Industry and Technology

Opening remarks

Good morning, Mr. Chair and honourable committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Canada has built a strong reputation in artificial intelligence. We are known globally for our research and our talent, and the foundations we've helped create in this field. The question in front of us now is not whether Canada understands AI, it's whether we are turning that understanding into real outcomes. The reality is that Canada doesn't have an AI research problem, rather, we have an AI translation problem. We are very good at developing models and advancing ideas at a research level. We are much less effective at deploying these systems into the environments where they actually create value, for example, factories, supply chains, infrastructure and the core industries that drive our economy. The gap becomes even more important as AI evolves—and it is evolving on a daily basis. We've seen a version of this before. In other sectors, early signals were dismissed as premature until they became dominant industrial realities. Physical AI is following a similar trajectory, and the window to build capability may be shorter than it appears. We are now entering a phase where AI is…

Opening remarks

Good morning, Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to appear today. My name is Stephanie Simmons, and yes, I am the chief quantum officer and founder of Photonic Inc. That will become a title you see throughout the industry, just like chief AI officer has come through. These things are going to change the world. I'm also an associate professor of physics at Simon Fraser University, and I'm a Canadian research chair and co-chair of Canada's national quantum strategy's advisory council. I've been in quantum since 2001, so I've a lot to share. I thank you very much for your interest. Photonic is proud to be a Canadian leader in quantum computing. We were founded and remain headquartered in beautiful British Columbia. Since beginning commercial operations in 2021, we have now raised more than $375 million and have over 160 employees in Canada and in various allied countries. At Photonic, our core mission is to commercialize the next branch of physics and build the world's first commercial-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer and, as such, build a truly generational Canadian success story. I'm here today to explain how quantum technologies that we and our…

Opening remarks

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon committee members. My name is Daniel Perry. I'm the director of federal affairs at the Council of Canadian Innovators. I am joined by my colleague, Laurent Carbonneau, our vice-president of policy and advocacy. The Council of Canadian Innovators is Canada’s 21st-century business council. We represent over 175 Canadian-headquartered, high-growth technology companies operating across a number of sectors, including artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, advanced manufacturing and defence. As we take a look at the conversation today, I want to step back and look at the global economy. It is no longer neutral or rules-based. Leading economies are actively shaping markets and securing control over critical technologies, value chains and standards. They are doing this by leveraging economic policies and industrial strategies. We have seen this recently in the United States' national security strategy, where America is treating technological leadership, control over critical technologies and economic strength as core instruments of geopolitical power. AI sits at the centre of this shift as a foundational layer of economic growth and…

Opening remarks

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, committee members. My name is Simon Ahdoot. I'm the president and CEO of the Hypertec Group. We've been in the IT industry for 42 years, since 1984. During that time, we've really seen every phase of IT evolve. Over the past 20 years, we have developed significant expertise in data centre construction and advanced computing. What this allows us to do today is to be well positioned to meet the computing needs related to AI—which are really quite different from what we've seen in the past—while maximizing the sustainability and performance of these systems. Speaking about AI, in general what we see as the key importance for artificial intelligence is first, overall, to fill a productivity gap. I was just walking down the road here in Ottawa. There's a lot of maintenance that needs to be done, but it's expensive. There are a number of resources we can put to it. If we could have that done more productively and more efficiently, then it would do well all around. A lot of the time, we're importing a lot of things from abroad. If we could do them more efficiently here, that would be a way for us to make sure that we could deliver more competitive…

Opening remarks

That's a great question. It's something we actually talked about in our report to the minister in the scope of his task force. The first piece, which Daniel walked us through, is the pillars of what we recommended. We said to look overall at the picture of scale, because if Canada isn't a place where you can scale a business, it's not going to be a place where you can scale an AI business. The second piece is sovereignty. We need to be sure that we control our own light switches and plumbing to the maximum extent that we can. That still makes sense commercially. The third piece, going to Mr. Falk's question, is, what assets we have that are unique. To pick up on Simon's comments earlier about the five-layer cake, the application layer is also incredibly reliant on really high-quality, domain-specific data. We have really good data in Canada. Those pools of data are typically not well governed. They are very split and there's a lot of public sector data that isn't well leveraged that we could be leveraging a lot better. In the scope of the AI strategy that I understand is forthcoming, one thing that needs to be highly prioritized is how we make public sector data that is…