Science and Research Committee on Feb. 12th, 2026

[Dr. Peter Lewis]

I'm glad you were able to come and visit us in the lab and meet the students we have. I think you're right. There is such a wealth of expertise and real energy amongst the students and researchers being trained under such programs as the ones through NSERC and other funding agencies, including in labs like mine.

In terms of how we retain, which perhaps I can broaden to how we attract, I really welcome some of the very recent changes around trying to ensure that HQP from overseas are able to come to Canada to engage in graduate study and post-doctoral research. I think this is essential. Anything that can be done to streamline and smooth those kinds of processes in terms of things like timelines is very welcome. It enables us to act in a much more agile way. I think that is crucial.

In terms of attracting and keeping people afterwards, and where they go next, I think we've seen that things like visas that allow graduate student graduates to be able to stay in Canada, and perhaps stay even in the province they've moved to, are incredibly attractive and incredibly valuable in terms of enabling them to then stay and move into either further research jobs or into industry. We see examples of students who are very keen to move into those kinds of engineering jobs or indeed some of the more business-facing jobs around AI adoption and trustworthiness.

Even more so nowadays, we're seeing people wanting to move into jobs as AI ethics officers, taking on regulatory roles and being part of that ecosystem—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting, Dr. Lewis. The time is up for MP McKelvie. Thank you.

We will now proceed to MP Blanchette-Joncas for six minutes.

Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to welcome the witnesses who are with us for this important study.

If I may, I'd be pleased to come back to the central topic of our study, artificial intelligence.

My first question is for Mr. Lewis.

If an artificial intelligence system were deployed in Canada and caused serious harm tomorrow morning, who would have the legal authority right now to stop it immediately, in your opinion?

[Dr. Peter Lewis]

That's a very interesting question. I would defer to the lawyers. I'm not a lawyer. I would not be able to comment on legal accountability or responsibility for things like this. I think you were talking about the legal versus the practical ability to stop it.

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

To your knowledge, is there currently a mechanism within the legal framework to possibly thwart a dangerous attack generated by artificial intelligence?

[Dr. Peter Lewis]

I am not a lawyer. I would not like to comment on that.

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

Is there a witness with us today who could help us answer that question?

I see none, Madam Chair, so I'll move on to my next question.

Mr. Owen, compared to the European Union or countries like the United States, does Canada suffer from an institutional deficit when it comes to independent oversight of artificial intelligence, in your opinion?

Do we currently have a truly independent authority that makes it possible to regulate and observe whether there are problems, or are there only advisory mechanisms?

[Dr. Taylor Owen]

Thank you for the question.

There is not.

I think there are various pathways to build one, and to legislate and empower one. One pathway was in the previous consumer protection privacy act, which built in an AI-focused, systemic risk assessment and a risk-based regulator. That was very similar to what the EU AI Act did: create one body to regulate a broad variety of AI capacities and products.

I'm not sure that's where we're headed, or where many other countries are headed. It's certainly not where the U.S. is going. Instead, what I think we're likely to see are different regulatory and safety capacities—to your previous question—sitting in different types of regulatory bodies that are, in some way, more targeted at the types of AI they oversee and the sectors in which those exist.

On the consumer safety side, regarding the ways citizens are using AI products in their daily lives, most of that is best done through an online harms regulatory structure, in my view. We already have that model, which has been widely consulted. I think it provides the right risk assessment and transparency obligations for social media platforms and could be applied to consumer-facing AI products.

That is very different from the spirit of your initial question. I am also not a lawyer, so I don't know what legal emergency mechanisms may or may not exist. There may be some that I'm not aware of, but those would be for a very different set of risks versus what we would have through a consumer-facing risk and transparency mechanism like the online harms act. I think they need to be treated as fundamentally different, just like systemic risks to our health care system, for example, or to our financial system, both of which have existing regulatory authorities.

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

If the ability to calculate critical infrastructure basic models is concentrated among a few companies, even foreign private companies, can we continue to say Canada has strategic autonomy?

[Dr. Taylor Owen]

It depends on what we mean by “strategic autonomy”, and it depends on what we mean by “digital sovereignty”, which is an analogous frame that's getting used a lot now.

Think about, for example, the information ecosystem, where most of my work is. The fact that our information ecosystem is now largely reliant on both a small number of U.S. platforms and a small number of U.S. large language models would certainly create difficulties if these were to be leveraged and used against us. Should we be developing more autonomy in both of those respects? Yes, we should be building Canadian systems, and there are many others who can speak better than I can about the infrastructure needed to do that. We also need the ability to govern the ones we use. Right now, we have neither. We have neither our own systems nor the levers through which we can govern the foreign products we use.

I think that twin deficiency is a real vulnerability, as you point out.

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

I just want to go back to something you mentioned.

As far as you know, there's currently no mechanism to regulate artificial superintelligence. Specialized AI is different from artificial superintelligence.

[Dr. Taylor Owen]

There's certainly no existing mechanism that makes this differentiation. Whether there are legal mechanisms to address some of the runaway harms you're alluding to, like superintelligence, I don't know. I suppose there are forms of emergency blocking that could occur, for example.

Again, that's not my expertise.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you. You can talk about that in detail in the next round.

This ends our first round of questioning. We will start our second round of questioning with MP Ho for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My first set of questions will be for Professor Kristal.

I'll say that it's a pleasure to have you here, as a fellow Schulich MBA grad.

In late 2025, the Liberal government announced a $1.7-billion initiative to recruit up to 1,000 international researchers. That's roughly $1.7 million per researcher. At the same time, many experts, including you, argued that Canada's weakness is not in basic research. It's in scaling and commercialization.

In your view, has the government misdiagnosed the problem altogether by pouring more money into producing research? Should they be focused on something else?

[Prof. Mehmet Murat Kristal]

As a researcher, I am always in favour of more research, so that is great. At the same time, it's not only researchers. We need to do more. That's the bottom line.

Also, when you refer to $1.7 million per researcher for 1,000 researchers, over the lifetime of a researcher, unfortunately, that's not a lot of money. I would like to point out that, but as I indicated in my submission, it's more than just research. We need to bring AI to the organizations. Ninety-six per cent of the Canadian economy is based on small and medium-sized enterprises, and those enterprises need support because it's our overall competitiveness. How we do that, from my perspective, is the million-dollar question. It's research, but also more.

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

You also mentioned jobs in AI. There are, depending on which report you look at, tens of thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs that could be lost in Canada due to artificial intelligence. We see multinational companies cutting tens of thousands of jobs because of AI alone.

Do you think the government has a plan to deal with this transformation?

[Prof. Mehmet Murat Kristal]

I think upskilling is very important. There will be certain tasks that can be done faster by AI systems, which will reduce jobs, but the bottom line is this: In the way I see AI applications, it's not head count reduction. It is more about how we can allow individuals working in any kind of organization to do more meaningful and thoughtful work.

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

Do you see any sort of plan? Is the government doing enough to do that upskilling? Are you comfortable that the upskilling is going to occur at a pace that would meet the number of jobs that are going to be lost due to AI?

[Prof. Mehmet Murat Kristal]

I would like to see more AI literacy. The application of AI in organizations is a real problem. The more we can train our society—the people who are working—the more competitive we will become.

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

The government recently created an AI strategy task force, on which there appears to be limited representation from the energy and electricity sectors. These are the sectors that will help build our grid and handle all the AI demand we're going to see in the foreseeable future.

Do you see that as an issue? Do you think that's a potential blind spot in the AI strategy?

[Prof. Mehmet Murat Kristal]

The AI strategy should encompass everybody, because it's not only the electricity grid or infrastructure providers. You have health care, legal and finance, and AI will touch upon all sorts of different things within our lives. The more you can have participation from different walks of life, the better it will be. Creating a coherent nationwide strategy means you need to get input from different parts of the country.

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

I just have a little bit more time left.

The government, in late 2025, discussed doing this AI sprint. Is the government sprinting fast enough, in your view, in its handling of AI?

[Prof. Mehmet Murat Kristal]

We could go faster, but we also need to be thoughtful, because any AI application has resource implications. You want to make sure that whatever you're spending money on...because there is legislation and there are strategies that you're going to build. Once you start implementing those, there is also a cost element to that. What we tell our students all the time is that when you're going to do an AI project, you need to have a clear understanding of your business goals and the ROI attached to it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

Thank you. I'm sorry for interrupting, but the time is up for MP Ho.

We will now proceed to MP Rana for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Aslam Rana, Liberal, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for being here with us.

Dr. Kristal, I'm very glad to know that you are also a civil engineer. My question is for you.

You are one of the founding program directors of both the master of business analytics and the master of management in artificial intelligence programs at the Schulich School of Business. I was hoping you could speak to how Canadian academics are responding to the recent surge in AI and whether they are facing barriers to conducting research and ultimately commercializing their research.

What would help break down these barriers?