Science and Research Committee on Feb. 2nd, 2026

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

Okay, but that's not the question—

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

—memorandum of understanding with Cohere. That's why all procurement will go through SSC and PSPC and will follow all the processes—

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

Okay, there's going to be more procurement, so there's going to be more buying and more spending. Where are the costs?

You said there are going to be efficiencies and cost savings. Where are they going to come from? Can you name one example?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Well, I did name an example. I'm happy to name—

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

You named an example of how to improve service delivery—

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

But—

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

—but you didn't name an example of cutting costs. You said there are costs that are going to be cut. Is it going to be a head count or program cuts or—

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Again, I know this member understands business. If you can utilize an AI tool to cut the time that it would take a department to go from eight months to eight days, that frees us up to do other things—

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

Then what do we do with that excess time? I do understand time—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Let's have one person at a time.

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

Where would that excess time—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Wait one second. I have stopped the clock. We have a point of order.

[Guillaume Deschênes-Thériault, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

I have a point of order.

I would just like to mention that, when my colleague speaks at the same time as the witness, it becomes difficult for me to hear the interpretation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Yes. I will request from the member that one person speak at a time. Please allow the witness to answer the question. If two people are speaking, it creates interpretation problems.

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

Thank you.

I'll rephrase the question.

You just mentioned there's going to be excess time for those public servants. What are you going to do with that time? Are we going to have them do more, or are we just going to have them do less, because now they don't need to do as much, with all the tools that are going to be implemented?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

It's a great question. Again, I absolutely appreciate it.

We have a huge mandate. We have so much work to do as a government to make sure that we're investing the right dollars in our infrastructure. That's why we have the compute access fund, the public compute fund. We have diligence to do on all of that to make sure that our investments are done wisely. We have to make sure that our plan is implemented—

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

You mentioned how your investments are done wisely—

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

There's lots of work to do. I assure you there's lots of work.

[Vincent Ho, Conservative, Richmond Hill South, ON]

How do you measure whether those investments are done wisely? Do you have any metrics or tools you're going to use?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Again, that's a great question.

Every time there is an investment, for example in our public compute access fund, there is a diligence process to make sure that these companies qualify and that they are spending in a way that will help their business and promote innovation here in Canada. Every program has KPIs, and we're making sure our investments are done wisely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

The time is up for MP Ho.

We will proceed to MP McKelvie for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Jennifer McKelvie, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for joining us again to share your work on AI.

Last week, we heard from witnesses about the importance of AI in the production and distribution of electricity. How are you working with energy companies to unleash the power of AI?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Again, we are at this historic transformation. We know that we have this moment of political realignment happening at the same time as a technological transformation, and that means that the incentive to build a sovereign country and our sovereign infrastructure is really critical.

Your question about energy and a safe, efficient energy grid is critical, not only to our country but also to our government's plan across government. That's why we have the Major Projects Office to help do that. That's why Minister Hodgson is seized with that and why we're working so closely with the provinces.

We speak regularly to our provinces. In fact, just in the last number of weeks, I've had a federal-provincial-territorial series of meetings so that I can find out exactly what kind of grid capacity the provinces are estimating they need, not just for the economy of the future and AI but also for lots of other projects. They included discussions of electricity and infrastructure.

One of the things I should mention is that, while we do need electricity to power this AI revolution to create jobs and serve Canadians, AI is also serving the electricity grid.

I was here in Ottawa through NRCan's energy innovation program and at Hydro Ottawa with Minister Hodgson, and we invested $6 million here. They've built this remarkable AI program here to predict demand and to optimize the grid. What does that mean in the real world? It means that they can be significantly more efficient. They can make sure that in peak moments, they won't have outages. They can manage their supply and they can manage people's rates. There, AI is working on both sides: It's helping to power the economy of the future, but it's also helping to manage our energy supply more efficiently.

[Jennifer McKelvie, Liberal, Ajax, ON]

I'm certainly excited about smart grids and what can come from that.

Data centres, though, as you mentioned, do have large energy requirements. How are we planning for this increased demand? Are we having conversations about what sort of technologies they could use at site and how they can make sure that these are built in, or how they are trying to site them in locations where there is energy demand? How are we working in that regard?

[Evan Solomon, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

It's a great question.

I should say that recently in Quebec City I was visiting a data centre called QScale: privately invested, a remarkable facility there, clean energy. This is a clean-energy facility, about 170 megawatts. They've built about half of it. It's a brand new facility. It's highly secure. It is clean energy. They use what's called a closed-loop water system so they're reusing water. They're not draining the water supply at all. They have their own step-down power, so it's very efficient. They have redundancy. They're creating jobs, hundreds and hundreds of jobs for many years, to build the facility. Then they create a big ecosystem. They've invested $1.2 billion into the Quebec economy. That's one company. It shows you that.... They're working with, in that case, Hydro-Québec, and they're working very closely with the Quebec government.

In Alberta, AESO, the regulator there, has released some grid power, about 1.2 gigawatts of grid power, to build data centres. That's driving billions of dollars in investment there. That's why the Premier of Alberta and Minister Nate Glubish are so pleased to see that the energy is being used to drive investment, and that's happening.

It's also why, and I'll just reiterate, we're investing $2 billion at the new nuclear facility at Darlington. The Province of Ontario also put in $1 billion, because we all recognize that we need to build out our electricity grids. They need to be reliable, they need to be safe, and they need to be used to serve Canadians.