The committee studied the governance and accountability of federal science policy and institutions. Appearing were Wyatt Tessari L'Allié of AI Governance and Safety Canada, Stéphanie Michaud of BioCanRx, Robert Annan of Genome Canada, Karine Morin of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ken Doyle of Tech-Access Canada, and Timothy Chan of the University of Toronto.
Wyatt Tessari L'Allié warned that AI agents—systems that can act autonomously—now pose an unacceptable risk, citing incidents of loss of control and data theft. He recommended that Canada treat advanced AI as a national security crisis, convene global talks toward an AI treaty, and build resilience through monitoring, banning dangerous systems, and preparing containment and shutdown protocols. He disagreed with any suggestion that current governance is sufficient, arguing that governments are far behind the pace of AI development.
Stéphanie Michaud described a structural gap between CIHR-funded research and clinic-ready therapies, where projects stall because no federal mechanism funds the regulatory work needed for clinical trials. She supported an independent oversight function but insisted its mandate must cover real-world outcomes like patient access and clinical deployment, not just grant compliance. She noted that recent funding cuts to BioCanRx threaten to delay or cancel projects that provide novel therapies to patients with no other options.
Robert Annan argued that Canada lacks alignment and coordination across its research system, leading to subscale and fragmented initiatives. He recommended a national science, technology and innovation strategy, stronger mission-driven research, better coordination through a central body, and deliberate support for pathways from research to impact. He noted that Genome Canada uses a federated model with provincial partners and multiple layers of peer review and financial oversight.
Karine Morin stated that existing accountability mechanisms are robust and that creating a new independent body is unnecessary; instead, the focus should be on broadening assessments of research value beyond patents and spin-offs to include social innovation and community benefit. She emphasized that the humanities and social sciences are essential for understanding societal challenges, and that better data on French-language research and clearer mechanisms for researcher data requests are needed.
Ken Doyle highlighted that technology access centres help small and medium-sized companies adopt and commercialize innovations, with measurable outcomes including 70% employment growth and 140% sales growth for collaborating firms. He recommended exploring a patent box model to retain intellectual property in Canada and suggested that companies that offshore publicly funded IP should repay the investment. He noted that administrative fragmentation across federal programs is a barrier for businesses.
Timothy Chan stated that Canada already has strong accountability mechanisms through peer review and institutional reporting, and that any new framework should build on these strengths. He supported mission-driven research as a complement to disciplinary funding, arguing that it requires a collective governance approach to ensure outcomes benefit all Canadians. He disagreed with the idea that early-stage research funding should be reduced to support later-stage commercialization, calling it a false trade-off.
The committee adopted a motion from Vincent Ho, as amended by Taleeb Noormohamed to remove one element, to study the impact of federal funding cuts on science organizations over four meetings.
AI-generated summary — may contain errors; verify against the official evidence.