Shareholders push for ethical AI use at Canada’s biggest companies

“In Canada, I think, in the last year or two, we’re seeing more and more shareholders, investors being more interested in the topic of AI,” she said. “At least for SHARE ourselves, many of our clients are making it a priority to think through what ethical AI means, but also what that means for investee companies.”

That thinking manifested itself in a proposal two funds at the B.C. General Employees’ Union targeted Thomson Reuters Corp.  

The proposal asked the tech firm to amend its AI framework to square with a set of business and human rights principles the United Nations has. It got 4.87% support. 

Government’s AI code of conduct receives mixed response

Meanwhile, MÉDAC centred its proposals around Canada’s voluntary code of conduct on AI.

The code was launched by the federal government in September 2023 and so far, has 46 signatories, including BlackBerry, Cohere, IBM, Mastercard, and Telus. Signatories promise to bake risk mitigation measures into AI tools, use adversarial testing to uncover vulnerabilities in such systems and keep track of any harms the technology causes.

MÉDAC framed its proposals around the code because there’s a lack of domestic legislation for them to otherwise recommend firms heed and big companies have already supported the model, director general Willie Gagnon said.

Several companies it sent the proposal to already have AI policies but didn’t want to sign the code.

“Some of them told us that the code is mainly designed for companies developing AI, but we disagree about that because we saw a bunch of companies that signed the code that are not developing any AI,” Gagnon said.