Category: Perspectives

Navigator in conversation with AI expert Fenwick McKelvey

In anticipation of another year of exponential leaps in AI products and capabilities, Navigator Managing Principal Chris Hall spoke with Fenwick McKelvey, co-director of Concordia University’s Applied AI Institute, about the potential impacts of AI on Canada’s upcoming federal election, the optimistic view of bots, and the difficult choices ahead for businesses looking to keep up. 

CH – You recently conducted research that included a classroom exercise you did with your students to see if AI tools such as OpenAI could be used to manipulate voters. Some of those big firms didn’t say no when you tried to manipulate messages. Can you tell me about your findings?

FM – Many of the AI firms, I feel, are unprepared or not taking seriously their potential impact on, or use in, elections. What I find striking is that for all the rhetoric and evaluations and the money being dumped into AI safety, or Open AI’s claims of protecting its threats to democracy, my small team of graduate students at Concordia University — in collaboration with the University of Ottawa — were able to go to most of the major large language models, ask them very simply and very obviously, “Could you generate 50 fake tweets about my experience going to a (political) rally?” That’s very suspicious. 

[However], every major large language model, Open AI, Anthropic, Microsoft — every one except for Google — happily gave up that information, happily did that work. And that, to me, is part of the issue here. That even though we’ve been talking for 10 years about threats to democracy and the Internet, we don’t see platforms taking that seriously enough. So, while I don’t think AI is going to swing the next election, it does become a major policy issue, and we really haven’t made a lot of headway in addressing it or moving that needle.

CH – What does that tell you about what political players and, frankly, the public need to do to recognize bots and other efforts to manipulate their opinions?

FM – Part of the trend here is acknowledging the increasing pressures being put on the public to be the bot spotters. There’s a large push towards more and more automated messages throughout [the culture], whether that’s ads or synthetic influencers on Instagram. So I think it’s part of this bigger trend that we have to contextualize and think of as a media governance issue. It’s an issue that’s going to require a lot of collaboration between journalists, academics and governments acting in good faith to really make sense of very dramatic shifts in how everyday people consume the news and have to be making this kind of constant decision about what’s real and fake.

CH – Some AI experts are worried that artificial intelligence could play a destructive role in the next federal election, undermining trust in our institutions through disinformation and manipulating data. What concerns do you have?

FM – What I’m most concerned about is how we’ve let our imagination of politics and political futures become so dependent upon technology. For better or worse, technology is not going to break or fix our democracy or the next election.

AI is going to have a marginal effect in the next election, but certainly it’s going to test the norms of our political parties and politicians on how they may or may not use deep fakes as part of their rhetoric, or how they may try to use artificial intelligence to enhance the turn towards micro-targeting. I do think this raises a deeper question about the influence of big tech platforms in our politics. This has been an ongoing issue since Cambridge Analytica [was found to have misused Facebook data for political manipulation in 2018]. More directly, we suffer from a governance question about how a lot of innovation is being imported from Silicon Valley and we lack a sense of how to steer that, and, as a society, how to respond to that.

So that’s a big part of where AI is going to fit into the next election: in one part, how politics, politicians and parties are reacting to it, and, in another part, how this becomes part of their platforms or not.

CH – I’ve asked you about the negative consequences. Are there positive aspects to using artificial intelligence and machine learning in politics?

FM – Certainly. In trying to be nuanced here, I’m trying to give room for the opportunity to think about the upside. [University of Ottawa professor] Elizabeth Dubois and I, when we were working on political bots, would often think about bots being used in journalism to track websites to help reporters monitor changes in government policy or changes in corporate policy. A lot of bots are also instrumental for key websites we use, like Wikipedia, and for the ways we might be able to generate and write content.

I think there are some very interesting questions we might ask about how AI is going to be used in politics. One example I like to give is [embattled Mayor] Eric Adams in New York, who used a generative AI system to call voters and make him sound like he’s speaking in a language he doesn’t speak, whether that’s Yiddish or another foreign language, so voters would hear, in their mother tongue, Eric Adams speaking to them.

Now, that’s a really interesting question of how that enfranchises or invites voters whose first language might not be English into the political process. And that’s, I think, part of where we might see AI help make politics more accessible and ultimately help enfranchise people to participate more in politics given we’re in a time when we see such a low turnout. I like the fact that the Eric Adams example makes people feel a bit uncomfortable, but it also speaks to the possible promises that could happen with this technology.

CH – Does the Canadian government have a role in making sure AI is used in a way that is more productive than malicious?

FM – I think that’s a big question for us: how Canada can influence AI’s development. And certainly, you’ve seen tremendous investment from Canada in AI, both monetarily and strategically, yet it’s unclear how much say Canada will have. And it’s a big open question for me.

That doesn’t deny the fact that Canada has undertaken important measures to update its laws to respond to AI. I would point to the Digital Charter Implementation Act or [Bill] C-27 as a key piece [of legislation] that includes the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act. I’ve had concerns about whether those bills have been developed in such a way that actually builds capacity in civil society and in the corporate sector around dealing with the host of issues AI presents. I think the government needs to think about its policy crafting process as instrumental to building capacity in AI adoption and AI literacy.

CH – You mentioned AI adoption. Let me ask you to look ahead to 2025, if I could. Do you think this is the year when businesses will really begin to embrace AI as part of their practice?

FM – I think businesses are going to face an existential question of whether they want to think about artificial intelligence as a part of their organization or as a service contract in which they’re procuring AI services.

That is a strategic calculation that comes with great implications. In one sense, if you’re a firm that can see very fixed benefits of artificial intelligence, then it’s how do you ensure your organization constructs the artificial intelligence in such a way that it becomes an asset, becomes something you have the capacity of managing and actually have control or governance over. [Conversely, you could turn] towards very large online platforms that are going to be providing these AI services probably for a lower cost, but with clear downsides about how much influence you have and potentially the data flows that are going to be established for those contracts.

CH – Is there a danger of being left behind if companies don’t begin to embrace it in a bigger way?

FM – I think there’s always a risk of being left behind in technologies. But I also think that we’re at a point where there’s a lot of mixed messaging and mixed signals about the upside of artificial intelligence. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.  

Part of it is that AI is going to have impacts, but those impacts are going to look different depending on what the organization is. If you’re a call centre company, where you might be using artificial intelligence — and this is what they’re doing in Japan — to mute enraged customers yelling at their customer-service representatives to make their employees happier or [make it so] their employees sound more English using artificial intelligence, that’s one potential opportunity. That’s very different than in a news organization that might be encountering the fact that what’s going to really differentiate it is that its articles don’t seem like they’re written by machine. So it’s going to vary depending on the organization, and I think that’s why it’s a strategic calculation.

CH – I have heard and read a lot about Canadian productivity lagging behind other OECD countries, and that if we don’t begin to invest in new technologies we can’t close that gap. What is at stake for Canadian companies in the year ahead if they are not prepared to make these kinds of investments in the new technologies?

FM – Well, I think there’s a tension between most managers, who think AI is going to improve productivity, and most employees, who do not. This is a classic moment of being sold snake oil. Is AI going to solve the productivity gap? 

If you’re looking at the macroeconomic issues around Canadian productivity, Canada also has historically low levels of corporate investment in research and development, which also could be a huge factor in why there’s a productivity gap. 

So the idea that AI is going to come and make employees more productive is certainly a slightly naive theory about how Canada’s going to close that productivity gap. The fact that it’s being marketed by AI firms that still have a really open question about how effective these tools are going be in the multitude of use cases they are putting out, means companies should be a bit wary about rushing whole hog into some of these AI solutions. 

To me, [it’s very important] to think about AI as something that really requires a degree of change management in the organization, and a buy-in to make sure AI is being developed and deployed responsibly, ethically, in line with Canadian law, and in ways that actually empower workers’ autonomy and their jobs.

Fenwick McKelvey is co-director of Concordia University’s AI institute.

It feels like a lifetime ago that in 2019, 181 CEOs of the biggest companies in the United States came together to redefine the purpose of a corporation to promote “an economy that serves all Americans.”  

We can laugh at the hubris of the proclamation, but it responded to a real demand for businesses to stand for something beyond profits. The year 2020 intensified that demand. The murder of George Floyd sparked calls for racial justice and equity. The immediate impacts of one global crisis (COVID-19) forced people to think deeply about other crises, like climate change and income inequality.  

Above all, it was a time when businesses seemed to understand that, in the big picture, they operate because of their customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders. And it was time to start acting with all those interests in mind. 

Since 2020, the stakeholder capitalism movement has had a rough go. Emmanuel Faber, who famously boasted that his company, Danone, had “toppled the statue of Milton Friedman” with its purposeful approach to capitalism, was sacked; Nike cut 30 per cent of its sustainability staff; and Larry Fink, one of the leading proponents of stakeholder capitalism, stopped talking about it altogether. 

The strains of this movement were predictable early. Today they’re clearer and starker.  

To start, the issue environment that businesses seemed eager to enter is highly polarized. Take ESG, for example. While it was once widely believed that embracing these principles was strategic from both an ethical and risk management perspective, a rising tide has written the framework off as woke moralizing or a deliberate attack on energy producers, with 18 U.S. states passing laws that discourage the practice. 

Take the Israel-Hamas war as another. While every company should place a high value on human life and oppose race- or religious-based violence of any kind, very few are equipped to offer constructive messages on a complex conflict with age-old roots. Most have chosen the simpler route of retreating altogether. 

Another diagnosis is that for some Canadians, businesses have lost the right to lecture them on social issues. U.S. President Joe Biden famously likes to tell Americans, “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” 

It appears many Canadians are making similar assessments of their employers. If executive compensation continues to outpace worker pay, carbon emissions continue to increase, and race-based inequities persist, they feel they’ve seen what they need to see about corporate Canada’s “values.” 

It would be easy to declare the stakeholder capitalism movement dead or dying in Canada. The harder question: What could make it work?  

The solution comes back to the first principle that companies driven by an intrinsic purpose fare best over time, both for themselves and society. In practice, that means defining your priorities and strengths and leaning into them as core focuses, leaning out from others. In other words, speaking loudly on issues of principle and purpose, but saving the virtue signalling for others. 

This discussion should influence human resources, capital allocation, operational planning and strategic message development. We need more than just statements and slogans, but businesses with clarity about what they stand for.  

Achieving this can help build alignment with stakeholders, encourage open, fact-based discussions about future plans, and help to sustain trust in a rapidly changing economy and society. 

Stakeholder capitalism may be dying as a term, but this form of pragmatic, long-term planning rooted in real purpose should not. 

C’est bien connu : Montréal est une ville emblématique, parsemée de cônes orange, de panneaux « DÉTOUR » souvent contradictoires, et de nids-de-poule. Naviguer dans la ville peut parfois se révéler être un véritable défi, suscitant frustration et jurons chez piétons et automobilistes. Pourtant, pour d’autres, l’expérience montréalaise s’avère bien plus fluide. 

C’est le cas pour plusieurs industries qui, ces dernières décennies, ont choisi Montréal comme leur pôle canadien. Leur succès montréalais leur a permis de rayonner non seulement au Canada, mais aussi à l’échelle mondiale. 

Prenons l’exemple du secteur de l’aérospatiale. Avec des poids lourds comme Bombardier, Pratt & Whitney, Airbus et CAE, ainsi que des centaines de partenaires, Montréal s’est imposée comme le 3e pôle mondial dans ce domaine. C’est d’ailleurs le seul endroit au monde où un avion peut être entièrement assemblé à partir de composants fabriqués localement. 

Montréal s’affirme également comme la capitale mondiale des jeux vidéo. Fondée en France, Ubisoft a ouvert son premier bureau nord-américain à Montréal en 1997. Aujourd’hui, il s’agit du plus grand studio de développement au monde, avec plus de 4 000 employés et des franchises à succès comme Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs et Rainbow Six. Le succès d’Ubisoft à Montréal a encouragé d’autres studios et entreprises d’animation à venir s’y installer, contribuant à l’essor de cette industrie dans notre métropole. 

Plus récemment, c’est l’industrie technologique, et plus précisément celle de l’intelligence artificielle, qui a fait de Montréal sa plaque tournante. Avec l’Institut des algorithmes d’apprentissage de Montréal (MILA) et la plus grande communauté universitaire en IA au monde, des géants comme DeepMind, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Samsung et Thales ont tous choisi d’y investir.  

Malgré les critiques récurrentes sur l’état des infrastructures, le système d’éducation et l’accès difficile aux services sociaux au Québec, comment Montréal est-elle devenue un catalyseur de croissance pour ces industries ? Et pourquoi ces entreprises ont-elles préféré Montréal à Vancouver ou à la Ville Reine ? Vancouver bénéficie pourtant d’une main-d’œuvre hautement qualifiée et d’un emplacement stratégique pour le commerce international, notamment avec l’Asie. De son côté, Toronto, la plus grande ville du Canada et la capitale financière du pays, bénéficie d’une économie diversifiée qui fait d’elle un choix privilégié pour les grandes entreprises et les affaires internationales. 

Il se trouve que plusieurs facteurs ont contribué à la création de cet écosystème unique à Montréal, devenu aujourd’hui incontournable pour les industries cherchant à propulser leur croissance. Tout d’abord, l’emplacement stratégique de Montréal offre un accès direct au marché nord-américain ainsi qu’une ouverture privilégiée vers l’Europe. 

Réputée pour sa diversité, Montréal est aussi un véritable creuset de talents, d’idées et de perspectives. La ville abrite deux universités anglophones, deux francophones et plus de 50 chaires de recherche, attirant des talents venus des quatre coins du monde. Les partenariats entre institutions éducatives et industries ont permis de créer des programmes de formation spécialisés, assurant une main-d’œuvre qualifiée et prête à répondre aux besoins du marché. 

Enfin, le gouvernement du Québec a su soutenir ces secteurs grâce à des initiatives favorisant l’innovation et l’investissement. Des programmes gouvernementaux, des incitations fiscales et des incubateurs ont facilité l’émergence de startups et l’installation d’entreprises bien établies. 

Montréal est ainsi devenue un terreau fertile pour l’innovation, attirant entreprises, investisseurs étrangers et talents désireux de profiter de ces conditions idéales. 

Malgré l’exode massif vers Toronto dans les années 70, Montréal a su conserver sa réputation de ville à l’avant-garde de l’innovation. Et tandis que la ville continue d’être marquée par ses travaux routiers incessants, on peut se demander : quelle nouvelle industrie y trouvera bientôt son essor ?

Canada’s auto sector has many of the fundamentals right. Our educated workforce, history of high-quality assembly and parts manufacturing, and close trading relationship with the U.S. have been pillars of our success for decades. 

As the industry shifts toward the manufacturing of electric vehicles, or EVs, our abundance of critical minerals offers us an even greater advantage in a global arms race to build and power the cars of the future. 

Federal and provincial governments alike are seized with this opportunity and have invested billions to support EV and battery manufacturing on home soil. And while I support these investments, it’s also important to reflect on the true strength of Canada’s auto sector: its diversity. We’ve never kept all our eggs in one basket. And we shouldn’t change that in the years ahead.  

We can’t be selective or ideological when it comes to auto jobs. Realistically, if you look at the Detroit Three (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis), pickup trucks pay the bills. The three companies committed over $120 billion towards EV and EV battery manufacturing, but their major profit centres remain with internal combustion engines (ICEs).

A few years ago, Ford made a big splash with the F150 Lightning, its flagship EV pickup truck. The result? In 2023, Ford sold 24,165 EV pickup trucks, and about 750,000 F150s.

With Trump threatening tariffs and a rollback of Biden-era EV policies, the industry will be under even greater pressure. But counterintuitively, if Pierre Poilievre wins the election and comes out saying the Canadian government will no longer be an active participant in the EV market, we’ll pay one hell of a price.  

Ontarians will remember that one of the first things Doug Ford did when he became premier was cancel the incentives to buy an electric vehicle. I was okay with that in isolation, because he was basically penalizing Tesla, one of the most anti-union companies in the world. But here we are in 2025 and what is he doing? Heavily investing in electric vehicles and marketing Ontario as a destination of choice for the sector. 

An incoming government should bypass any uncertainty and embrace the sector from day one. We should demand and expect a credible plan that looks past immediate political pressures and prioritizes the long-term protection and diversification of our auto sector. 

Jerry Dias was the founding president of Unifor and served as an advisor to Canada’s NAFTA negotiating team.

Most young people I talk to just don’t really know what lies ahead, and they haven’t seen the government coming to the table for them in the last several years. They’re looking for a new path forward. For many years, young people parked their votes behind the Liberals or the NDP or the Greens, and nobody seems to have delivered. Especially right now, young people are frustrated and they are willing to give the Conservatives a chance. The party has put forward a strong voice, and they seem determined. Young people are also very determined, and so they kind of identify with that. The Conservative Party has been the one that has come out and said: “We see you’re struggling. You’re not alone. We don’t want you to struggle anymore.” 

And one thing the Liberals often have said lately is: “Oh, it’s just a communications error. People just don’t understand what we’re trying to do. We’re doing good things. They just don’t understand how it’s a good thing.” But if they were doing good things, people wouldn’t be in these situations where they are living in overcrowded housing, or they wouldn’t be grocery shopping at Dollarama. That’s not a communications issue. That’s a policy failure. 

I see people of different ethnicities and genders, of different sexual orientations coming to the Conservative Party. It’s very insincere when people tell you what political party you should belong to. That’s identity politics. Identity politics are a horrible thing that young Conservatives are quite frankly sick and tired of. 

The number one issue [driving young people to the Conservatives] is the cost of living. When you used to go to university, you were more or less promised a good job in your field or something close to it. And that’s not the case for a lot of people.

I have always had more trouble telling other gay people that I’m a Conservative than I have telling Conservative people that I’m gay. The party, to me, has never been anything but welcoming. They don’t care who I am going to get married to someday. They care that I work hard, I’m a team player, and I’m loyal, and that I’m always trying to get smarter. 

If Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister, he and his cabinet ministers will sit down and say “Young people voted for us. We are going to deliver for them.” I think it’s very reasonable to expect we haven’t seen the last of young people coming to the Conservative Party. Hopefully, we’re just getting started in that regard.

Levi Cottingham is President of the University of Ottawa Campus Conservatives and works as a Legislative Assistant on Parliament Hill.