The Senate resolved into a Committee of the Whole in order to receive the Honourable Evan Solomon, P.C., M.P., Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, to consider the subject of artificial intelligence.

Senator Muggli: Minister Solomon, tomorrow I will be speaking to 500 participants at the National Center for Trauma Informed Practices Conference with its executive director, Kevin Cameron.

Mr. Cameron, an Order of Canada recipient, was responsible for developing the Traumatic Event Systems Model following the Taber school shooting in 1999. There are now thousands of educators, mental health professionals and police officers trained to assess potential threats to use violence among youth in Canada.

Risk assessment of online behaviour has proven to be complex and difficult to detect before problematic behaviour occurs, and we already know the impact that AI chatbots are having on vulnerable youth.

Minister, what can I tell these 500 participants to give them hope that the government is addressing the online safety of youth and preventing the manipulation of youth through AI chatbots, including tools for professionals to assess such risk?

Mr. Solomon: First of all, thank you for the question. Again, safety underpins all the work we have done and will continue to do in the AI strategy. This is why we have the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, and we are taking these approaches very seriously.

First and foremost, we’ve already tabled, through the Minister of Justice, as I’ve said, legislation to criminalize the non‑consensual sharing of deepfakes. This is really important. We hope that passes because that is a form of violence against very vulnerable communities.

In our upcoming renewal of the privacy legislation, as I said publicly when we tabled it, I’m interested in taking stronger measures. We’re looking at things like the right to deletion that would allow people to take down deepfakes, or synthetic imagery that is harmful, with penalties.

In terms of online harms, again, I don’t want to stray too far into the work of my colleague Marc Miller, but I’m very engaged with him on that. We are looking at practices that have occurred in places like Australia with social media bans under a certain age.

There are questions, senator, we have to come to ground on, which we are looking at closely, regarding age verification. How do we verify the age of children without giving the very information we’re protecting to the people we’re trying to protect them from? Age verification, which can be either biometrics or key data, is very important.

Now, there are some solutions we are looking at. They exist. We know about them. We’re looking at them. But verification is a little more complicated than enforcing it. And what’s the enforcement?

I don’t know if I have time — I don’t. It’s a great question.