The group wants the government to bring back the online harms bill that was introduced by the Trudeau government but never became law. The Liberals have signalled they will not bring the bill back in the same form, but instead tackle aspects of online harms in other bills.

The report also gives examples of influencers, which include both well-known commentators in traditional Canadian media and individuals who post under the handles BertaProudDad and Quick Dick McDick.

The report incorporates results from a survey of Canadians and tracked millions of online posts. Overall, 42 per cent of Canadians surveyed reported engaging with those they consider influencers on political topics.

The report from the McGill University and University of Toronto-led Media Ecosystem Observatory says a significant portion of the political content Canadians see on the major platforms “comes directly from influencers.”

Ottawa has spent almost $1.3 billion on cloud services provided by U.S. companies Amazon, Microsoft and Google since 2021, which includes “mission-critical” defence applications hosted by Amazon Web Services.

It warns storing data in Canada, or using a Canadian supplier, would not guarantee foreign courts wouldn’t have jurisdiction, and that the government can only maintain full control if it delivers the service itself, or uses providers operating fully under Canadian jurisdiction.

He agreed Canada is too small to have influence by itself.

“The incentives are not there in the U.S. right now, but I think Europeans, Canadians and other liberal democracies do care about these things,” Bengio said, adding they can "make a difference" together.

AI Minister Evan Solomon has cited the United States’ anti-regulation stance as a reason to go easy on regulatory efforts, saying Canada would be wasting its time by going it alone.

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio told the same conference Canada should partner with allies like the EU.

EU commissioner Michael McGrath is visiting Canada as the Liberal government pursues an AI policy that puts less emphasis on regulation and more on adoption. He spoke at an AI conference today about how the EU is pushing ahead on regulating tech platforms and artificial intelligence.

They found at least one significant problem with 45 per cent of the AI answers. There were serious problems with sourcing in 31 per cent of the responses, while 20 per cent had major accuracy issues.

The study involved 22 public media organizations in 18 countries, including CBC/Radio-Canada. Journalists evaluated more than 3,000 responses provided by four chatbots — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity.

Bouchard also presented the public broadcaster as a way to guard against disinformation at a time when many people are turning to AI chatbots that may not be offering accurate information.

When asked in an interview whether that means the plan is to reach out to Conservative supporters, Bouchard said there may be some overlap between those demographics but it’s not something she considers a factor.