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Government of Canada – DTPR AI Register

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AI Writing and Knowledge Assistant for Government Employees

Employment & Work · Inform

What it collects that can identify you

Sensitive personal information
Identifiable data
  • Emails, calendar entries, meeting transcripts, and documents authored by or referencing identifiable employees in Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The system impersonates the user and accesses all content they are authorized to see.

Also collects operational data, which is anonymized data.

Run by
Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)
Where
No fixed location
Kept
Not stated by the Helpful Places.
Shared with
Accountable organization, Vendor

What it is for

Employment & WorkInform

This tool is a pilot deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot, a generative AI assistant integrated into government email, document, and collaboration platforms. It helps federal employees draft documents, summarize meetings and emails, and find information stored across internal systems. The system accesses content that the individual user is already authorized to see, and is being evaluated by Environment and Climate Change Canada to determine whether it should be rolled out more broadly across the federal government.

What it collects and what happens to it

Data taken in

Sensitive personal information
Identifiable data
  • Emails, calendar entries, meeting transcripts, and documents authored by or referencing identifiable employees in Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The system impersonates the user and accesses all content they are authorized to see.
Operational data
Anonymized data
  • Organizational documents, policies, reports, and other institutional content stored in SharePoint and OneDrive that do not directly identify individuals.

Processing

Language Models
  • Microsoft 365 Copilot uses large language models (LLMs) provided by Microsoft to read, summarize, draft, and respond in natural language, grounded in the user's enterprise data.
Search & Retrieval
  • Copilot searches across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook to retrieve relevant documents and messages, surfacing content the user may not have known they had access to.

What it does

Creating (Generative AI)
Human decides
  • Copilot drafts and modifies emails and documents, summarizes threads and meetings, generates replies, and produces written feedback on tone and clarity. All output is advisory — the employee reviews and decides whether to use, edit, or discard the generated content.
Understanding (Semantic AI)
Human decides
  • Copilot answers questions based on internal content from SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook, and surfaces enterprise knowledge the user may not have known was accessible to them.

Outputs

Generated content
Identifiable data
  • Draft emails, document text, meeting summaries, replies, and written feedback generated by Copilot and presented to the employee for review. Outputs may reference identifiable individuals by name as drawn from source emails and documents.
A recommendation or prediction
Anonymized data
  • Suggestions for tone, clarity, and phrasing improvements on employee-drafted content; recommended documents or knowledge items surfaced from internal repositories in response to queries.

Run by

Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)
  • The Digital Services Branch of ECCC is deploying and operating this pilot to evaluate Microsoft 365 Copilot for potential broader adoption across the Government of Canada.

GC AI Register — M365 Copilot

Built by

Microsoft
  • Microsoft supplies and licenses M365 Copilot as a SaaS product integrated with Microsoft 365 services including SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook.

GC AI Register — M365 Copilot

Kept for

Not stated by the Helpful Places.

Shared with

Available to the accountable organization
  • Outputs produced by Copilot (drafts, summaries, answers) are accessible to the individual GC employee who generated them and may be stored within the Microsoft 365 environment accessible to ECCC.
Available to vendor
  • As a SaaS product, Microsoft processes user inputs and generated outputs on its infrastructure. Microsoft's data processing terms govern what data Microsoft can access or use for service operations.

Stored

Stored on 3rd Party Cloud
  • M365 Copilot is a SaaS product operated on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. Inputs, outputs, and underlying data sources (SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Teams) are stored in Microsoft's cloud environment under the Government of Canada's Microsoft 365 tenant.
  • Duration: Not specified in the register entry; governed by Government of Canada Microsoft 365 tenant agreement and Treasury Board data retention policy.
How to read the colours

Can it identify you?

Anonymized data
Data about people with the link to who is broken. Stripped of identifiers, blurred, aggregated, or noised so this system can’t reasonably tie a record back to an individual.
Pseudonymous data
Each person’s data is tied to a token (hash, ID, template) that lets this system recognise the same person across events, but the token itself doesn’t reveal a name. Reidentification is possible with extra information.
Identifiable data
The data either contains a direct identifier (name, address, account name, recognisable face or voice, plate number) or carries a token this system uses to look up legal identity during processing.

Who completes the loop?

Human decides
This mode suggests; a person decides what to do next. The AI is always advisory — a human is in the loop on every decision. Example: a triage tool ranks cases for a clinician who chooses which to see first.
Human executes
This mode decides; a person carries out the result. Example: an optimizer plans the day’s trash-collection routes, and drivers run them.
Autonomous
This mode decides and acts on its own. No person reviews each decision or carries out the resulting action.

Definitions from the DTPR standard. Amber is about your data, violet about who decides. The fuller the shape and the deeper the colour, the more identifying the data or the less a person is involved.

What you can do

Ask about this system

Questions go to the Helpful Places, not the vendor.

Your rights

  • Right to Be Informed of AI UseGovernment of Canada employees are informed that this tool is an AI system before using it. The register confirms AI use is disclosed to users. Employees interact with Copilot knowingly through the Microsoft 365 interface.
  • Right to Algorithmic TransparencyThis ECCC AI Register entry provides public transparency about the system's purpose, data sources, and scope. Microsoft's product documentation describes how M365 Copilot processes requests. Employees may consult the Digital Services Branch for further information.

Risks and safeguards

  • Psychological harmEmployees may over-rely on AI-generated drafts or summaries, reducing critical thinking, or may experience anxiety from surveillance concerns if colleagues' AI usage touches shared communications.Safeguard: The system is voluntary in this pilot phase; AI use is disclosed to users; all outputs require human review before being sent or acted upon.
  • Civil liberties harmThe system has broad access to internal government communications and documents, creating potential for chilling effects on employee expression in internal channels if employees feel AI tools monitor their communications.Safeguard: Access is scoped to content the user is already authorized to see; the system does not perform surveillance, monitoring, or reporting on individual employees; AI use is disclosed.