  In February 2020, the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) was invited by the
Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPCC) to provide for comments
both at a closed roundtable and in writing on the OPCC consultation proposal
for amendments relative to Artificial Intelligence (AI), to the Canadian
privacy legislation, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic
Documents Act (PIPEDA). The present document includes MAIEI comments and
recommendations in writing. Per MAIEI's mission and mandate to act as a
catalyst for public feedback pertaining to AI Ethics and regulatory technology
developments, as well as to provide for public competence-building workshops on
critical topics in such domains, the reader will also find such public feedback
and propositions by Montrealers who participated at MAIEI's workshops,
submitted as Schedule 1 to the present report. For each of OPCC 12 proposals,
and underlying questions, as described on its website, MAIEI provides a short
reply, a summary list of recommendations, as well as comments relevant to the
question at hand. We leave you with three general statements to keep in mind
while going through the next pages:
  1) AI systems should be used to augment human capacity for meaningful and
purposeful connections and associations, not as a substitute for trust.
  2) Humans have collectively accepted to uphold the rule of law, but for
machines, the code is rule. Where socio-technical systems are deployed to make
important decisions, profiles or inferences about individuals, we will
increasingly have to attempt the difficult exercise of drafting and encoding
our law in a manner learnable by machines.
  3) Let us work collectively towards a world where Responsible AI becomes the
rule, before our socio-technical systems become "too connected to fail".
