When the Council of Canadian Academies brought its quantum expert panel to Quantum Days in January 2023, it did something unusual for a national academy: it opened an unfinished study to public input. Mauritz Kop joined the session to frame the ethical, legal, social, and policy stakes of quantum adoption—and to invite the audience to help shape the questions, not just receive the answers.
A government-commissioned panel, in public
The panel had been formed at the request of federal sponsors, including the National Research Council of Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and was chaired by the physicist Raymond Laflamme. The Quantum Days appearance gathered members of that panel—Laflamme, Jeff Kinder, Mauritz Kop, and Jacqueline Bartlett among the named participants—to discuss the panel's mandate, key questions, and priorities while its assessment of Canadian quantum adoption was still being written. It was a national study opened up mid-draft, with its conclusions deliberately still open.
Live polls and equitable access
The session's signature move was procedural: the audience was invited to feed the eventual report through live polls, under the banner of helping Canada build a quantum ecosystem. That design choice carries an argument. Responsible quantum governance, on Kop's reading, treats equitable access to quantum-enabled prosperity as a question to be settled by deliberation rather than left to the market, and asks how codes of conduct and design guidelines can be agreed across cultures whose ethical intuitions differ. Live audience input is well suited to surfacing exactly the trade-offs that have no single technically correct answer—and it reflects the distributive themes that run through Kop's broader scholarship on responsible technology.
Why the policy lens belongs at a physics conference
Quantum systems invite governance because their behavior is genuinely unfamiliar. Superposition and entanglement change what computation can do, with consequences for cryptography and security that existing law did not anticipate. The case for an ethical, legal, social, and policy lens at a technical conference is that the rules must be drafted while the science is still moving—a position consistent with the standards-and-principles direction Kop and colleagues set out in the Ten Principles for Responsible Quantum Innovation.
A panel on its way to a report
The Quantum Days session is one step in a longer process. The same panel, under the same chair, is carrying its study through 2023 toward a national assessment of quantum adoption in Canada, with Kop among its members. The sequence—open the questions in public, gather input through live polls, then translate that deliberation into evidence for decision-makers—offers a working model of quantum governance that is both expert-led and publicly grounded, an early example of treating quantum policy as a question worked out in the open rather than a finished product to be announced. (That study became the CCA's Quantum Potential report, published November 30, 2023.)
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