Industry and Technology

Opening remarks

As a national AI institute, one of the things Vector does is make Canadian compute available to researchers on a scale that otherwise would not be available to them. This means they are working with Canadian data in the context of a Canadian compute environment, where they can be sure that their data is safe and secure.

Opening remarks

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Canada is at an inflection point. Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from the research stage into the very core of our economy. It is reshaping how we build, produce, serve customers and compete globally. The question before this committee is not whether AI will transform Canada’s strategic industries, but whether Canada will shape that transformation or allow it to be shaped elsewhere. Bell believes Canada has a real opportunity to lead. Not only can it contribute to research, but it can also deploy AI at scale to strengthen productivity, competitiveness and economic sovereignty. Achieving that depends on trusted infrastructure, practical adoption, and clear authority over the systems Canadians rely on. For Bell, AI sovereignty is operational. It depends on who controls the compute, where data is stored, how it moves across networks and who has the authority to operate or shut down critical systems. Bell’s networks already form part of Canada’s digital backbone, supporting businesses, governments and public safety nationwide. Building on that foundation, we are investing in Bell AI Fabric, Canada’s largest AI compute…

Opening remarks

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, honourable members and fellow panellists. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee on a matter of critical importance to Canada's economic future. We stand at a decisive inflection point. We possess world-leading AI research and innovation, yet we confront a systemic productivity crisis that has allowed our national growth to stall for decades. We train brilliant minds, engineers and researchers, only to witness them leave because the essential domestic infrastructure required to commercialize their innovation does not exist. Seventy-five per cent of AI patents developed in Canada are owned by foreign entities, and our most valuable talent inevitably follows the computing infrastructure down south. In today's AI era, compute power is national power, and we cannot adopt AI at scale without the absolute confidence that our proprietary data, operational intelligence and competitive advantages remain under Canadian jurisdiction. This isn't just my belief; this is a message we hear from Canadian entities looking to adopt AI themselves. They want clarity on the Canadian definition of AI sovereignty, and they want consistency…

Opening remarks

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today. My name is Joëlle Pineau. I'm the chief AI officer at Cohere, where I lead the company's product strategy and supervise our research at Cohere Labs. I'm also a professor at McGill University and an academic member of Mila. I'd like to begin by highlighting the magnitude of the moment we are in. AI is a fundamental economic shift reminiscent of the massive industrial mobilization of the forties and has rapidly evolved from an academic pursuit into a defining force in national productivity, security and sovereignty, which has taken me from McGill University to being with Cohere today. Global competition is now nation to nation. Countries are mobilizing defence budgets and strategic investors to back their AI champions. Without actively building sovereign AI capacity, we risk absolute reliance on foreign infrastructure and losing decades of economic benefit. Canada can anchor its ecosystem with our own values and governance system. Founded in Toronto in 2019, Cohere is Canada's only foundational model lab at global scale today, building large language models that are…

Opening remarks

I think there are going to be security issues like this, where we're going to have to land as a country on what the right controls are that we want in place in Canadian deployments. Our company is not in the model and application space. Primarily, we partner with Canadian organizations to do that, but I think it emphasizes the importance of building out those capabilities in Canada, right from the infrastructure layer up through the stack, including the security layer. We are in the security space. We spend a lot of time both educating our clients on the security risks and supporting them in developing security solutions to address those risks as they deploy AI so we can continue to facilitate adoption. We need a Canadian ecosystem and Canadian infrastructure so that we aren't faced with a choice between an approach that is not regulated in Canada but determined in another country or not deploying AI. We need the ability to deploy Canadian-governed AI, and that's why we're so focused on developing that full-stack solution.