Madam Speaker, I am pleased to follow my colleague and I thank him for his really good work with regard to this report, which was issued in October 2022.
It is sad that we have not seen the government use this report for what it should have been used for. It is a call for action to deal with many of the issues of artificial intelligence, and it puts due light and justice not only to areas of concern but also to some of the good that AI can do, as my colleague referenced, when it is applied to conditions that have oversight and due diligence related to knowledge and awareness. It also looks at the vulnerabilities of AI as it is being built out.
I have had the opportunity to attend several conferences across the United States and Canada on artificial intelligence, and I can say that we are missing the opportunity to act in a responsible fashion. My colleague mentioned some practical examples, and I will return to those in a few minutes. I want to start by identifying that at the industry committee, Bill C-27, to deal with artificial intelligence, has been languishing since the start of this Parliament. That bill was tabled by the government and not a single thing took place with respect to it for a full year. We had a series of hearings and discussions with testimony that lasted weeks upon weeks to get to the bill, and at that time, we identified several problems.
There are two key components the New Democrats have been pushing for with regard to this bill that are important right now. The issues over privacy, which there seems to be a path forward to resolve, were part of the bill. Then the government decided to put artificial intelligence in the bill as well, which complicated the bill's sense. The government tried to sneak one past everybody by combining these pieces of legislation, which was not necessary. In fact, it was the member for New Westminster—Burnaby who got the bill separated for votes in this chamber, which we can still have, but the bill should never have been put together like this. The protection of Canadians' privacy should have been, foremost, the part of the bill we did first, before even going to testimony on artificial intelligence, instead of trying to sneak one by the Canadian public.
My colleague from Hamilton has outlined some of the deficiencies of artificial intelligence related to facial recognition, which this report speaks to. However, artificial intelligence, given some of the models that have been developed to date that people use, also already shows biases with regard to race, religion and the inputs it has. I have heard from the Amazons and the Googles at different conferences, and they admit to their failures in creating algorithms. They have biases for race and different genders built and baked into their systems because the people generating AI are not diverse and do not have to deal with the consequences of people being identified and misidentified mostly based on not being white and male. That is a known fact in the entire universe of AI.
In fact, at the time the government tabled the bill, a number of AI scientists broke from the major conglomerates to warn humanity about that. However, we have seen what has taken place from how badly the bill was manufactured, as we have over 200 amendments on this bill alone. As referenced here in the chamber by one of my colleagues on the committee, over 50 amendments were from the government, which tells us how badly it was crafted.
Those are very important factors to identify, because we are passing on protecting Canadian privacy and on updating the Privacy Commissioner. That is identified through several excellent recommendations in this report, which call for action. Despite that, not only have the Liberals done nothing, but on top of that, they filibustered their own bill. Even in the past week, when the minister was in Montreal, the Liberals blamed the committee and the opposition for holding up the bill. His own members filibustered their own bill before we broke at the end of the last session. That is what took place in committee and they blamed us publicly.
I asked the minister at committee just last week whether he regretted his comments or at least wanted to clarify them, but he doubled down. We have been requesting amendments to deal with the Privacy Commissioner and to protect Canadians, which they know of, but the Liberals are hanging onto the idea that we want to be complicit in an AI strategy that is not fundamentally vetted and has the not-for-profit community, the public and the academic community all concerned.
The Googles, the Amazons and all the others that are going to benefit from this are not concerned, and that is why they are clinging on to keeping the bill together. What I want to talk about, in terms of how we can move forward, the NDP's proposition to deal with the one carrying point that has a problem. This has united the other members on the committee, the Conservatives, the Bloc and the NDP, who are concerned about a tribunal system set up regarding the Privacy Commissioner.
We have concerns about that because the Competition Bureau has a tribunal over top of it. As New Democrats called for stopping the takeover of Shaw by Rogers, the government allowed the Competition Bureau to be sued for $5 million for doing its job by Rogers itself. The New Democrats defended the Canadian public. They defended the position that should have been there, which was not to let this takeover take place. On top of that, the public was punished by not even having their representation be able to carry the case without repercussions that were allowed from Rogers and Telus.
To wrap up quickly, the real repercussions are as follows: We have seen the Lavender project used by the Israel Defense Forces, using artificial intelligence, as a practical situation that has cost human lives. Today, this has consequences for thousands of families in Gaza. It is a real situation that has come to take place since this report was published. It is a real situation in which artificial intelligence in the military needs oversight and control.
I agree with my colleague and the rest of the committee in their call for halting artificial intelligence face recognition right now until we get some controls. It is about time the Liberals actually came to the table with solutions instead of putting up problems and other problems in the future.