Stephen Smysnuik
Should Canada put the brakes on new AI data centres?
Photo via Tirachard Kumtanom, Shutterstock
The Topline
- Avi Lewis, who’s running for NDP leadership, is calling for a moratorium on new AI data centres in Canada until stronger environmental, labour, and public-interest rules are in place.
- Canada has become an attractive location for large AI and data-centre investments due to its relatively clean electricity grid, political stability, and federal and provincial efforts to expand domestic AI compute capacity.
- Lewis is calling for the government to “ rein in ” AI companies that, he says, are stealing private data, threatening jobs, and harming the environment
Switch sides,
back and forth
Let's just take a breather
Lewis isn’t trying to slow a future risk. He’s trying to mitigate present damage.
Slowing the expansion of AI data centres buys the country time to establish labour protections for vulnerable workers, along with copyright rules before workforce displacement becomes more permanent.
Certain creative industries are already seeing the effects. Writers, artists, translators, editors, and designers, among others, are watching paid work get displaced by AI systems. This is just the beginning as more occupations feel the impact .
But this isn’t only about workers’ rights. AI infrastructure is also a climate issue, whether we acknowledge it or not. Modern AI data centres require constant power and consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, often rivaling the consumption of small cities.
That demand reshapes power grids, strains water systems, and often requires public investment to support facilities that are privately owned and operated.
So they should be treated like other major industrial projects that require public buy-in, including pipelines, mines, ports, and power plants. Those projects are regulated in part for their environmental and economic impacts.
Theste data centres belong in that same category. How can Canada credibly claim climate leadership while quietly approving operations with such significant environmental impact and little scrutiny?
Lewis’s idea is less about banning AI technology altogether. According to CBC , he supports automated machine learning used for medical research, for example. His focus is on oversight.
His issue is mainly about its environmental impact and how generative AI could displace workers. He’s calling for a “human guarantee,” for example, to ensure people can still speak to a real person, not just a bot, when accessing federal services.
The government needs stronger oversight and regulation before these data centres get built, because once projects are underway, the debate is over.
AI is here to stay, like it or not
The reality is that AI will disrupt industries and displace workers. Layoffs are coming. It’s unavoidable. But pausing infrastructure won’t protect workers either.
The AI industry will grow regardless of what Canada chooses to do. The real issue at play is whether Canada builds the infrastructure needed to manage the transition happening worldwide, or becomes dependent on other countries to provide these services.
Slowing development at home would likely mean outsourcing more data processing and AI workflows abroad, particularly to the United States, where Canada is already outsourcing data processing and cloud storage to tech companies like AWS and Google.
Given the current relationship between the two countries, relying on U.S. infrastructure for core economic functions is seriously risky.
Introducing a moratorium on AI data centres would also put Canada on the sidelines at the very moment when scale, speed, and capacity matter most, and could damage the economy in the process.
This would send the exact opposite message from what Prime Minister Mark Carney signaled at Davos last week.
Canada already suffers weak business investment and struggles with scaling domestic technology companies beyond their early stages. We’re entering an era where AI will transform the global economy. AI systems are already being used by banks, hospitals, accounting firms, law offices, manufacturers, retailers, and more.
Carney has argued that AI could help transform education, health care, and the federal public service, and that major reforms are needed to make that possible. Data centres would help Canada achieve these ambitions at scale.
Slowing AI’s roll in Canada risks undercutting those ambitions by limiting access to the computing power needed to make them real. We can’t modernize public services or boost productivity while restricting the infrastructure required to run them.
And right now, at this precarious moment, Canada can’t afford to fall behind.
