Bureaucratic Silences: What the Canadian AI Register Reveals, Omits, and Obscures

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 16 Apr 2026] Bureaucratic Silences: What the Canadian AI Register Reveals, Omits, and Obscures Dipto Das, Christelle Tessono, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Shion Guha In November 2025, the Government of Canada operationalized its commitment to transparency by releasing its first Federal AI Register. In this paper, we argue that such registers are not neutral mirrors of government activity, but active instruments of ontological design that configure the boundaries of accountability. We analyzed the Register's complete dataset of 409 systems using the Algorithmic Decision-Making Adapted for the Public Sector (ADMAPS) framework, combining quantitative mapping with deductive qualitative coding. Our findings reveal a sharp divergence between the rhetoric of "sovereign AI" and the reality of bureaucratic practice: while 86\% of systems are deployed internally for efficiency, the Register systematically obscures the human discretion, training, and uncertainty management required to operate them. By privileging technical descriptions over sociotechnical context, the Register constructs an ontology of AI as "reliable tooling" rather than "contestable decision-making." We conclude that without a shift in design, such transparency artifacts risk automating accountability into a performative compliance exercise, offering visibility without contestability. Comments: Accepted at FAccT 2026 Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15514 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.15514v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15514 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Dipto Das [view email] [v1] Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:48:35 UTC (2,096 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY cs.HC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)