Science and Research Committee on Feb. 12th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I call this meeting to order and welcome you back.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. Those on Zoom can select the appropriate channel for interpretation at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French. I remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

With that, I would like to welcome our witnesses for today's panel. We have Jim Hinton, intellectual property lawyer, joining us in person. From the Conseil de l'innovation du Québec, we are joined, via video conference, by Anne Nguyen, chief AI officer. From the Council of Canadian Academies, we are joined by Dr. Tijs Creutzberg, president and chief executive officer.

Welcome to all witnesses, and thank you for appearing before the committee.

All witnesses will have five minutes for their opening remarks, and then we will proceed to the rounds of questioning.

Mr. Hinton, we will start with you. Please go ahead.

[Jim Hinton, Intellectual Property Lawyer, As an Individual]

Thank you, Honourable Chair and members of the committee on science and research. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. The work that you're doing is of tremendous importance to Canada's sovereignty and economic prosperity.

I'm the CEO of Own Innovation, where I'm an intellectual property lawyer, a patent agent and a trademark agent. I'm also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a fellow at the BSIA, and I'm an assistant professor at Western University in the faculties of engineering and law. I'm appearing before the committee today as an individual.

Today's economy is more than 90% driven by intangible assets, including intellectual property, data, algorithms and code, and the intangibles economy has economic impacts. You cannot commercialize what you do not own and control, and there are sovereignty impacts. You cannot govern what you don't own and control. Intellectual property allows you to own and control digital technologies.

Where does Canada stand in AI ownership and control? AI patenting is a leading indicator of AI ownership. Since 2005, more than 2,734,000 AI patents have been granted globally, with more than 350,000 patents now being granted annually for artificial intelligence. Patenting is not an afterthought for AI; it's a major activity.

Canada has been doing a very poor job of owning AI. Since the so-called pan-Canadian AI strategy in 2017, Canada's share of AI patent ownership has dropped from 0.81% to 0.54%. Canada went from being a have-not country to a have-none country, and it's not that we don't invent some great AI technology. It's that we don't own it, and because we don't own it, we can't make money from it. For every 2.5 AI patents Canada invents, it owns only one. In comparison, for every one AI patent that South Korea invents, it owns three.

While important, patenting isn't everything. AI is also protected and commercialized with proprietary algorithms kept as trade secrets, copyrighted code and data, and data is protected as trade secrets and confidential information. Canada does not have a data asset strategy. Canadian companies can't compete in AI if they don't have access to the same quality and quantity of critical data as their global peers.

Sovereign compute capacity is another precondition to digital sovereignty and economic prosperity. Digital sovereignty is a legal construct, not an emotional one. The legal construct says that to be sovereign means to be a Canadian company with Canadian ownership and control that is out of reach of foreign laws such as the U.S. CLOUD Act. A U.S. company that holds our data and algorithms on Canadian soil is subject to U.S. law, and Canadian justice does not apply.

Digital sovereignty is not about physical location. Digital sovereignty is not about corporate assurances. Nokia Canada cannot be sovereign AI. CoreWeave, a U.S. company, cannot be sovereign AI. Foreign hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft cannot be sovereign AI. Even Canada's large telcos may not assure digital sovereignty because of their U.S. presence. Digital sovereignty requires exclusive jurisdiction by Canada's legal systems.

I make the following recommendations to the committee.

Canada needs to have an actual AI strategy, one that puts economic prosperity and national security at its core.

We need to stop all funding of talent and research that gets owned by foreign companies.

We need to build truly sovereign compute infrastructure that is 100% out of reach of foreign control.

We need to spur an IP economy that allows Canada to own and commercialize critical technologies at home and at scale globally. Specifically, we need to have Canadian firms be global leaders in AI, IP and patent ownership. Finally, we need to create and scale Canadian firms that generate, retain and commercialize data assets.

Canada's economic trajectory is currently negative. We are projected to be the worst-performing advanced economy for the next decade and the three decades after. That negative trajectory is continuing to this day with things like subsidies for EV manufacturing and adoption and funding of Canadian-based researchers without control over who gets the benefits of that research.

In today's economy, it is not productive to create technology for somebody else, manufacture someone else's technology or buy someone else's technology. Canada needs to prioritize economically productive activities by owning and commercializing intangible assets and controlling and monetizing data. Canada's current path is one of a developing nation. If we keep it up, we're going to become the developing nation that we're positioning ourselves to be.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you, Mr. Hinton.

We will now proceed to Madame Nguyen for five minutes.

Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

[Anne Nguyen, Chief AI Officer, Conseil de l'innovation du Québec]

Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to contribute to your work.

The Conseil de l'innovation du Québec is an independent organization supported by the Ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et de l'Énergie, or MEIE. When it comes to artificial intelligence, its current mandate is to support and advise the ministry and certain government authorities responsible for public policy in this area to consult ecosystem stakeholders in order to use this technological driver for the benefit of Quebec's economic, social, environmental and cultural development.

We also support MEIE in its efforts to mobilize businesses and organizations and promote responsible AI adoption across the province.

Turning scientific excellence into tangible benefits requires a fluid continuum from research and experimentation to organizational adoption and commercialization.

The council also conducted the consultation process Prêt pour l'IA, mobilizing 15 co-leaders, 250 experts, 420 contributions from members of the public and 1,500 participants to formulate 37 foundational recommendations. The council has also supported, with integrity, the following five recommendations that are consistent with the foundations of Prêt pour l'IA and adapted to current realities.

First, the council recommends leading by example and becoming a customer of publicly funded innovation. To generate value, the government can no longer just fund research: It must adopt and test the solutions it helps bring about.

A first public contract program would allow Canadian companies to win a first government contract when their solutions resolve matters of public interest. Being an early adopter creates a market, reduces risk and sends a structuring message to the ecosystem.

Second, the council recommends creating demand and investing upstream in recurring matters of public interest. Several European countries use demand-side policies to drive innovation towards public priorities. This approach complements the legislative and ethical frameworks of Prêt pour l'IA.

Certain issues like aging infrastructure, climate risk and pressure on public services are becoming so commonplace that the private market cannot bear the risks on its own. A federal demand creation policy would challenge the public, fund emerging technologies and drive Canadian innovation. This is a proven model to move things faster from research to impact.

Third, the council recommends making AI literacy a national jurisdiction. A Canada-wide AI literacy strategy is essential to prepare the public for the technological shift. It should cover primary education, continuing education and requalification, as well as support for individuals after they cease active work. Qualified people are better prepared to make informed decisions, adapt to changes in the labour market and resist disinformation. Literacy is a pillar of collective resilience.

Fourth, the council recommends structuring an industrialization continuum. We need to support a coherent path connecting basic research, applied research, experimentation, organizational adoption and commercialization. Investing in this continuum, data infrastructure, joint labs and test environments will translate our scientific excellence into real-world solutions and keep Canada on the leading edge.

Fifth, the council recommends turning knowledge into a public good and supporting open intelligence and expertise. We need to build on open innovation infrastructure and collaborative AI technical spaces to accelerate applied research, knowledge transfer and responsible adoption across all sectors.

Great digital advancements have historically relied on shared infrastructure like Linux, Python and other foundational technologies that showcase the power of open innovation. With that in mind, the council launched Brigade IA, a collective intelligence technical space that brings together experts, practitioners, public entities and economic actors to deal with the shared challenges of responsible AI adoption.

Brigade IA pools scientific and technical knowledge, proven practices, reusable tools and solutions, and models to facilitate secure AI integration. This kind of open infrastructure builds collective capacity to innovate, reduces AI adoption risk and accelerates responsible implementation across all sectors.

In conclusion, Madam Chair, AI represents a historic turning point. The countries that succeed will be those that turn their innovation into economic, social and democratic values.

The five drivers presented today—leading by example, creating demand, educating the public, structuring the continuum and making knowledge a public good—can turn Canada into not only a scientific leader, but also a global leader in the responsible industrialization of artificial intelligence.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

With that, we will now proceed to Dr. Creutzberg, president and chief executive officer of the Council of Canadian Academies.

Please go ahead. You have five minutes.

[Dr. Tijs Creutzberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Council of Canadian Academies]

Madam Chair and honourable members of this committee, I thank you for this opportunity to contribute to your deliberations today.

My name is Tijs Creutzberg. I'm the president and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies, or CCA.

The CCA is an independent, not-for-profit organization established 20 years ago to provide rigorous, expert-led assessments of scientific matters of public interest.

Our mandate is straightforward: to convene leading experts across disciplines and sectors to voluntarily apply their knowledge and judgment in assessing complex policy topics important to Canada. Our panel members do not advocate, make recommendations or represent political or sectoral interests. Rather, their job is to reach agreement on what the evidence says, with the goal of informing decisions made by you, our elected representatives, along with government policy-makers, public institutions and others.

Today, I shall speak to some key findings from our recent work that are relevant to your deliberations, beginning with the valorization of AI discovery.

In our most recent report, a panel looked closely at the conditions supporting the commercialization of advanced technologies in Canada. The findings are not encouraging. Indicators continue to point to the long-standing challenges that Canada faces when seeking to capture the benefits of homegrown scientific discoveries and technologies. Chief among them is the scaling of start-ups' access to capital. Firms often rely on foreign—mostly U.S.—capital to scale up, which can result in the loss of IP and economic benefits. The size of VC deals in Canada is also significantly smaller. Late-stage capital is scarce, and scale-up rates remain low overall. AI also needs talent, and here the panel found that many top researchers leave Canada after postgraduate training for higher salaries and better opportunities.

For Canada, however, the big economic opportunity is less in the scientific discoveries of AI and more in the use of AI throughout the economy. This goes beyond simple diffusion to reimagining industries altogether—reinventing processes, structures and business models. Here, again, signs are not promising. Business adoption of AI has been low and growing too slowly, especially in contrast to our peers.

Now let me turn to AI in research.

AI has tremendous potential in scientific research. It can not only eliminate repetitive scientific tasks but also drive scientific investigation through automated hypothesis generation and experimentation. As it becomes more central, it also brings a number of challenges to Canada's research system. Through its ability to integrate disciplines, AI is blurring the boundaries among those very disciplines and thus challenging how research is typically administered, funded and evaluated. AI also requires that we think differently about research integrity, and about who or what exactly is responsible for research conduct. There remains general legal ambiguity when AI tools contribute to research discovery, error or safety risk.

As for intellectual property, current IP laws struggle with machine-generated discoveries due to unclear inventorship and weak protection of datasets.

This brings me to my final point on the protection of AI scientific discoveries. Many nations are seeking to harness AI. With this competition come security concerns, including foreign interference and IP theft. The challenge for AI is that it sits at the intersection between two competing objectives: open science goals—like open datasets, open models and reproducibility—and national security concerns. While Canada has policies in place listing AI as a sensitive technology, thus requiring administrative precautions, our panel flagged the need for Canadian researchers and institutions to go further and embrace a modern research mindset of having awareness of the risks, alongside responsible research conduct. It is one wherein researchers and administrators understand AI's dual-use risks, related geopolitical conditions and the security responsibilities they share to protect Canada and its people.

Madam Chair and members, I have a final note from the CCA on the use of AI for evidence-based decisions. AI tools are, indeed, exciting, but they introduce many high-stakes risks. When poorly governed or used, AI can amplify bias, mislead and obscure uncertainty. Also, common AI tools only access published knowledge, missing the insights of practitioners, local knowledge, lived experience and linguistic nuance, all of which can be important for complex policy decisions. In short, AI has the potential to result in decisions that harm Canada's people, communities, economy and reputation. The CCA, for its part, is pleased to be part of a thoughtful community working to provide the trusted and unbiased leadership needed to ensure that AI enhances—rather than replaces—sound judgment in evidence for policy.

Thank you. I welcome questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you.

Now we will start our first round of questioning with MP DeRidder for six minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome back, Mr. Hinton. My questions will be for you.

The federal government spent $240 million on the American firm CoreWeave to build a data centre here in Canada. In a time of being in a trade war, we're using taxpayer dollars to fund American firms. In your opinion, through our data, are we also putting our national security at risk to the American firms as a whole?

[Jim Hinton]

Yes. CoreWeave is a U.S. company, and even though the data centre is located just up the street from me in Cambridge, Ontario, it doesn't mean that the U.S. government can't get access to the data and to the algorithms. There's no reason why a Canadian firm wasn't chosen. There are many Canadian companies that could have been chosen. It wasn't because there wasn't capacity. It wasn't because there weren't Canadian companies with the right technology.

All of those preconditions are compromising our national security and our economic security by design.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Microsoft announced a plan to invest $7.5 billion over the next two years for digital and AI infrastructure. In their procurement announcement, Microsoft issued a five-point plan to protect Canada's digital sovereignty. One point was to keep Canadian data on Canadian soil.

Given that Microsoft is an American company and is subject to laws such as the U.S. CLOUD Act, can Microsoft truly guarantee sovereignty over Canadian data and IP or are there legal limitations that Canadians should be aware of?

[Jim Hinton]

Microsoft cannot.

In a European parliamentary committee, a legal officer from one of the cloud companies admitted and acknowledged that the U.S. CLOUD Act compels them to share data. France, for example, is moving away from Microsoft. Other countries are doing that because of this glaring gap.

Corporate assurances won't cut it. We really have to build the capacity. It's not protectionist to build our own ability to protect our data. Even if it's located in Canada, it needs to be controlled and 100% out of the jurisdiction of foreign firms or foreign countries. The CLOUD Act is just one example. There are other policies and other pieces in place, like the PATRIOT Act and other things, that compromise our ability to govern these.

Sovereignty is a lot more than this. Microsoft just may not be part of that piece of the value chain. They're having to transition out in countries like France.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Would it not be more effective to strengthen our IP sovereignty by incentivizing Canadian companies such as eStruxture to build domestic data storage and compute infrastructure, rather than relying on American companies like Microsoft, where IP sovereignty cannot be guaranteed? How is that, in your opinion, building Canada strong and sovereign?

[Jim Hinton]

It's not. We have great Canadian companies and we're relying on these U.S. foreign companies because our systems are compromised. We have captured systems by these foreign firms and foreign countries. We need to be standing on our own two legs and we're not. We continue to invest in systems—national defence systems and health systems—that rely on foreign firms, thus compromising the data, the algorithms and our economic competitiveness.

If we give these billion-dollar contracts, these hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of contracts, to foreign firms, that's a lost opportunity, and our Canadian firms will be even that much further behind. We don't have the industrial capacity because we continue to put Canadian firms far below those global firms.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Effectively, we're using taxpayer dollars to put our data at risk in terms of our national security and sovereignty.

[Jim Hinton]

That's right.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

If a government does fund sovereign compute, how can it ensure the companies it funds still have the freedom to operate, in your opinion?

[Jim Hinton]

That's a very big challenge. You can't just push out Microsoft, Google or Amazon without having freedom to operate. You have to work with Canadian firms that have a strong IP position in AI and cloud compute to be able to push them out.

Ninety per cent of the patents issued out of the Canadian intellectual property office go to foreign firms, so even in Canada we have limited freedom to operate. We need things—patent collectives, resources—to be able to capture that IP, generate that IP and then have freedom to operate.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Another area where we're spending taxpayer dollars is through SR and ED. We've learned in this committee that Huawei got $100 million back in SR and ED credits last year.

Just because you're headquartered in Canada doesn't mean we're funding foreign nationals with our tax structure base right now.

Can you explain how that's completely backward and what we should be doing instead?

[Jim Hinton]

Yes. More than half of SR and ED, I believe, goes to foreign firms. All of that value—all of the IP and all of the economic returns—goes to those nations and not to Canada. We're funding our competitors and not realizing that value.

Huawei still works with all of Canada's universities. I just did a quick search. Since 2023, there were more than 26 patents assigned to Huawei Technologies in Canada, as well as Canadian universities—at least 10 Canadian universities—so it hasn't stopped. It continues.

I testified before this committee more than two years ago on this very subject, and Canadian universities are still working with Huawei.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

We've banned their technology, but we're funding their research. That's a little bit of a conflict.

[Jim Hinton]

Yes.

Security guidelines were put out in 2023 purportedly to manage research security. That hasn't changed. On the ground, there's been no impact. It continues to take Canadian research—a lot of those are AI patents and research—out of the country to China, to other jurisdictions and to the U.S.

[Kelly DeRidder, Conservative, Kitchener Centre, ON]

How many times have you spoken directly to the current government about what needs to be done here in Canada and have not been listened to?

[Jim Hinton]

I was in this very building a couple of years ago with the then minister of innovation presenting this information. He said publicly, and was quoted in an article in The Globe and Mail, that we need more patents for our AI institutes. That hasn't happened.

I did a quick search. Do you know how many patents the Vector Institute has in its name? There is one. I said that there were 2,734,000 patents granted and that's just one patent.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. The time is up for MP DeRidder.

With that, we will proceed to MP Sawatzky for six minutes.

Welcome to the science and research committee. Please go ahead.

[Jake Sawatzky, Liberal, New Westminster—Burnaby—Maillardville, BC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for coming today.

Dr. Creutzberg, I have some questions around AI alignments and ensuring that the pathway that AI is taking is aligned with our values.

I was wondering if maybe you could explain in practical terms how you see AI alignments. Do you see any gaps between the direction AI is going and what we consider to be our human values?