Below are multiple ways you can participate in the People’s Consultation on AI. We have designed them for different levels of familiarity and expertise with AI issues. Option 1 is the Basic Consultation Guide, which comes with a built-in Submission Template that you can download to fill in for your comments. Option 2 provides a Local Facilitation Guide if you’d like to host a small gathering to work through the questions with other people and complete a submission together (and may be paired with the Submission Template). Option 3 is an Advanced Consultation Guide, which assumes AI-related or other domain expertise and provides numerous detailed questions to choose from for providing in-depth input.
OPTION 1: Basic Consultation Guide
Contribute your thoughts and concerns about AI and any experiences you’ve had, or how AI has directy impacted your life.
If you have thoughts or concerns about AI and want to participate in the consultation, but aren’t sure where to get started, use the Basic Consultation Guide with an included Submission Template. The template will guide you along in completing a submission. We would also recommend consulting the Examples List of “AI” Technologies, and the Readings & Multimedia List, which we have provided to support you in that process.
Note: Submissions will be posted publicly, so please only share details you are comfortable being posted. Keep this in mind if sharing stories or experiences that are not your own, and do not share identifying details about someone without their consent.
OPTION 2: Local Facilitation Guide
Host a micro-consultation in your community, and report back!
If you’re a people person, enjoy organizing or working with groups, or want to get your community involved, use our Local Facilitation Guide to host a micro-consultation! This can be done at your home, school, workplace, public library, studio, or wherever else you gather with people. Bring together your friends, family, students, coworkers, teammates, bandmates, classmates, or whomever else you wish. Work through the Local Facilitation Guide together and designate someone to take notes as you discuss. At the end, decide as a group what your answers are to questions of your choice in the Submission Template and complete it together for sending into the consultation.
Note: Submissions will be posted publicly, so please only share details you are comfortable being posted. Keep this in mind if sharing stories or experiences that are not your own, and do not share identifying details about someone without their consent.
OPTION 3: Advanced Consultation Guide
Contribute a detailed expert submission.
If you’re an expert or otherwise well-versed in AI issues, or an expert in a field or issue area impacted by AI, refer to the Advanced Consultation Guide for detailed questions that you may find helpful in structuring your comments, organized by issue topic. Feel free to respond to as many or as few as you like, or none at all, if you already know what you want to say or are responding to the issue from a perspective that isn’t contemplated in the Guide.
Note: Submissions will be posted publicly, so please only share details you are comfortable being posted. Keep this in mind if sharing stories or experiences that are not your own, and do not share identifying details about someone without their consent.
Generative AI Policy
We strongly recommend against using generative AI in the comments you submit to this consultation. If you use any such tools, however, please include a transparency statement at the beginning of your submission, indicating what you used and specifically what aspects and which parts of your submission it was used for.
What Will Happen to Submitted Comments?
All submitted comments will be made publicly available on this website after they are received, starting in March 2026. For that reason, do not include any private or personal information you would not want posted publicly, and do not include any private or personal information of others without their consent.
Once the People’s Consultation on AI is closed, we will compile all submitted comments and send them to the relevant parts of the federal government and potential parliamentary committee studies, such as:
- Ministry of AI and Digital Innovation
- Industry, Science and Economic Development
- Prime Minister’s Office
- Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
- Standing Committees in the House of Commons and in the Senate, in the event they conduct a study on any relevant aspect of AI
Pending the availability of funding or organization of volunteers, after the close of the People’s Consultation, the submissions to the consultation may also be summarized or analyzed (by humans), with any summaries or findings posted publicly on this website.
Submissions may also be used to inform future community organizing, capacity building, and public education initiatives that build on the groundwork begun through this consultation. This might include virtual or in-person townhalls, virtual or in-person teach-ins on AI, or a series of public panels or webinars each diving into AI issues related to a specific sector or aspect of society, such as labour, education, health care, gender-based violence, or journalism, for example.If this is something you would be interested in helping make happen or leading on, get in touch below!
How to Submit Comments
- Save your submission as a PDF, naming it: PCAI_Option [#]_[Name or Organization]_[YYYYMMDD]
- Upload your PDF through our submission portal here. That’s it!
Deadline for Submissions
We are accepting submissions ongoingly until March 15, 2026 EXTENDED: Monday, March 23, 2026, at 8:00pm PST / 11:00pm EST. This will be the final day to submit comments. In fairness to those who meet this deadline and to keep the process organized, the submission portal will be taken down after this time.
We will begin posting submissions on this website in early late March or early April.
Questions?
Please note: this is NOT the official submission portal for comments; you can find that here. This contact form is meant for questions and comments about the process and the PCAI itself.
However, if you have a brief comment that does not require an entire PDF and to make participation more accessible, we will accept comments submitted through this contact form as your consultation submission IF you explicitly state that’s your intention within your comment, you include your name for sharing within the comment (for attribution), AND include in your comment the consent statement required by the submission portal, so that we are able to actually include and share your comment. Otherwise, anything submitted through this contact form will be ignored as a consultation submission. For clarity, we encourage use of the official submission portal here.