Minister’s Message – Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Framework

I am pleased to present Ontario’s Action Plan to the Open Government Partnership (2021-22). Read the full action plan.

Ontarians expect and deserve to understand how their government works and how decisions are made. Ontarians are concerned about how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by government and that is why we are committed to engage meaningfully with Ontarians through open dialogue, open data, and open decision making.

Building on the work started by Minister Bethlenfalvy, I have continued to put into place a Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Framework to create the conditions and protections that will enable Ontarians to trust their government’s use of artificial intelligence.

Ontarians deserve to receive both the benefit of new technologies and to be protected from the unintentional harm that they can create. Our submission to the Open Government Partnership demonstrates the government’s commitment to work openly, transparently, and inclusively with all Ontarians.  This will support AI job creation, improve service delivery and enable Ontarians to hold our government accountable for the decisions we make.  

Later this year, our government will publish our guiding ethical principles and release more information on how we will create an inventory of AI use across government. To come is work on the development of a risk-based assessment model and modeling ways to best enable the public to understand and challenge government decisions made by AI.

I look forward to sharing our more in-depth plans this fall. We will continue working with you all to create a trustworthy AI framework that works for all Ontarians, businesses and communities.

Overview

For the past 6 years, Ontario has been an active local member of the Open Government Partnership — an organization of people working inside and out of government to transform how government serves its citizens.

In 2016, we submitted our first action plan (PDF) as part of the original sub-national cohort. That plan ended in 2018, with the successful implementation of three commitments.

In 2019, we cemented our commitment to openness by legislating open government principles into our Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act.

The Act is committed to:

  • placing people at the center of every government program, service, process and policy
  • delivering simpler, faster and more easily accessible services for the people, communities and businesses of Ontario

In 2020, during the COVID‑19 global pandemic:

  • we opened extensive data on COVID‑19 cases, deaths, demographics, outbreaks and vaccines
  • made this data available on Ontario’s websites, dashboards and data catalogue
  • used feedback from the public to identify and prioritize the future release of datasets
  • standardized date fields across COVID‑19 related data (a standard we hope to see applied to all government data).

In 2021 our current focus: Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence

For our next Open Government Action Plan, our focus is trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI).

AI is an evolving technology and industry in Ontario. As AI-powered technologies continue to develop, they offer new ways to deliver faster and better programs, products, and services to Ontarians. But, without proper safeguards in place, there are risks, such as bias and exclusion, in adopting these technologies.

Ontario’s Open Data program has now evolved to include algorithms and early elements of AI. This evolution:

  • is guided by the values of ethics and transparency such as protection of privacy and inclusion.
  • was informed by a government-led, public, co-creation open data event in 2019
  • was shared on GitHub in June 2020 for the public to consider and provide feedback on
  • led to the expansion of our corporate directive on Open Data resulting in identifying algorithms that we use in our public catalogue.

The feedback we received indicated a need for clearer, more comprehensive guidance on the responsible use of AI.

Our 2021-22 OGP commitments

As part of our ongoing commitment to open government, we are submitting our second action plan, which includes the following 2 commitments:

Our ongoing work to build trust in government AI

As part of ongoing work to protect Ontarians we will continue to develop the trustworthy AI framework by building a risk-based assessment tool and finding better ways for Ontarians to challenge and comment on Government AI use.