The Ben Mulroney Show - Is Canada's "culture of secrecy" keeping key info from voters?

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

GUEST:   Francis Syms / Associate Dean of Information and Communication Technology at Humber Polytechnic If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. Hey, thanks, son. What do I owe you? Don't worry about it. It's payday. Payday, huh? I bet you it went straight into your bank account and you didn't even check your pay stuff. My what? Your pay stuff. Back in my day, you had to wait for a physical check. Then you had to go to the bank. Deposit it, I wait for it to clear. Your pay really. meant something. Payroll is incredibly complex. It's art and the science. It literally keeps the economy moving. Parole professionals do a lot for us. You know, it's about time we do something for them. How about we ask our leaders to name a day in their honor, a national day to recognize payroll professionals. I got it. This is perfect. Why don't we explain to people just how

important the roles are the payroll professionals play in our lives? We can even ask them to sign a petition. We can even ask them to sign a petition to recognize the third Tuesday in September as the National Day to recognize payroll professionals. We'll rally support and bring the payroll party to the nation. National payroll party? Precisely. Sounds like a plan, you know, just one thing. What's that?

I'm choosing the music. What? And I'm sitting in the backseat. The whole way? The whole way. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Happy Monday, everybody. Monday, September 29th. We appreciate your time. Hey, thank you so much for finding us.

Wherever you watch or listen to the Ben Mulroney show, because we're in as many places as we can possibly be. We're a radio show. We're a podcast. We're a streaming app. We're on YouTube. We're on social media. And so we're in a lot of different places. And we know that you look out there to try to find us in the place that is easiest for you to enjoy the show. And we say thank you. Okay. Who is the Super Bowl? halftime show performer. That is the question that always pops up around this time of year.

And as is always the case, and it might be a little wishful thinking, but a lot of people were betting on Taylor Swift. She was probably the biggest bet, for sure. The biggest bet. Because she got engaged at Travis Kelly. Yeah, and was it going to be

Taylor Swift? Look, Taylor Swift does not need the Super Bowl halftime show. It turns out it's not Taylor Swift. It's been announced it is Bad Bunny. And I gave up a long time ago thinking my musical tastes would be reflected in the halftime show at the Super Bowl. He's one of the biggest stars in the world right now. I know Bad Bunny for his roles in Bullet Train and Happy Gilmore too. He was great in both of them. And if Bad Bunny decide to make a career, out of being an actor, I would be there for it. But his music is not my music.

But it also doesn't matter. Like, I don't care. I don't care that much. There are some people who feel it should be Beyonce every year. Well, middle America is not going to be happy with Bad Bunny. I can't name you a Bad Bunny song. Yeah. But, you know, I understand he's huge.

But Middle America, the Midwest and stuff, they're going to be like, why isn't it some country star? Well, it hasn't been a country star in a very long time. Like, and that's surprising to me. You would think that at least once, once in a decade, they would go with a country star and they don't. So it is what it is. I think it doesn't really matter who the half-time performer is. They're going to do a great job.

They take it very seriously. You know, they've got to pay for the whole thing themselves. But they make it all back the next day when every single one of their songs in their catalog just flies up the top of the Spotify and Apple music charts. Well, I mean, that was part of the reason why it was why Taylor Swift didn't do it because she doesn't need the publicity, but she wanted more control. She wanted to be able to promote some things of her own, and they said no.

You know? She probably turned on my microphone. But you look at some of the most recent ones, the headliners, and like Kendrick Lamar, that was controversial. Yep. The response to him was not great. Usher, Rihanna, and they had the doctor. Ray one, the weekend. They've gone with a lot of the hip-hop.

They've gone with hip-hop and R&B significantly. But the one thing that they have not gone with in a very, very, very long time is country music. And they're, you know, country music consistently is exceptionally popular than they've crossed over. I mean, even mainstream country is now more poppy than it's ever been. Yeah. But in terms of they haven't done rock and roll either. Yeah.

The last sort of, I don't know, I mean, Maroon 5 wouldn't be... Maroon 5 is not rock and roll. It's pop. It's pop. Justin Timberlake, it's pop. Lady Gaga, it's... She's pop, yeah. And then cold play, that's not rock.

That's soft rock. Yeah, it's pop rock. Yeah, it's pop rock. It's pop rock. And that was 2016. So in the last decade, yeah. Really haven't had anything.

Yeah, I'm really quite surprised because at some point they're going to have to, at some point they're going to have to lean into country and go hard on country. Yeah. It's massive. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about how open our government is in terms of the information that they provide to us. You may not remember, but Justin Trudeau promised a government that would be open by default.

He criticized his predecessor for being very opaque. And the conservatives were going to hold on to information as long as they could. And they were going to make it very difficult. on anybody who wanted access to information on anything that they were doing. And that's not accountable, and that's not democracy. And Justin Trudeau was going to change that. And by and large, the report card that his government received on how transparent they were was a failing grade by, even people who supported them. And the Globe and Mail is saying that it's just as bad as it's ever been.

and why aren't they open? What aren't they telling us? What do we need to know that they are not making it easy for us to know? Is our things as bad as I'm suggesting? And so what aren't they telling us? Well, maybe it has something to do with our fiscal outlook. Let's listen to Parliamentary Budget Office interim leader, Jason Jacques, who made waves last week by talking about the stupefying decisions that have been made at the federal level in terms of

our fiscal outlook. Well, he went onto the press circuit after he made those comments to committee on House of Commons committee. And here's what he had to say about our fiscal outlook. It's not a funny fiscal outlook. It's a really serious fiscal outlook. And we don't lightly use the word unsustainable, right? unsustainable means

you don't have the option of saying maybe I'll wait a couple of years I'll see how things go it means if you don't change this is done right so it's very

serious okay yeah so it would be great if we hear those things and the journalists that we rely on to keep our government's honest would be able to pounce on things like that and get the information as quickly as possible so that we as citizens could be empowered to think a certain way and make our decisions on other things in due time and in due

course. So we have in Canada what's called an information commissioner, and that person is Carolyn Maynard. And she says that Ottawa maintains what she calls a culture of secrecy with departments abusing exemptions in the Access to Information Act to withhold documents. So these exemptions, this abuse of those exemptions, here's what she's talking about. She says the, quote, advice to ministers clause,

which apparently is something, I've never heard of this before, is one of the most overused exemptions. Maynard argues that most of the supporting material and ministerial briefings should be released by I guess it's not because it's viewed as advice to ministers and therefore not subject to disclosure. now what happens if you take issue you get this information and you take issue and you complain to the commissioner's office and you ask for them to investigate well those can take up to two years to investigate there are more than 2,200 cases of complaints to the commissioner's office pending

and the backlogs now are better they used to be four years now it's two years but does anybody think that two years is an acceptable length to wait I mean what do we say about? about court cases. Court cases are thrown out if they are not brought within a year, right? If somebody has to sit there waiting for a court case for a year. I think it's a bit more. I think it's two years. I don't think it's two years.

I think it's a, well, we'll get that information, but it might be somewhere in the middle. But the point is, you're getting really close to an abuse of justice in court cases. Why then would it be any different? Why should it be any different when a citizen, a taxpayer, want something investigated for what they feel is, is a problem. And then you've got to wait two years, three years, four years. That's a problem. So Maynard and critics say that the 40-year-old law, it's 40 years old.

You would think with technology, that law would have been updated. I mean, look, NAFTA or Kuzma has to be renegotiated every, what, five years, 10 years? 10 years. And this has been 40 years. It needs a major rewrite, and the government must adopt. transparency by default to restore accountability and public trust. So things we need to know more about, real quick. We'll go through these.

We need to know about immigration numbers and how much money has been spent. How many people are coming in? How much were the hotels that we put people up in? What about crime numbers? And as they relate to bail. How much money has been spent overseas? I think we all need to know this. We've got to watch our pennies and the dollar is supposed to take care of themselves.

Well, those pennies can be viewed as line items in terms of aid that we send away across the ocean. Justin Trudeau, for example, authorized $100 million in Canadian aid to support humanitarian efforts in Gaza and the West Bank in 2024. And then he announced he was stepping down in January 2025. Where'd that money go? We don't know.

So listen, a lot to get to, but I'm glad that the Clarion call has been put out there. And coming up, we are going to talk with Francis Sims about going toe to toe with our new AISR. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney show. This message is from Wise, the app for international money.

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Curious cast discovery. Available now on Apple Podcasts for just $4 a month. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. A little Brian Adams on a day like today. It's good for the soul. Love it. All right. So you've heard me say before that I'm not going to criticize the federal government

just for the sake of criticizing them. I think that when I bring up issues that I think are warranted, I do so based on real information. and real concerns, and I don't do so because of any political stripes or any political gripes. And I championed the fact that Canada was, for the first time in our history, elevating artificial intelligence to the level of a ministerial responsibility. And Evan Solomon, former journalist and newly minted MP for the Liberal Caucus, is our first

minister of artificial intelligence. And I think that that signals that we, at least on a government level, want to take this file very seriously. And whatever position we are in globally in terms of leadership, we either want to maintain or increase. But the devil is in the details. And how our minister goes about building out his ministry and laying out his priorities is kind of everything, right? We kind of have to take our marching orders from our government, the regulations that they put forth, and the framework in which they have decided we are going to build this industry is everything. And very recently, there was, the minister revealed Canada's AI task force. And our next guest was, I guess, at the announcement and took

issue with a few key aspects of this announcement and said as much to the minister. So please welcome Francis Sims, Associate Dean of Information and Communication Technology at Humber Polytechnic. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Matt. Okay, so what did you think of how I just laid that out? I think that's good. That's fair, right? We want the best, and I think the fact that there's an AI minister in place is really an

excellent step. But like you said, the devil is in the details, and that's what we're here to talk about. Okay, so talk to me about this announcement. Where was it? Who was in attendance? What was the purpose of the announcement? Yeah, so this announcement happened at the Empire Club of Canada. which I know you know as well, right?

It's a place where lots of amazing speakers come and talk. I'm going to be hosting a fireside chat with the Premier. Yeah, October 14th. Yes, I'll be there. Yeah. And so what he did is he talked about his plan with respect to AI. And, you know, what I heard was that it's important for Canada to lead, right, which is excellent, but lead in terms of innovation and adoption, right?

And so I think those are two important aspects. The adoption piece, Canada, has one of the lowest AI adoption rates around the world. We were talking about that last week, especially as it relates to small and medium-sized businesses. The business owners don't know how to teach it to the people working there, and the people working there are waiting for leadership to tell them what to do. In a lot of cases, it's ad hoc. They're making up as they go along. They're adopting what they think is important, but there's no consistency. That's right.

And then I also heard about innovation, which is important, too. We're dealing with big tech out of Silicon Valley, and we know that a lot of our talent is being drained to the U.S., and we need to focus on building that talent here and keeping it here. Yeah. Okay, so the announcement is put forth, the AI Task Force is announced, and you pointed out that there's no representation for applied colleges, for polytechnics, which are critical for workforce development, applied research, and AI.

So you told this to the minister. Yeah. So at the end of the event, like it happens at many of those events, there's an opportunity to go up. And I said specifically to the minister that he has a number of colleges, including mine, in his writing, but yet there's no representation. Colleges, there's 24 publicly funded colleges in Ontario. Across the country, it's over 700,000 students.

It's a huge part of the population, and people are worried about jobs being lost in a lot of the areas that the colleges are training on. And so the announcement was focused on 26 great individuals. I don't know them all personally. But those individuals are primarily from big tech and big universities and don't necessarily represent the country. Right. Yeah.

So if it's a 26 person task force, maybe they could have found two spots for polytechnics, right? Yeah. That's right. Or trade unions or small, medium enterprises. There was no representation. Think about the manufacturers across Canada that they've been. that are the backbone of this country. Great Premier Ford talks about it all the time.

No representation there. Yeah. So, unions, trade associations, workforce development bodies, that was another issue that you had. Now, what was his response to that? His response was, okay, we're going to work, you know, I don't remember specifically, but it was a response that, yes, we have to look at it, and we're going to continue to evolve,

and it's not perfect at the beginning. And that's fine if it's not perfect, but you have to, you know, he talks about the fact that, that we need to do this in 30 days. And that means that the clock is ticking. And so what you don't want is, sure, we're going to come and consider your perspective, but three months down the road, right?

If there's a race, you need to make sure you have the voices that are required there at the table at the beginning. You know, I think you mentioned another one. There's few, there are few people from public advocacy, ethics, or citizens' rights groups, which is important. I mean, you know, we talk about how AI is, in a lot of ways, the Wild West, and left unchecked,

it could skew towards encroaching on personal freedoms and personal rights. Yeah, and I think just about the lawsuit with Open AI recently about children that have, you know, committed, taking their own lives using that platform. And now chat GPT is trying to put some rule on to make sure that you have to be 18 years or older. So where is that kind of conversation, right? Where is the, you know, in order to get past that really low adoption, you need to convince Canadians that it's safe and need to understand how Canadians can use a Canadian platform and not one that they get from the U.S.

You know, I'll tell you years ago, for a completely different reason, but I think it applies here to what we're talking about. I saw for the first time why having differences in perspective in the room where they make the decisions matters. And it was about this, you know, one of those big companies like H&M from Europe, the clothing companies. And you can imagine what the cultural makeup of one of those European, like Northern European companies is. I mean, it's probably very

Swedish, right? In terms of what it looks like. And they had an ad campaign for a children's sweater that had monkeys on it. And it said, my monkey. And they had a black child wearing it. Now, I

call my kids monkey all the time, right? It's completely acceptable. I would never call a black kid monkey. But in my house, it's a term of endearment. Of course it is. It's cute, and it's sweet and it's fun and that sweater would look great on my kid right but they clearly had nobody in that room just to point out that one thing and throughout the entire chain decision making

chain all the way to actually publishing that picture and trying to get people to buy it they had people saying great idea great idea great idea great idea great idea great idea and all it would have taken was to have one person in that room for whom that that idea that paradigm doesn't work and And that is the reason you need to have people from the other side of the equation as part of this to check the enthusiasm of those who are bullish on AI. For those who see it as a panacea, it's going to solve everything. You need to have somebody there slowing their role just a little bit, just to remind them that if you move it 100 miles an hour, you might steamroll somebody and you might inadvertently hurt the people you're trying to. help. Yeah, this reminds me of the Apple Watch in the early days had lots of features on it, but what it lacked was menstrual tracking. And it wasn't because, you know, they didn't want to do it.

It was because it was developed by a bunch of men and never thought that was important, even though that's valuable for half the population. So that's an example that is nothing to do with, you know, diversity and inclusion, but it has to do about making sure that the people that are using the tool, it's designed for them. Yeah. Now, we have reached out many times, not on necessarily on this case specifically, but we've reached out to Minister Solomon as well as to his office and attempt to have him on the show.

My hope is we will have him on. Heck, my hope is to have any liberal on the show. We've been doing this show for a very long time. I have not had a single sitting member of the Liberal Caucus ever join us. I don't know if they're trying to tell me something, but we will keep asking because we're not afraid of good and honest conversation.

So what are your hopes? And we only have in about 30 seconds. Tell me what you think you need to see from this ministry, moving forward. Yeah, I need to see, you know, the task force eventually representing the people that it needs to serve, which is all Canadians, right? And in an applied way, the people that need to use these tools and are afraid of using

these tools every single day, those voices need to be at the table. Francis Sims from Humber Polytechnic, thank you very much. Thank you for pushing back. I think I thank you for going there. I mean, that's part of our responsibilities, right? Going to hear from the decision makers and getting them to give us the answers we need here's hoping he heard you. Let's hope he can get, we can get him on the show.

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