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The federal and B.C. governments want artificial intelligence firms to have a strong foothold in Canada to spur economic and job growth, but say there’s also a need for guardrails on the technology and return on public investment.
British Columbia Premier David Eby told a crowd at Vancouver’s Web Summit, which has more than 20,000 attendees, that he’s an optimist about the technology having seen both the “opportunity and the threat” it presents.
Eby said B.C. has experienced the extremes of AI, referencing the February mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge where he said the shooter used ChatGPT to plan the shooting, resulting in the deaths of eight victims.
“We don’t know all the content of the chats or so on, but it was sufficiently concerning that allegedly the OpenAI employees were petitioning to call the police and the company made a decision not to involve law enforcement,” Eby said.
He said the province is now calling “for a minimum threshold for reporting to law enforcement when it comes to using these tools to plan harm to others.”
He said the province has seen the “human fallibility” of the technology, but he remains a “huge optimist” about artificial intelligence.
“We have remarkable and incredible research that’s happened here in the province,” he said. “As a government, we’re embracing the opportunity of AI.”
Eby’s remarks came a day after Telus and federal AI Minister Evan Solomon announced a cluster of three AI data centres in B.C.
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The premier said BC Hydro as a public utility gives the province a “huge advantage” because of its low energy costs and clean output.
The demand for power from the industry could be overwhelming in B.C. because of its low rates, but there’s a need to work with the federal government on sovereign AI capacity, which is of national importance, Eby said.
There are companies shopping around for support from governments, and Eby said federal and provincial funding “helps them to be able to expand and keeps them located here in British Columbia.”
“We have companies here that get calls,” he said. “They’re like, ‘We got a call from Alabama and they’re offering us $100 million to move our facility down there and all these tax credits and whatever else. And what do you guys have?’”
In January, the B.C. government launched a competitive process for companies seeking to establish certain power-hungry tech projects, with 300 megawatts set aside for AI and 100 megawatts for data centres every two years.
Telus said the two data centres that are planned for Vancouver and one in Kamloops will draw 150 megawatts of power by 2032. That is equivalent to about 12 to 14 per cent of the output of the newly built Site C dam in northeast B.C.
Solomon said at a news conference at the summit on Tuesday that government support for companies is to help entrepreneurs and keep them in Canada, and data centres are the “backbone.”
“Let’s not demonize these folks. These are people who have advanced educations. They’ve decided to start a company. They’re solving problems like medical breakthroughs,” he said. “We don’t want to be investing public money for people in other countries and billionaires.”
Anne Pasek, Canada research chair in media, culture and the environment and an assistant professor at Trent University, said the Telus facilities appeared to represent “a harm-reduction approach to building AI data centres.”
Telus said recycled waste heat from the three centres would go back into the grid, heating more than 150,000 homes in Metro Vancouver, while the facilities would use 90 per cent less water than traditional data centres.
She said their heating and cooling systems and hydropower aspects could mitigate adverse impacts of data centres, but she doesn’t believe it’s possible to make them sustainable.
“We’ve seen in the data centre sector, like quite a lot of cases where companies just pack up and leave,” she said, leading to concerns among academics about so-called “stranded assets.”
She said it remained to be seen whether AI infrastructure investments would produce “enduring local value,” and that Solomon’s remarks seems to presume that is a forgone conclusion.
“What happens when the bubble pops is a question I think we should all be mulling over,” she said. “We just want to make sure that we’re not like putting all of our chips on the exciting AI lottery.”
B.C. Jobs Minister Ravi Kahlon spoke during a panel discussion at the convention on Tuesday, and said public investments in data centres and AI firms are important because they’ll see a return, rather than just handing out grants.
“There was a time when all we did was write grants to companies and that’s OK because sometimes that’s needed,” he said. “We wouldn’t be making investments in these organizations unless we thought there was a real benefit for the public.”
© 2026 The Canadian Press
