Public Policy Grads win Global Affairs Canada award for AI governance policy pitch

‘Canada may not be able to lead the world in AI development, but what if we could lead the world in safe and ethical AI?’

That’s the question that Master of Public Policy graduates Emily Osborne and Christo Hall are grappling with, and it’s the question that has earned them an audience with policymakers from Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

That’s because their research into the issue of AI governance won the 2025 International Policy Ideas Challenge, a collaboration between GAC and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Osborne and Hall were among seven winning teams who now have the opportunity to work with subject-matter experts from Global Affairs Canada to develop the proposal into a full policy brief.

Canada’s role in making AI safer

Osborne and Hall won the award for their project titled ‘Canada’s role in strengthening the G7’s Hiroshima AI Process’.

The team’s research examines how Canada can leverage its current role as President of the G7 to lead the way in making the AI oversight process more trustworthy.

Their idea was to strengthen the Hiroshima AI Process (HAIP) Reporting Framework, a voluntary mechanism for companies to report how they address risk assessment, incident reporting, governance and transparency.

And for policymakers like Hall and Osborne, it’s the most effective AI governance tool around, though it isn’t without its flaws.

“I would argue that the HAIP is probably the most robust framework that we currently have in an international perspective,” said Hall. “Despite the fact that it’s voluntary and it’s not particularly very strong in itself.”

But Osborne and Hall quickly identified one way to strengthen the tool.

“One of the things that stood out to us,” said Osborne, “is that there isn’t a review of the actual content of the submissions. The only check that is made is to see if organizations have answered all the questions.”

The team’s policy idea, therefore, is to bring in external academic, business and civil society experts to review the submissions, scrutinising how AI developers identify, manage and respond to risks.

It would, they argue, help legitimize the HAIP Reporting Framework and help governments identify and understand AI risks.

And broadly, it would help Canada cement its place as a leader in secure, responsible and trustworthy AI, especially since it is not able to lead the world in AI development.

“Canada is not able to move at the same speed as the USA, say, so there is an opportunity for us to do something different and to think about how we can promote more ethical and safer AI development,” said Osborne. “This is an opportunity for us to be better at AI safety.”

The team are now being mentored by policy experts at Global Affairs, who will help them turn their idea into a full policy brief, which is due in November.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to have an audience like Global Affairs to listen to these recommendations,” said Hall. “It will be fantastic to work with policy professionals that have decades of experience.”

Public Policy Opportunities

Osborne and Hall are both graduates of the MPP program at McMaster, which they both credit as instrumental in winning this award and helping them get started in their careers in the policy sphere.

Hall, now a research assistant in the Digital Society Lab at McMaster after a role as an AI governance researcher with The Centre for International Governance Innovation, said he’s currently in working his dream career, and that’s thanks to his experience in the MPP.

“I pinch myself everyday,” he said. “I find myself thinking, ‘well, this is exactly the thing that I want to be working on’, and all of that so far has been entirely because of the MPP.

“It has been transformative for me.”

And Osborne, who is currently working as a policy research associate at the Canadian SHIELD Institute, feels the same way.

“I’ve had so many opportunities since graduating, including my current position, which I wouldn’t have had without the MPP,” said Osborne. “I got some opportunities out of the research that I did for my capstone project too. The MPP launched a whole lot of exciting things for me.”

“It has led to a cascade of really cool things.”

McMaster’s MPP is?the first Canadian graduate degree of its kind to offer specialized streams in Housing Policy and in Digital Transformation and its implications for public policy and governance.