Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 29, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba Read online at winnipegfreepress.com/fp-features DON’T MISS THE SUMMER 2024 ISSUE Available at Manitoba Liquor Marts - while supplies last! P i c k u p y o u r c o p y t o d a y ! WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM ● B3 NEWS I LOCAL / CANADA MONDAY, JULY 29, 2024 CREWS RESPOND TO FIRE WINNIPEG Fire Paramedic Service was called to a house on Abbotsford Crescent for reports of a fire Saturday morning. When crews arrived shortly after 5 a.m., they found a “well-involved fire with heavy smoke.” The fire was extinguished around an hour later. No injuries were reported. Damage esti- mates are not available. The cause of the fire is under investigation. BYELECTIONS DATE SET OTTAWA — A pair of federal byelections will be held in September to fill vacant seats in Quebec and Manitoba, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Sunday. Voters will go to the polls in the Elmwood -Transcona riding in Manitoba and the Mont- real-area riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun on Sept. 16. The Manitoba riding was held by the New Democratic Party until MP Daniel Blaikie resigned in March to go work for the office of the province’s Premier, Wab Kinew. Blaikie had held the federal seat since the 2015 election. The Quebec riding was held by former Liberal justice minister David Lametti, who resigned in January after being excluded from Trudeau’s cabinet during a shuffle the previous summer. The byelections will mark the first test for Trudeau’s Liberals since losing a June byelec- tion in Toronto-St. Paul, a riding the Liberals had previously held for decades. — staff / The Canadian Press Pair arrested after Furby Street robbery A ROBBERY late Friday afternoon resulted in two suspects leading nearly a dozen police cars on a dicey pursuit through a quiet neigh- bourhood. Wolseley resident Russell Wangersky was on his front porch Friday evening when he heard the police helicopter above him. Soon after, a white SUV with two flat tires came barrelling down Wolseley Avenue. “About 70 kilometres an hour,” said Wangersky (who is the Free Press per- spectives editor). “And then it was just trailed by a variety of marked and un- marked police cars. There were six or seven in the first bunch and then there was another four.” Winnipeg police officers were noti- fied of an armed robbery on the 300 block of Furby Street in the late after- noon. While driving a Jeep Trailhawk with stolen licence plates, the suspects pulled up to a man and woman and used weapons to rob the victims of cash and cigarettes, Winnipeg Police Service spokesperson Cst. Jason Michalyshen said Saturday. Later that evening, police spotted the Jeep near Isabel Street and Logan Av- enue. Officers attempted to stop the car with no success, before using a spike strip near St. James Street and Sargent Avenue, Michalyshen said. The car eventually came to a halt on the 900 block of Palmerston Avenue and the driver fled on foot to the riverbank. Officers caught up to him and he, along with the passenger, were arrested. “A lot of resources dedicated to it. It’s unfortunate that it comes down to this, but good work by a number of mem- bers,” Michalyshen said. No one was hurt in the pursuit. Colin Love Groves, 37, and Sage Al- bert Young, 33, face numerous char- ges including robbery, possession of a weapon, disguise with intent, flight from a police officer and failing to com- ply with conditions of a release order. They remain in custody. nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca NICOLE BUFFIE BRIEFS Government chatbots? It’s one possibility under Ottawa’s new AI strategy OTTAWA — Delayed air passengers, disgruntled phone customers and even hungry people craving a slice of pizza increasingly find their pleas to private companies being answered by artificial intelligence. Soon Canadians who need to reach out to the federal government could also find themselves talking to an employee who’s been helped by non-human assistants. Ottawa is working on a strategy to use more AI in the federal pub- lic service and while it’s too soon to say exactly what that could look like, chatbots are one likely possibility. Stephen Burt, the government’s chief data officer, said private-sec- tor call centres are using generative AI chatbots to navigate internal data and help employees find better an- swers faster when customers call in. “I can imagine a number of similar applications in the Canadian govern- ment context for services we offer to clients, from EI and Old Age Security through to immigration processes,” he said in an interview. Civil servants could also use AI to sort through massive piles of govern- ment data, he said. In the Treasury Board of Canada alone, employees are responsible for government fi- nances, hiring and technology used by the public service. “There’s a lot of documents with a lot of words on a lot of pages of paper. It’s difficult even for folks inside gov- ernment to understand in any given situation what is most applicable,” he said. The federal government will be crafting the AI strategy over the coming months, with the goal of launching it next March. The plan is to encourage departments to experi- ment openly, so that “they can see what’s working and what’s not.” “We can’t do everything at once and it’s not clear to me yet what are going to be the (best-use) cases,” Burt said. When it comes to what won’t be allowed, he said it’s too soon to talk about red lines, though there are “ab- solutely going to be areas where we need to be more careful.” Generative AI applications can produce text and images based on vast amounts of data fed into them. The federal public service has al- ready started tinkering with AI. Jo- anna Redden, an associate professor at Western University, compiled a database documenting hundreds of government uses of AI in Canada. It contains a wide range of uses, from predicting the outcome of tax cases and sorting through temporary visa applications to tracking invasive plants and detecting whales from overhead images. In the European Union, AI legis- lation bans certain uses, she said, including untargeted scraping of im- ages for facial recognition, the use of emotion recognition systems in workplaces and schools, social scor- ing, and some types of predictive policing. At an introductory event for the strategy in May, Treasury Board President Anita Anand said genera- tive AI “isn’t generally going to be used” when it comes to confidential matters, like information available only to cabinet ministers behind closed doors. According to University of Ottawa law professor Teresa Scassa, the privacy legislation covering govern- ment activities needs to be brought up to date. The federal Privacy Act “really hasn’t been adapted to an informa- tion society or let alone the AI con- text,” she said. There could also be issues around use of generative AI and the risk that it could ingest personal or confiden- tial information. “Somebody might just decide to start answering emails using gen AI, and how do you deal with that? And what kind of information is going into the system and who’s checking it?” Scassa also questioned wheth- er there would be any recourse if a government chatbot gives someone wrong information. As Canada’s largest employer, the federal government should be look- ing into incorporating artificial in- telligence, said Concordia University associate professor Fenwick McKel- vey. McKelvey suggested the govern- ment could use chatbots to “help users understand and navigate their complex offerings,” as well as to make sure government documents are accessible and more legible. One example would be filling out complicated tax forms. Redden had to piece together her database of government AI through news reports, documents tabled in Parliament and access-to-informa- tion requests. Redden has argued that the govern- ment should be keeping better track of its own uses of AI and be transpar- ent about its use, but Ottawa appears unlikely to change its approach under the new AI strategy. — The Canadian Press ANJA KARADEGLIJA ;