AI for Government and the Public Sector in Canada

Where AI helps public-sector teams

Public-sector work is document-heavy, rule-based and bilingual. That makes it a good fit for AI that prepares work for a person to decide. Typical use cases:

• Intake and completeness checks. Applications, permits and forms classified, checked against a checklist and summarized for the officer. See document processing.
• Correspondence drafting. First drafts of replies, deficiency notices and briefing notes in English and French, reviewed before sending.
• Internal knowledge search. Staff ask questions of policies, procedures and past decisions and get answers with the source document attached.
• Service assistants. Bilingual assistants that answer routine questions about status, hours and requirements and hand anything else to staff.
• Staff AI policy and training. Rules for which tools staff may use and with what data, backed by department training.

Eligibility, enforcement and benefit decisions stay with officials. The design makes that line visible.

Which rules apply to your organization

The right instrument depends on who you are. The sub-pages go into detail.

Federal departments and agencies. The Directive on Automated Decision-Making covers automated decision systems used in production to make administrative decisions about clients. Before production, the institution completes, approves and publishes an Algorithmic Impact Assessment. For internal generative AI, the Treasury Board Guide on the use of generative AI applies, with its FASTER principles, and it says public servants must not enter personal information into publicly available online tools.

Provincial ministries and municipalities. Ontario's Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence Directive applies to all ministries and provincial agencies. Municipalities, school boards and local boards are institutions under MFIPPA. Quebec public bodies must assess privacy impacts before acquiring or overhauling a system and inform people of decisions based exclusively on automated processing.

Crown corporations. Parent Crown corporations usually sit outside the Policy on Service and Digital, which sets the directive's scope. Parent Crown corporations and their wholly-owned subsidiaries are government institutions under the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act, with some corporation-specific exclusions. Governance is set to match the corporation's own legal position.

Our AI compliance work turns these rules into a checklist per use case, and an AI use policy sets the rules for staff.

Which package fits

Full scope is on the pricing page.

How the work runs

1. Scope call. Thirty minutes to agree the team, the problem and the package.
2. Audit. Interviews with program, IT, privacy and ATIP staff; the governing rule is noted for each use case.
3. Roadmap. Use cases ranked by value, effort and approval path, with an Algorithmic Impact Assessment flagged where it applies.
4. Pilot. One workflow built on approved infrastructure and tested on cases your privacy team has cleared.
5. Handover. Training, a runbook and the documentation your approvers need.

In our experience, approvals and system access set the pace more than the build; it depends on the institution and its security review.