Would you trust a detox facility that offers a minibar in every room? How about a climate course sponsored by ExxonMobil? If not, you might direct the same incredulity towards Canada’s recently unveiled Responsible Data Centre Development Principles, endorsed by tech giants that are implicated in violating those same principles.
Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon announced the voluntary and non-binding principles in September in response to mounting public opposition to massive data centre developments. It is hardly encouraging that the same companies leading the disruptive build out of massive data centres, such as Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, quickly signed on to this toothless commitment.
“Data centres must protect ratepayers, respect water and energy resources, and create lasting benefits for the communities that host them,” assured Solomon at the launch in September. “These principles set a clear national standard: If you build in Canada, you must build responsibly and transparently and you must build for Canadians.”
Really?
Barely three weeks after these companies pledged to Canadians to be “transparent about local impacts,” the U.S. House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into Amazon, Google, and Meta for using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to gag state and local officials from telling their constituents about data centre impacts on local water supplies and electricity rates.
“Google’s own confidentiality agreements have been shown to contain language that explicitly prevents local officials from disclosing ‘the terms of any agreement,’” ranking member Democratic U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote in a letter to Google’s parent company Alphabet.
For over a year, the company fought a local newspaper in Oregon in the courts to keep its Dalles data centre’s water consumption hidden, arguing the figure was a “trade secret.” When the courts finally forced the release of this essential information, it was revealed that Google was using a quarter of the entire city’s water. A company that litigates to hide its water use from the residents of one small town is now asking Canadians to trust its promise of transparency here.
A Meta subsidiary in Louisiana likewise convinced Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to sign an NDA tied to a $50 billion data centre campus. Over 100 Louisiana state public officials signed similar gag orders that apparently silence them even if they leave government. Eric Holl, an adviser to former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, told the Gulf States Newsroom, “I don’t see this being used as anything other than a tool of intimidation and control.”
Citizens in Wisconsin were also forced to sue the local utility regulator to release documents detailing the projected energy demand of a proposed Meta data centre after this basic information was also deemed a trade secret.
The impacts of enormous AI facilities on American communities are well known. The consequences being visited on Canadian towns and residents are concerning to say the least.
The principles say centres must reduce environmental impacts, and prioritize “low-emission energy sources.” Yet a contentious data centre development in Saskatchewan proposed by Bell Canada – also a signatory to Minister Solomon’s principles – would require as much generating capacity as the entire city of Regina. About 900 megawatts (MW) of its power will come from behind-the-fence gas generation. The Regina City Council recently debated the development for over seven hours and voted to demand more information on potential impacts on local water supplies and electricity costs. A total of 18,000 residents have signed a petition opposing the project.
Beacon Data Centers is another signatory, which stated it is “proud to stand with governments, municipalities, and industry in supporting them.” Yet the company is embroiled in a bitter dispute with residents of Lorneville, New Brunswick, who are understandably opposed to the company’s plans to fill in a local wetland to expand an industrial park with a data centre that will require more than 10 percent of provincial energy demand. The data centre would become one of New Brunswick’s biggest emitters, generating 6.6 percent of provincial emissions.
According to reporting from the Narwhal, “documents obtained through provincial access to information legislation … show provincial officials were in discussions to bring a data centre to the [industrial] park long before residents were told about the tenant — and that details of that data centre conflicted with the more low-impact vision for the industrial park advertised to residents.”
DeSmog has already documented the massive buildout of data centres in Alberta, almost entirely powered by burning natural gas. Almost 21 GW of potential new gas capacity is enthusiastically being embraced by provincial regulators, an amount described as “absurdly high” by Alex de Vries at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Based on similar gas-fired installations around the world, de Vries estimated this amount of new data centres would require about 200 billion litres in cooling water each year. How is this not supposed to impact local electricity rates, heating costs, or water supplies?
This absurd increase in climate-killing gas consumption seems, in fact, to be the point. Internal Privy Council documents obtained by DeSmog from Greenpeace showed that increased gas demand was being touted by senior advisors to Prime Minister Mark Carney as one of the top “public policy benefits to Canada” of data centres.
Bringing “strategic value to Canada” is another vague goal of the newly announced data centre principles. If this is meant to allude to protecting Canadian data sovereignty, building facilities owned by Google, Meta, Amazon or other tech giants will accomplish very little. The U.S. government can compel an American company that controls data – regardless of location – to release it to American regulators under the CLOUD Act (2018).
Regardless of the law, many of the enthusiastic corporate endorsers of Canada’s new data centre principles have repeatedly demonstrated their obedient political fealty to the Trump administration. Tech leaders attended his inauguration, donated vast sums of money to the Trump campaign, and indulged the president’s geographic fits of pique by rapidly renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” on Google and Apple maps.
With this cohort driving Canada’s tech build-out, what could possibly go wrong?
Canadians are justifiably concerned data centres will impact local water supplies and electricity costs. We need bold policies that will improve digital safety and address increasing democratic threats from AI-driven disinformation. Rather than bringing in meaningful and enforceable regulations, the federal government has instead trotted out vague platitudes endorsed by the same companies contributing to the problem. Ottawa, we have a credibility problem.
