Artificial Intelligence

The Dais at TMU is pleased to contribute this submission to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. The Dais is a public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, connecting people to ideas and power we need to build a more inclusive, innovative, prosperous Canada. This includes a focus on the responsible adoption and governance of new technology, which we have been engaged with for the past seven years.

This submission to the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology (INDU) highlights areas of concern and recommendations to make Canada’s proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) fit to purpose to responsibly govern AI and its risks. In October 2023, the Dais and the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy convened a roundtable with 30 participants from academia, civil society, and industry to address concerns about the proposed AIDA.

As digital skills continue to evolve at a rapid pace, workforce planners, policymakers and employers must ensure the workforce is equipped to meet current and future labour market demands.

We partnered with CIFAR to design and deliver a series of labs to discuss the public policy implications of artificial intelligence (AI). This series engaged over 125 policymakers from the public, private, academic, and not-for-profit sectors across Canada. This report shares trends in participant-generated policy recommendations and the lessons we learned while creating cross-country workshops.

Despite the productivity promise of AI, adoption across Canadian firms has been slow. Our analysis of available literature on AI adoption identifies talent as a critical pre-condition to successful firm-level adoption; scarcity of talent is therefore a key barrier to wide-scale AI adoption across Canadian firms.