In recent years, youth around the world have been suing their governments for climate change inaction, which is hastening the destruction of our planet. In 50 years, will future generations feel the same way about our adoption of AI?

The pattern is unmistakable. A transformative industry promises economic prosperity and job creation. Governments open the funding taps without guardrails. Lobbyists flood policy corridors with industry-friendly narratives. Communities bear the environmental and social costs while profits are concentrated in corporate hands. Public opposition gets sidelined or ignored entirely.

We’ve seen this playbook before with fossil fuels. Now, as artificial intelligence emerges as the defining technology of our generation, Canada is racing down the same path — and we’re running out of time to change course.

When money talks, who listens?

Follow the money, and you’ll see whose future really matters to the Canadian government.

Last year, Environmental Defence reviewed fossil fuel financing, revealing that Canada provided at least $29.6 billion to fossil fuel companies — including a jaw-dropping $21 billion for the Trans Mountain pipeline, a project so financially unsound it will likely never repay taxpayers. Export Development Canada handed out another $7.5 billion in public financing, often at subsidized rates, to an industry that made $20 billion in profits while investing next to nothing in emissions reductions.

Several advocacy groups submitted detailed pre-budget recommendations calling for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, and investment in renewable energy instead. But as the budget was unveiled last week the government substantially ignored or rejected many of these recommendations. Leading organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, Oxfam Canada, and Greenpeace, are describing Carney’s budget as a step backwards.

“This budget is a betrayal of public trust and a shocking failure to confront the climate emergency.” says Atiya Jaffar of 350.org.

While Canada has a robust set of climate action organizations to stand up against the fossil fuel industry, we do not yet have the networked capacity to address artificial intelligence at the same scale. It is sliding by with much less scrutiny. 

Over the last 12 months Big Tech has spent a substantial amount of lobbying resources across the government. Records from Canada’s Lobbyist Registry show that Amazon Web Service, Google, Cohere, Microsoft, Facebook, ShyftLabs and other tech organizations lobbied the Prime Minister’s Office, Justice Canada, the Privy Council Office and other government ministries and institutions about artificial intelligence. Subjects ranged from procurement of contracts, to central strategy and policy input, and legal frameworks.

Meanwhile, organizations representing actual humans submitted recommendations, too. Action Canada, EGALE, CUPE, SOCAN, and the Canadian SHIELD Institute called for safeguards protecting human rights, worker rights, creator rights, and genuine digital sovereignty. 

The 2025 budget promises $925.6 million over five years to scale AI infrastructure, that the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation will engage with industry to identify new promising AI infrastructure projects, and enable the Canada Infrastructure Bank to invest in AI infrastructure projects.

In contrast, research on AI’s societal impact is only receiving $25 million over the same time frame in the form of having Statistics Canada to implement the Artificial Intelligence and Technology Measurement Program (TechStat). The mandate is broad with TechStat tasked to “measure how AI is used by organisations, and understand its impact on Canadian society, the labour force, and the economy.” And none of the funding is new, it is reallocated from existing budgets. For every dollar spent on evaluating impacts the government will spend $37 rapidly building infrastructure; it’s a recipe for disaster. 

This final budget reflects the desires of Big Tech while ignoring much-needed protections that benefit all Canadians.

The government is subsidizing AI development at scale without guaranteeing return on investment for taxpayers or protections for those most affected. Sound familiar?

It follows the same pattern of the fossil fuel sector. When industry lobbies for subsidies, governments open wallets. When workers, communities, and advocates lobby for protections, they get platitudes.

The propaganda machine never sleeps

If money is the fuel of industry capture, propaganda is the engine. And the same people running fossil fuel influence campaigns are now working for AI.

Meet One Persuasion Inc., a PR firm that perfectly embodies the nexus between fossil fuels, conservative politics, and now AI. Partner Hamish Marshall ran Andrew Scheer’s 2019 campaign and formerly was director at Rebel Media. Partner Travis Freeman led Conservative Party digital operations in multiple elections. VP David Murray was Pierre Poilievre’s Director of Policy until July 2024. The firm has worked for Alberta’s Energy War Room and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

An investigation by Canada’s National Observer revealed that in October and November 2024, One Persuasion Inc. orchestrated a sophisticated influence operation. Four seemingly unrelated Facebook pages — “Affordability Advocates,” “Fair Share Report,” “Energy Gap,” and “Fueling Modern Life” — spent $153,166 targeting just Thorold and St. Catharines, Ontario. The pages looked like grassroots organizations championing working-class Canadians. Their message: government regulation makes you poorer, the carbon tax causes inflation, fossil fuels equal prosperity. All four pages traced back to One Persuasion. Same phone numbers. Same voicemail. Same metadata on their images.

Why Thorold? The city of 24,000 had rejected a gas plant expansion. When Ontario opened energy procurement to natural gas (worth over a million dollars daily until 2050), these Facebook pages laser-focused on the two municipalities that could veto local projects. One ad reached 5.4 million people despite the page having only 250 followers.

This is textbook astroturfing — creating the illusion of grassroots support for industry interests. And it works. 

The fossil fuel industry has been spreading misinformation about global warming since the 1980s, fully knowing that the science on climate change was true. In fact, their own scientists predicted it.

Players who stand to gain the most financially from widespread adoption of artificial intelligence are continuing this tradition. 

To see this in action we can look to Memphis. When Elon Musk’s xAI built the “Colossus” supercomputer, the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce became its PR arm. They created a five-member team for “round-the-clock concierge service” to xAI. They rebranded Memphis as the “Digital Delta,” and hosted at least 12 invitation-only meetings touting benefits while avoiding public forums. Their first mailer spreads misinformation about regulatory oversight.

The Chamber’s main conference room is now the “xAI Digital Delta Center.” Why? Because xAI became their biggest investor. As Chamber official Bobby White admitted, “We do sponsorships. You can put your name on the wall, too.” The Chamber used to be government-funded; now it’s privately funded by the companies it’s supposed to be holding accountable.

Meanwhile, xAI signed NDAs with Memphis Gas Light and Water and other key players. The data center was built in months with minimal public input. Residents in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Boxtown — already suffering industrial pollution — now breathe emissions from 35 methane turbines (when only 15 have permits) that increase smog 30 to 60 per cent.

The Chamber markets 500 jobs and tens of millions in property taxes that have yet to materialize. What they don’t advertise: one million gallons of daily water use, electricity for 100,000 homes, nitrogen oxide and formaldehyde emissions linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and a community designated as yet another “sacrifice zone.”

The irony is suffocating: AI companies position their technology as a solution to disinformation while deploying the most sophisticated influence campaigns imaginable.

Both sectors promise jobs and prosperity that don’t materialize as advertised. Both use front groups and astroturf to manufacture consent. Both deploy PR machines to sanitize their image. Both lack transparency by design. And increasingly, both use the same firms and tactics.

The United States is already suffering the consequences of unchecked AI infrastructure expansion — providing a preview of what Canada can expect without intervention.

Dream.org’s “Green the Grid” initiative documents the crisis. Data centers are “guzzling local water, straining power grids, polluting neighbourhoods, and shutting communities out of the decision-making process.” They’re disproportionately sited in vulnerable communities with less power to resist — exactly like fossil fuel infrastructure before them.

In Memphis, xAI’s facility sits in Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood already living with industrial pollution of industries past. The county recently received an ‘F’ in air quality from the  American Lung Association. Residents describe worsening air quality from turbine emissions. Community organizer KeShaun Pearson called it “the latest example of Memphis designating their community as a ‘sacrifice zone.'” One resident who received the Chamber’s misleading mailer said it felt like “an attempt to quiet their concerns.”

In Newton County, Georgia, Meta’s data center pushed water costs into crisis. Rates are set to jump 33 per cent over two years. The county will face water deficits by 2030. Meta uses 10 per cent of the county’s daily water — for one facility.

The AI water crisis is particularly stark worldwide. A Bloomberg investigation found two-thirds of global AI data centers are built or planned in water-stressed areas. Environmental Defence has outlined several issues Canada should prepare for; including water, energy, and waste impacts. And they’ve also highlighted how artificial intelligence and fossil fuel sectors are already partnering together, like BP’s partnership with Microsoft to use AzureAI on projects. 

But it’s not just environmental concerns we have to worry about, there is an additional human cost that comes with unchecked AI. Several parents are suing OpenAI for ChatGPT’s role in encouraging their children to commit suicide. 

Generative AI has enabled Child Sexual Abuse Material to proliferate at a rate that prosecutors, regulations, and laws can’t keep up with. It is not just the question of how to prosecute those cases; the growing sophistication of the technology is slowing down investigations into non-AI generated photos of child victims too. That’s not to mention potential job losses, the scam industry having more convincing tools that it can scale, the sexual harassment of women using generative-AI, implications of predictive policing exacerbating already existing biases, and other crises that have yet to reveal themselves. 

We’re watching the mistakes happen in real-time across the border. Subsidies without environmental review. Companies operating behind NDAs. Corporate interests are prioritized over community health. And the most vulnerable end up paying the highest price.

The lesson from fossil fuels couldn’t be clearer: once infrastructure is built, it’s nearly impossible to reverse. Once companies capture local economies with tax revenue and promised jobs, communities lose leverage. Once health impacts compound, no amount of money repairs the damage.

We have one chance to get this right.

Our opportunity

The good news: we’re not powerless. Every level of action matters, and we have the tools (and prescience) the fossil fuel resistance didn’t.

But let’s be clear about one thing first: we cannot simply trust our government to do the right thing.

And the AI lobby has already proven it can wield similar influence. We’ve seen this materialize in the federal budget. 

We need organized, coordinated resistance that doesn’t rely on hoping politicians will suddenly prioritize public good over industry pressure.

Even with all the knowledge we have now — decades of climate science, mountains of evidence about fossil fuel industry deception, and the lived reality of climate chaos — Canadian governments still answer to the oil lobby. As mentioned above, Canada provided at least $29.6 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2024 alone. This happened despite countless environmental groups, economists, and scientists explaining why these subsidies are economically and environmentally disastrous.

Building power at every level

The path forward requires three interconnected forms of power working together: institutional power, community power, and people power.

Institutional power includes universities, unions, and civil society. Unions must have seats at every table where AI policy is discussed — not consultation theater, but real decision-making power. CUPE’s recommendation for a Canadian Observatory on AI and Work should have been adopted in Budget 2025. It wasn’t. This means unions need to build that capacity themselves and demand recognition.

Environmental groups should expand their focus to include AI infrastructure alongside fossil fuels. The connections are already there — BP partnered with Microsoft to use AzureAI on projects, and the same PR firms working for Big Oil now work for Big Tech.

Universities and research institutions should develop ethical AI guidelines that prioritize public good. They should refuse corporate funding that comes with strings attached and refuse to partner with companies that skirt ethical guardrails.

Professional associations need to hold their members accountable. Tech workers have power — they can refuse to build systems that harm communities or violate privacy.

Organizations can lead alternative narratives that shine a spotlight on local issues, as Khasir Hean from Tech for Democracy explained when discussing surveillance technology in Ontario: “We should be calling the province to be accountable for spending funds and making sure that our money, our taxpayer dollars, are being spent accordingly, are being spent responsibly.”

Local resistance and coalition building

Communities worldwide are proving that organized local resistance works.

In Virginia, Elena Schlossberg’s Coalition to Protect Prince William County developed a “12-step program for halting data centers” that includes creating Facebook pages, distributing yard signs, electing opponents to local commissions, and hiring legal representation. In August 2025, a judge ruled in favor of residents challenging a 2.1-million-square-foot data center campus, nullifying plans for a project the developer claimed would jeopardize “$200 billion of investment into American AI.”

In Indiana, community advocates successfully negotiated $7.5 million from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to fund assistance for low-income ratepayers as these companies built AI data centers. They also secured transparency requirements forcing utilities to disclose how much they spend serving data centers and reveal the power consumption of the sites.

Municipal governments have real power through zoning and environmental bylaws. Use Freedom of Information requests to expose data center proposals before they’re announced. Build coalitions connecting climate activists, labour unions, digital rights advocates, and impacted communities. Isolated groups lose; united movements win.

Individual actions matter when they’re part of coordinated campaigns.

Demand elected representatives answer specific questions about AI subsidies and safeguards. Don’t accept vague responses about “innovation” or “competitiveness.” Ask: Which companies are getting funding? What are they required to provide in return? Where will data centers be sited? What are the water and energy demands? Who benefits?

Amplify voices of workers, creators, and communities bearing AI’s costs. When you see news about AI “progress,” ask whose progress and at what cost.

Two futures

We’re at a fork in the road. The path we choose will determine whether AI becomes this generation’s fossil fuel industry or something fundamentally different.

It’s not only possible, it’s happening elsewhere.

The European Union’s experience with the AI Act demonstrates that strong regulation doesn’t kill innovation — it channels it toward public benefit. Despite industry claims of regulatory overreach, the Act mainly regulates high-risk AI applications while leaving most systems free of heavy obligations. The EU built on its GDPR framework, which already governs data protection and operational resilience, integrating AI-specific controls into existing processes rather than reinventing everything.

The lesson? Regulation works when it’s comprehensive, enforceable, and designed with public interest at the center. And contrary to industry scaremongering, serious developers already comply through robust documentation and quality checks.

We need to unite institutional power, community power, and people power. We need to build coalitions across movements — climate justice, labour rights, digital rights, Indigenous sovereignty, racial justice, economic fairness. We need to communicate in ways that resonate beyond progressive bubbles, meeting people where they are with material analysis that connects to their lived experience.

The window for choosing is narrow. The stakes couldn’t be higher. What we need now is the will.