AI, access to information studies delayed by other priorities at ETHI committee

Competing priorities and parliamentary gamesmanship is keeping the House of Commons privacy and ethics committee from devoting attention to topics like artificial intelligence (AI) and access to information, the panel’s chair states. The committee is one of four oversight committees which have Opposition MPs presiding over them, including John Brassard (Barrie South–Innisfil, Ont.), who chairs the ethics committee. On April 23, Brassard tabled the report on the Conflict of Interest Act, which had not been reviewed in over a decade. The committee is currently looking at the Lobbying Act which, despite statutes saying it should be renewed every five years, has not been checked since 2007. In the last Parliament, the committee examined the state of the Access to Information Act and submitted a report. Brassard is worried about the fallout from the issue. “The government’s going through a review right now but there’s a tremendous amount of concern with respect to the direction the government is going on that,” he told The Wire Report. “We’ll have to see where that goes.” The Conservative MP cites access experts like Dean Beebe and Ken Rubin who have raised alarms that the federal government may attempt to limit access to documents. “It’ll be interesting to see whether the government invokes some of the recommendations that came out of committee,” Brassard maintains. The makeup of the committee is expected to change on April 27, when the government pushes through its changes to committee membership. Following the election, opposition MPs held the majority on committees because the LIberals were leading a minority government. Floor crossings and byelections have given the Grits a majority; they intend to use that to add two Liberal MPs to most committees and one MP to the oversight committees chaired by Conservatives. Brassard’s committee, which had four Liberals, four Conservatives and one Bloc Québécois MP, is expected to be constituted of five Grits, four Tories and the Bloquiste after Monday. “Some of these reviews that we’re doing may not be as substantive as they would have been in an opposition-led committee,” the chair warns. The ethics committee has started a study of AI and potential regulation but that process was put on the back burner due to the conflict of interest and lobbying reports. In addition, Brassard reports, the Liberals lobbied for 17 hours in an attempt to prevent Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Saint-Maurice–Champlain, Que.), the commissioner of ethics and the chair of the Alto high-speed rail consortium from testifying about an alleged conflict of interest of the minister, whose partner is a vice-president of Alto. The AI report has been drafted but not yet approved by the MPs on the panel. “I’m trying to find committee time to ensure that we can deal with the AI study and have it tabled before Parliament,” Brassard notes. “I’m not sure we’re going to be able to deal with the AI study until the fall.” The committee only has a dozen meetings left before MPs rise for their summer holidays on June 22. ppark@thewirereport.ca

AI, access to information studies delayed by other priorities at ETHI committee

Regulatory |
By Paul Park
|April 27, 2026

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AI, access to information studies delayed by other priorities at ETHI committee

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