Dozens gathered in the Richcraft Hall atrium Wednesday to hear from leading experts in policy, politics and technology discuss the future of artificial intelligence.
The Douglas Coldwell Layton Foundation co-hosted the panel with Carleton’s Clayton H. Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management. Titled “The Ghost in the Machine,” the event explored the threat AI poses to Canadian politics.
The main focus was on the adoption of generative AI.
Carleton public policy associate professor and panellist Amanda Clarke said one of the issues with generative AI is a lack of responsibility. .
“When you ask individuals what leads them to trust an AI system, they say, ‘I want to know that someone is held accountable for it,” Clarke said.
Sean O’Reilly, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said AI systems should remain local.
“I think that Canada, collectively, should be developing its own in-house AI,” O’Reilly said. “I don’t see that right now with what investments the Government of Canada have made.”
After the 2025 federal election, Prime Minister Mark Carney named Toronto MP Evan Solomon as Canada’s first minister responsible for artificial intelligence and digital innovation.
Carney’s first budget presented earlier this month proposes more than $1 billion to be spent over the next five years to build up the country’s AI ecosystem.
Jonathan Barry, an advisor on international AI policy at Mila, a Quebec AI institute, nonetheless echoed O’Reilly’s call for sovereignty.
“We’ve fallen behind quite a bit,” Barry said. “This becomes a really acute issue when the only two countries that can field frontier AI, that means the best of the best AI . . . are the U.S. and China. And to be frank, these are not reliable partners anymore.”
Barry said the European Union has taken strides to become self-sufficient, but Canada hasn’t yet jumped on board.
“[The EU] has asked Canada time and time again to join this effort, and we haven’t raised our hands,” Barry added.
“We have the best researchers in the world. We have the right climate to be building data centers. We have all of these things, and we’re not stepping up — even with this looming threat to sovereignty.”
Some of the event’s attendees shared the panellists’ concerns, including Betsy Schuurman, business and government information technician at Carleton’s MacOdrum Library.
“Everyone will ultimately agree that AI is happening, that it’s going to be used,” Schuurman said. “Then, it’s just some question of whether the Canadian government can kind of get its act together.”
Trusting AI begins with transparency from the institutional powers that use it, said Jordan Leichnitz, former deputy chief of staff for the NDP and a political campaign strategist.
“One of the leading indicators that led up to Trump’s election was a massive drop in institutional trust among the U.S. public,” Leichnitz said. “When people feel like they are not being served by their political and economic systems, they want to burn them down.”
“That should be a problem that concerns every party across the board to make sure that we don’t get into that space in Canada.”
Featured image by Mya Pasparakis/the Charlatan
