Some Canadians can have a case for requesting religious exemptions from artificial intelligence usage within the workplace, following formal Catholic Church warnings from Pope Leo XIV concerning the technology.
But experts caution that requesting religious exemptions will not be easy, and the query of where reasonable accommodation lies with an emerging and largely unregulated technology continues to be murky.
The Pope’s sweeping manifesto calls for the robust regulation of artificial intelligence, warning in his 42,300-word encyclical letter that “technology will not be simply a tool.”
“When it becomes the usual by which all the things is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what might be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency,” the Pope said.
“What is required is a more energetic political involvement that’s able to slowing things down when all the things is accelerating,” Pope Leo said within the text, entitled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity.
He also states there’s a “subtler danger” for AI usage, calling for “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that doesn’t abdicate its responsibility.”
Leo also called upon AI developers to work for the common good moderately than profit.
“Just because the creator of a creative or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values of their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful attention to making sure that what’s being cultivated is a real good.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney — who’s a practising Catholic — is poised to disclose his government’s long-awaited AI strategy this week following repeated delays.
He discussed the subject of artificial intelligence with Pope Leo on Friday, with Carney “welcoming the Pope’s leadership on this field.”
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“They discussed the imperative that AI must serve humanity, starting with the protection of the person. Prime Minister Carney expressed Canada’s desire to steer internationally on responsible AI and tools to learn the worldwide community,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a readout of the decision.
The federal government is anticipated to announce its long-awaited national AI strategy this week.
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Canada’s national assembly of the bishops of the Catholic Church, also described the Pope’s letter by saying it “places the dignity of the human person on the centre as the standards for guiding technical progress.”
“The Church’s social teaching accompanies these transformations, pointing to the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity as the basic benchmarks for understanding and interpreting the transformation currently underway,” based on the assembly’s media release.
Can employees now refuse to make use of AI?
Formal religious writings on the topic might leave some Canadians wondering whether or not they can seek a non secular exemption from using artificial intelligence of their jobs.
The Canadian Human Rights Act goals to “extent the laws in Canada that proscribe discrimination,” while the Ontario Human Rights Code is a statute that states that “every body has a right to equal treatment with respect to the occupancy of accommodation, without discrimination due to race, ancestry, place of birth, color, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability or the receipt of public assistance.”
Christopher Achkar, a managing partner at Achkar Law, states that those laws could potentially be cited by Canadian employees in a request for religious accommodation.
“Employees can cite those religious reasons as reasons to be accommodated and never need to use AI,” he said.
“Because these two pieces of laws protect against discrimination on the premise of those grounds, employers need to accommodate those employees once they cite that they’re a part of those groups that subscribe to those beliefs.
“If there are religious groups, for instance, and on this case not using AI for religious reasons, then the code protects them from being terminated, discriminated against or treated in another way or adversely due to these reasons, so employers need to accommodate.”
Nonetheless, Puneet Tiwari, an employment lawyer and partner of Leavitt LLP, said this is applicable to an employer unless there’s “undue hardship.”
This refers back to the point at which an employer is not any longer legally required to accommodate an worker.
In Canadian employment law, employers must accommodate employees thus far — to not the purpose of inconvenience, preference or minor disruption.
“There’s no blanket answer. It needs to be taken in on a case-by-case basis,” Tiwari said.
Aaron Zaltzman, an associate with Whitten & Lublin Employment Lawyers, said that “whether it is a non secular belief, then the worker can be entitled to reasonable accommodation.”
“I actually think the toughest hurdle there can be proving that it’s a non secular belief,” he said.
“AI is clearly not something that was contemplated when the Torah or the Bible or most current religious texts for mainstream religions were written. So, the query of whether objections to AI as a non secular belief could be very as much as interpretation.”
Achkar also stated that if “one worker out of fifty [employees] who cites religion as a reason not to make use of AI, then the employer can have a harder time saying no to that worker and they’d need to accommodate them.”
He also added that in the long run, there might be adjustments to laws already in place to satisfy these needs.
“It’s actually an evolving field, and it has to affect the prevailing laws in place, so I definitely see that coming into force inside different acts around.”
Tiwari said accommodation “is a two-way street.”
“So the employer and the worker can engage in a dialogue to see, ‘Hey, are there any solutions?’”
How do Canadians feel about AI?
Recent data from the released Tuesday found two-thirds of Canadians (68 per cent) say it’s government’s place to heavily regulate AI and tech corporations, even when doing so slows development.
Nonetheless, three-quarters (74 per cent) doubt any government is really equipped to maintain pace with the technology.
As well as, the poll found that only one in six (16 per cent) of Canadians would depart it to tech corporations to self-regulate.
— with files from Reuters