UNIT CONTENT

Required content

1. Overview of the Canadian AI Ecosystem 

This is a slide deck that lays out the key players in Canada's AI ecosystem, covering the public, private, and civil society sector, as well as some key voices from academia. Familiarize yourself with the content and follow the links in the speaker notes for more details on the actors you are not familiar with.

Optional content

In this section, we curate materials course participants may find useful if they are not familiar with how laws are made in Canada, how lawmaking responsibilities are distributed between the federal government and the provinces, what the difference is between laws and regulations, and how to identify the positions of parliamentarians on proposed laws. 

1. How a Bill becomes a Law by the Parliament of Canada

This is an accessible resource that describes the lawmaking process in Canada, including the institutions involved. There are lots of other relevant resources linked on this site that we recommend browsing through as well. Knowing how a bill becomes law in Canada is important because it equips policy professionals with the foundational knowledge needed to engage meaningfully with legislative processes, identify key moments for influence or intervention, and understand how proposed regulations—such as those related to AI—move from ideas to enforceable laws.

2. Navigating the Legislative Process by Senator Rosa Galvez

This resource contains information about the legislative process from the perspective of professional lobbyists. While there is overlap with the first resource, it offers deeper insight into the informal and strategic dimensions of lawmaking—such as timing, political dynamics, and direct engagement with Parliamentarians—that are often less visible but crucial for effective advocacy.

3. A Decentralized Vision for Canada’s Survival 

As the second resource briefly touched upon, the federal and provincial governments have been allocated distinct powers by the Constitution. That means they have different areas of responsibility in which they can legislate. This resource, while not focused on AI, describes the political motivation for that separation—arguing that decentralization can make Canada more resilient by enabling provinces to act more independently in response to local economic and political pressures.

In the context of this course, the reason for including this article is to sensitize participants to the jurisdictional complexity and potential political controversy surrounding AI governance in Canada. The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), for example, was a federal bill that must operate within areas of federal jurisdiction; they picked interprovincial and international trade. However, many important domains where AI is already being used, like health care, education, and labour standards, fall under provincial jurisdiction.

Understanding this division of powers helps clarify why AI policy may unfold unevenly across Canada and highlights the importance of considering both federal and provincial roles when designing or advocating for AI legislation.

4. Relationship between Acts and Regulations 

This short resource outlines how Acts (laws passed by Parliament) and regulations (subordinate rules made under the authority of Acts) interact. It explains who typically makes regulations, what kinds of decisions should be included in the primary legislation, and what principles constrain regulation-making powers.

We are reading this to understand a critical but often overlooked part of the legislative process: the division of responsibilities between Parliament and the executive branch in shaping and implementing laws. This is especially important in the context of AI governance, where much of the detail—such as compliance mechanisms, and enforcement tools—will be set out in regulations under frameworks like the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), or even lower in the hierarchy, i.e., in technical standards.

The goal is to sensitise participants to the fact that many key decisions about how AI laws work in practice are not made in Parliament but through delegated regulation-making. This raises questions about accountability, transparency, and how and when advocates can influence regulatory processes.

5. Hansard as a resource

This is an unfortunately unwieldy but very useful resource that includes transcriptions of the Parliamentary debates and their decisions. Play around with it, e.g., by filtering for "Artificial Intelligence” or your favorite MP.

There are also resources by the Committee tasked with the review of AI legislation in the previous Parliament:

• Here is a list of all the meetings

• Here you can watch the INDU Committee Hearing where AIGS's founder Wyatt Tessari testified on AIDA