first attempt of the government to pass some form of AI legislation.

I know you can't speak to the specifics or the recommendations you might have made to the new Minister of AI, but you can speak to what other people said in the community and across Canada.

One of the big concerns that we had as Conservatives in the last Parliament was that the Government of Canada was prioritizing commercial interests over human rights. I'm wondering whether, in its consultations across Canada, the task force heard directly from people that the privacy, freedom from discrimination, democratic participation or even protection against exposure to biometrics in certain cases—like monitoring in the public sphere—should always be weighed more strongly than the commercial interests of companies that want to conduct those activities.

[Arvind Gupta]

Thank you for that.

We definitely heard that the government needs to set up mechanisms to protect privacy, to ensure fair use of data and to ensure fair use of these systems.

I would argue that having those mechanisms in place actually helps commercial adoption of AI. More people will be willing to use systems that they trust.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC]

I agree that the last legislation didn't have that, so that's what I'm pushing for.

[Arvind Gupta]

I would say that this is also an emerging area. We don't quite know what privacy-protecting tools are needed in a lot of these areas. We didn't expect, until recently, the question around fair use. This is a very recent emerging trend. Six months ago it was a huge issue, and now we're beginning to understand that fair use of creative licence, but definitely we're going to have to keep up legislatively as we learn these things.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC]

My second question relates to risk classification and prohibited uses.

Minister Solomon has acknowledged the need for safety and guardrails in AI deployment with the new AI bill that will be forthcoming.

In the last Parliament, there was AIDA's reliance on regulatory definitions of high-impact systems to create clear statutory prohibitions for unacceptable risk uses, such as biometric surveillance in public spaces, consistent with international best practices. Did the task force recommend any such exclusions from the committee, from what you heard from the public?

[Arvind Gupta]

I don't think we can speak about....

[Gail Murphy]

I think our part of the task force was very focused on research and talent. There were discussions that we were a part of that talked about trust and the low trust of Canadians in AI systems, and hence the need to pay attention to privacy, safety and other responsible uses of AI to up that trust.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC]

In the consultations, though, were there many recommendations for such exclusions?

[Gail Murphy]

I don't think we have the scope of view on the other task force members' reports to answer that question.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC]

Okay.

Minister Solomon has described the task force as a focused 30-day sprint with recommendations feeding into a strategy expected very shortly. Given the civil society warning that rushed AI legislation creates long-term democratic risks, how will the recommendations embed mandatory parliamentary review? Did any of the people who fed into this sprint talk about mandatory parliamentary review of any future legislation?

[Arvind Gupta]

I think these questions are beyond the scope of our study. We didn't discuss how our recommendations would be rolled into any kind of legislative—

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford, BC]

I'm asking all these questions because you might recall with Bill C-27, it was such a gong show. The now finance minister had to come back to the committee multiple times with new versions of the legislation before it had even been tabled in Parliament. It was all on fundamental questions related to consultation: What is acceptable risk? How do you balance human rights versus commercial interest? What type of independent oversight—civil society or Parliament—would there be over AI? How do we define risk appropriately in the legislative framework in this new and emerging field?

Do you have any comments on that?

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, but your time is up, MP Vis.