Human Resources Committee on Nov. 6th, 2023

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here.

Mr. Smith, from what I understand, your municipality promotes automation of discussion mechanisms with citizens. What impact has that had on the workforce employed by the city?

[Ryan Smith]

The impact on our labour force in Kelowna, we believe, has been a positive one for both city staff and our customers.

I'll give an example. It's not a planning and development example. It's a snow removal example. It may be a more Canadian example.

We implemented a chatbot on our snow removal line. Every winter, when we have a snow event, we get thousands of phone calls related to when snow will be removed on a person's street. We employed staff who would respond to those questions in overtime functions. Again, they would be answering the same question over and over again. We use the artificial intelligence tool—we have a voice-driven chatbot now—and it can look at data from our snowplows and data that we have related to the priority of snowplowing and snowplow routes. It is able to tell our residents when their street was last plowed and when it's likely to be plowed again.

We're reducing the number of calls that the frontline staff have. They're able to answer the calls from the public and spend time on the ones that are more emergency-related and more technical, rather than the ones that are purely related to when a street is going to be plowed.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Smith.

What has happened to those whose job it was to inform the citizenry? Now, thanks to AI, these tasks have all been automated, so people talk to chatbots rather than humans. What happened to the employees? How has the nature of the job changed? Have there been job losses? If so, have you transferred those employees to other areas? What repercussions has automation had on the number of employees and the skills required of employees who have had to change jobs?

[Ryan Smith]

This has reduced the amount of overtime that our employees need to work during those snow events. Outside of that time, it's allowed us to repurpose those employees to respond to more complicated questions from the public. They're still doing similar jobs, but they're not answering the same questions over and over. They're able to respond to those residents with more complicated calls and questions that our chatbots aren't able to answer.

They're, in essence, doing higher-value tasks, but in very similar roles.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Have the employees been consulted on the change that's taking place? You mentioned higher value tasks. Did the employees have any concerns? Have they brought up any safeguards that should be adhered to in terms of ethics or tasks?

[Ryan Smith]

When the City of Kelowna first announced, in our development process, the fact that we would begin trying to develop and use chatbots, there were definitely some fear and angst amongst employees, but I believe that, as we have explained more about the project and about how we will potentially be using AI as a helper, not as a replacement, the employees are starting to get on board.

I'll give an example of why that is. I have a planning team that writes reports to city council. An average council report might take six or eight hours for a planner to write, but a lot of the information is technical, and you're going to find the same or similar policies over and over again. What the AI tool will allow them to do is create those reports more quickly and spend more time negotiating with a developer or a home builder to improve the quality of the project and less time writing reports about the project. We believe there will be a quality gain in the type of development we do. As staff learn this and learn that they're going to have more time to do this, I believe their support for the tool will grow.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

There haven't been any redundancies, then. Is that what you're saying?

The nature of the job has changed, but not the number of employees, administration officers, people in reception, who interface with citizens and write up certain reports. I gather that AI will be doing certain administrative tasks but that this will have no impact on the number of employees. Is that right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Please give a short answer.

[Ryan Smith]

That's correct. We have not reduced staff numbers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Chabot.

Ms. Zarrillo, you have six minutes.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to direct my questions to the Competition Bureau initially. I am going to want to talk about workers and how the competition board would intersect with workers, but I want to start with the discussion we've been having today and how important it is to have access to the Internet and broadband.

We know already that the Shaw and Rogers merger caused a lot of problems for people. The connectivity is no longer available where it used to be. It's not as good a service. I just wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing how we are going to protect, as a government, when things like this happen? If we are going to get into an AI world where we are really relying on that connectivity every single day for output that.... I guess we're measuring people's productivity on some kind of output that's not related to their well-being.

Could you let me know what can be done with Shaw and Rogers right now to increase the connectivity and to make sure that people have the same standard of service and we are ready for AI?

[Anthony Durocher]

Thank you very much for the question.

With respect to the Rogers-Shaw transaction, that is one that the Competition Bureau challenged and sought to block before the courts. We ultimately failed in that endeavour and the merger was allowed to close, but I guess our perspective is that competitive markets are critical not only in terms of ensuring affordability for broadband services but also in ensuring there are incentives to invest and for continued investment in order to bring broadband services to communities across Canada. We will continue to prioritize the telecom sector. The bureau recognizes its importance.

Another area has to do with how we can intervene in regulatory processes, such as we are presently doing with the CRTC to make sure that we bring evidence and facts to bear about how to promote competitive broadband markets. We will continue to have our enforcement role and to review mergers or any anti-competitive conduct, but right now we're focused on and currently involved in regulatory proceedings to try to bring to bear our competition perspective on how we can increase competition in broadband markets and particularly the wholesale access regime.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

That's very interesting to me because the City of Coquitlam—my riding—owns its own dark fibre. It was always an issue that small ISPs could not be competitive in that market with the wholesale pricing at CRTC, so I would be very appreciative of any information you could share with me and the City of Coquitlam on that.

I just want to go back to the proactive nature of the work you do. On the Shaw-Rogers merger, it's my understanding that there's really no statute of limitations on being able to review mergers. Is that correct or is there a limit as to when the Competition Bureau can no longer review mergers? Can you do a review of it in a year or five years?

[Anthony Durocher]

There is a statute of limitations, which is one year, so that is currently the case.

I will point out that there is a very comprehensive review of Canada's competition law under way right now. It's a review in which we, the Competition Bureau, have participated. We've provided a number of recommendations on how to modernize and strengthen our law, including the merger review process. We made over 50 recommendations to the government with respect to how to improve the Competition Act. This is an ongoing process right now and obviously with bills before Parliament as well.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

The NDP has one before Parliament today in relation to the grocery industry and the Competition Act.

I want to move to workers. My interest in this study is to understand the protection of workers and how perhaps the Competition Bureau would interact with that. I know that earlier in your comments you mentioned benefits for workers.

I'm really trying to understand how this is going to affect workers, and I'm going to put a particular lens on it. I'm very concerned that a person's personal IP, which now is being called “cognitive property” can be captured and scaled and used over and over again, but the person gets no royalties. They get nothing from it. Even when we spoke today, the witness from Kelowna—and I found this fascinating—said we're making people's intelligence redundant. How do we protect workers and their personal IP from that? Do we need to trademark ourselves? What do we need to do to make sure we get royalties for our ideas and for our intelligence?

[Anthony Durocher]

It's a very interesting question. I think our expertise really lies in assessing the competition issues in that respect. IP is a relevant issue in competition circles, because you can exercise an IP right that might exclude certain people from a market. There are different considerations at play that really depend on each fact.

In terms of protecting workers in particular, obviously our position is that competition amongst employers helps employees. It helps them get higher wages, better wages and better working conditions. I will note that earlier this year an important new provision in the Competition Act came into effect, which basically criminalized wage-fixing and no-poach agreements between employers. That was certainly an important change to protect workers from any competitive conduct that could hurt their wages.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Zarrillo.

Now we go to Mrs. Falk for five minutes.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Thank you very much.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today and for sharing your perspectives.

To the Competition Bureau, there was a brief mention of the entrenchment of dominant players in the use of artificial intelligence. I'm just wondering, from the bureau's perspective, whether the artificial intelligence sector is an open competitive space or if it is monopolized by a few companies.

[Trevor MacKay, Deputy Commissioner, Digital Enforcement and Intelligence Branch, Competition Bureau Canada]

It's a fascinating question. It's probably one that's pretty difficult to give a good answer on since it's a developing industry. It's a developing market, and I think what you're seeing now is a number of players who are getting into the space, who are involved in the space, who are quite big. Where that goes we will have to see.

At the same time, there are smaller players who are also innovating in that space and creating stuff, and it's a little bit of having to see how that will play out. Our laws are non-interventionist by nature. That's the design of them. There's the concept that the markets will sort themselves out, or that if they can sort themselves out, we should leave them to do that as well as they can.

It's a little bit of waiting and seeing how the market develops. There are big players who have a strong presence with respect to the critical inputs, the AI things like computational power, data—

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Do you have examples of companies?

[Trevor MacKay]

You see the big names that everybody knows are involved in the AI space like Meta, Alphabet and Google. Those names are very much at the forefront of this, but, as I said, the market is developing. How that plays out and ultimately where the strong positions within that market come from is a little bit of a waiting game.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Then, in that developing space, would you say that Canadian businesses are developing well or competing well?

[Trevor MacKay]

Honestly, I'm not sure that's something we can answer. We engage in efforts to look at industries from the perspective of horizon scanning to understand them so that, when competition issues arise, we're well placed to address them. Without any kind of indication of competitive issues that fall within the framework of our act, we're not doing a comprehensive assessment of all of the players in that market.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Would the bureau say that the Canadian regulatory system is impacting their competitive positioning, in being Canadian businesses?