The summer of 2026 was the summer of AI protests in Vancouver — a phenomenon seen echoed in communities throughout Canada and the United States. The organisation ‘No AI Vancouver’ began their protests this year and has been gaining momentum in communities across the city.
The protests have been happening at the same time as a number of AI researchers and developers have been going public with dire warnings that the technology could lead to the rapid collapse of civilization and extinction of human life.
Chloe Leslie, a city councillor candidate with Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), told Ricochet that the construction of potential AI data centres in Vancouver has become an election concern. “I think we’ve had a lot of people join the movement and get involved because they’ve heard our firm stance on AI data centres.”
No AI Vancouver’s founder Torin Laroque told Ricochet that seeing the two new data centres proposed in Vancouver inspired him to begin organising Vancouver’s protests. “I looked a lot to the U.S., and the protests happening there, and saw that nothing was being done here. I knew that couldn’t stand, and I knew I had be the voice that started it all.”
The group created an instagram page at the beginning of May, and has already amassed more than 10,000 followers. Laroque continued that, “We have been able to outreach and expand, and now we have a group of over 400 people helping out.”
There have been numerous protests throughout the summer and into the fall to fight AI data centres. The new AI resistance has attracted hundreds to every protest in Vancouver, hoping to replicate some of the success activists have had in the U.S. where protests against data centres have scuttled nearly $100 billion-worth of projects.
Ricochet attended a number of demonstrations throughout the summer. Protesters in Vancouver voiced their concerns of environmental degradation, the use of AI for surveillance, and the enrichment of a powerful tech elite who are using their wealth to amass political control to impose an authoritarian agenda.
Okanagan a sacrifice zone
Growing discontent with a rapidly expanding surveillance state has been most visible in the United States where widespread destruction of Flock Cameras has been a major feature of recent defiance against the corporate takeover of the American government.
Protests in Vancouver started almost immediately following the federal government announcement of its “AI for All” policy, as well as the proposal for the massive Telus AI data centre to build the multi-billion federal initiative Mark Carney is calling “Canada’s Sovereign AI.”
In June, CBC News reported that there are 96 hyperscale data centres in development across Canada.
Vancouver resident Emma Plewes described how her family in Ontario is directly impacted by potential AI infrastructure. Her family’s property in the Muskoka area, about 20 minutes south of Perry Sound, is currently facing land requisition for the construction of a power line that will go from Berry to Sudbury.
In the United States, “about two-thirds of upcoming data centers are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.”
“My family owned it for almost 50 years. So it’s a big part of our family. I spent my summers growing up there. It has a lot of memories. I really don’t want to lose it.”
“[Hydro One] says they’re going to pay, but they won’t say how much, and based on other things that we’ve heard from other people who’ve had the same thing happen, it’s probably not going to be what it’s actually worth.”
Typically in a land requisition, the property will be valued at far lower than the owner would receive if sold for market value. According to a new annual forecast from the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), electricity demand in Ontario is anticipated to grow 75 per cent by 2050. This demand is driven by “additional electric vehicle supply chain manufacturing, and energy-intensive data centres, a trend that is quickly emerging around the world to support the proliferation of artificial intelligence.”
These AI systems are being put into place and utilised at a time of rapid environmental collapse. In the context of the climate crisis, research has shown that AI infrastructure will exacerbate this crisis.
This has been the top issue for protestors.
Anna Busch, one of the No AI activists in Vancouver, told Ricochet that her “biggest concern with AI data centres is the environment.”
Anna says she’s especially concerned about the massive amount of water used by these facilities to keep the machines cool. She brought up the increasing scarcity of water for communities and wildlife, as well as the increasing number of wildfires in British Columbia.
Water usage, and the impact that data centres will have in perpetuating drought, and rapidly increasing temperatures, have been at the forefront of anti-AI activism.
One study, for example, found that AI data centres create a heat island effect that can impact average temperatures by two degrees celsius up to 10 kilometres away.
One such sight of Canada’s growing data centre construction plans and the federal government’s sovereign AI strategy is in Kamloops, B.C., where both Canadian major telecommunication corporations — Telus and Bell — are planning to build and expand their AI data centres.
Electricity demand in Ontario is anticipated to grow 75 per cent by 2050. This demand is driven by “additional electric vehicle supply chain manufacturing, and energy-intensive data centres.”
According to TELUS, they are “expanding its existing Kamloops data centre and developing two new Vancouver facilities. The Kamloops AI Factory will come online later this year; Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood facility will open at the end of 2026 and scale through 2028; and the 150 West Georgia facility will come online in 2029.
Bell is simultaneously building several new AI data centres in Kamloops, and has released a plan to build six new facilities across British Columbia.
According to the Data Centre Map database, there are six data centres in Kamloops, four of them are for AI. Three of the data centres are located on the Thompson River University campus.
Kamloops and its surrounding area is an arid grassland habitat, home to rattlesnakes, badgers, the rubber boa, curlews, and spadefoot toads.
Mike Dedels, the executive director of the Grasslands Conservation Council of British Columbia, described the various ways in which the construction of AI data facilities would have severe impacts on the local ecology.
Dedels highlighted how rising temperatures caused by the heat island effect would create severe fire conditions. While water depletion caused by data centres pulling from the Kamloops municipal water source from the Thompson River would severely impact salmon and other at-risk species.
The summers are already unbearably hot, he said. “We’ve had this streak we’re in right now where we’re well over 30 here in Kamoops today, 35, 37 or so. But once you start getting temperatures over into the 40s, it’s just gonna make things run. We really do need to look at controlling the fuels. Adding more heat to the fire, through data centres is, obviously, a scary proposition.”
When asked how an increase in two degrees celsius would compound to an already heating climate, Dedels talked about the rapidly expanding wildfires. “I don’t know how much drier we can make those fuels because the percent moisture is already down so low. So any spark can just get these things going. When lightning runs through, all of a sudden you’ve got all these fires started and they can only put out so many of them.”
On top of worsening drought and fire conditions due to human-caused climate change, Dedels described the numerous species at risk due to ecological degradation in the Kamloops area, and a major disruption of their habitat could drive them to extinction.
Dedels described how depleting water levels of the Thompson River cause the temperature of the river to increase simultaneously. “As the river gets shallower, you know, we’ve got even more heating there. It doesn’t take as much to heat it up when it’s shallow. Shuswap lake is already low, all the lakes are low.”
He said that the temperatures of the Thompson River are “past the point for salmon.”
In B.C., The Ministry of Land, Water, and Resource Stewardship, in an online summary, outlined how increasing water temperatures would be harmful for fish populations in the Thompson Okanagan.
What Dedels described was a vicious cycle. AI centres would cause water depletion through their access to Kamloops water supply, water temperature increasing in the Thompson River, while moisture in shrubs and vegetation decreasing, along with increasing droughts and forest fires — all with very little consideration to the animals that call this brittle environment home, and are forced to endure harsher and harsher conditions.
On top of this, more bad news. Dedel said that increased annual temperatures support invasive plants to grow. A University of British Columbia study from this year found that invasive plants also increase the severity of wildfires.
The example of AI data centres being built in drought-riddled areas is not unique to Telus or Bell in Canada either. The Guardian reports in June that in the United States, “about two-thirds of upcoming data centers are set to be built in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.” The article goes on to state that, “Of 809 planned datacenters, 517 are in locations that have been in drought conditions throughout the past year. A similar proportion of existing data centers are already situated in drought-affected areas.”
There is limited transparency in the Canadian Impact Assessment Registry on AI data centre construction. With the majority of documents of Impact Assessments of AI infrastructure being located in Alberta. Researchers from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health highlighted the numerous environmental impacts of data centres including, “high energy consumption and associated carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use impacts.” The researchers also stated that, “By 2030, AI’s water use will match the needs of 1.3 billion people.”
Droughts, forest fires, water depletion and land usage, expansion of mining for rare earth metals, are all top of mind for those fighting data centres. Throughout Alberta, planned Meta AI data centres will be powered by fossil fuels, the main driver of the climate crisis.
In January 2026, the UK government released a report on the national security concerns of the climate breakdown. The report highlights “cascading risks of ecosystem degradation are likely to include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources.”
AI infrastructure in a warming world
The UK’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) said in January 2025, “The global economy could face a 50 per cent loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090, unless immediate policy action on risks posed by the climate crisis is taken. Populations are already impacted by food system shocks, water insecurity, heat stress and infectious diseases. If unchecked, mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict become more likely.”
Already, AI technology is utilized in border control and anti-migration efforts. One such example is ICE agents in the United States utilizing Palantir systems. Axios reported that, “In mid-April, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to deliver a new platform — the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (ImmigrationOS).”
These trends have been on the minds of the No AI activists. One protestor Wes articulated this exceptionally well, “I feel like the carceral state is the climate action plan from the elites” told Ricochet. He says AI will have the ability to “use all the data they’ve been collecting for decades, but more so in the last 15, 20 years. Large language models can process that data, whereas humans can’t.”
“I feel like the carceral state is the climate action plan from the elites.”
The Government of Alberta has been open about data collection facilitated by data centers stating, “Every email you send lives in a data centre. Every photo you back up, every show you stream, every e-transfer you send, every medical record your doctor pulls up. When people say ‘the cloud,’ they mean a data centre. There is no cloud. There is just somebody else’s computer, in a big building, doing work on your behalf.”
Another activist, Steven Townsend said in an interview how present day digital architecture already amounts to surveillance however AI adaptions changes the nature of mass data collection, “Now we’re talking about a way to actually piece everything together, the government or corporations is able to like take all those little tiny pieces of information and use AI to piece it all together and create a picture.”
The role surveillance technology will play as climate refugees become more prevalent is yet to be seen. The Canadian Balsillie School of International Affairs publication ‘The Balsillie Papers’ released a paper on the increasing demand of European states for applications in Big Data analysis and Artificial intelligence to help with refugees crossing the Mediterranean.
Palantir, whose founder and chairman is Peter Thiel, has made enormous amounts of money off of military contracts and policing in Canada, the UK and the United States. The Investigative Journalism Foundation found that Canada’s Department of National Defence had spent $46.8 million on acquiring Palantir systems between 2020 and 2025.
The surveillance and privacy concerns of AI are not foreign policies either. In Canada, there have been numerous instances of AI driven surveillance. In major Canadian cities local police forces have used surveillance technology.
Cities such as Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, have all – to varying degrees – utilized the intertwined apparatus of AI and surveillance technology. The connections between private corporations and police services in Canada. How these cities are implementing “Algorithmic,” or “Predictive policing” is a major concern among legal and digital advocates in Canada.
The Ricochet has already reported how Doug Ford is spreading surveillance technology throughout Ontario.
In 2020, The Tyee reported that the RCMP bought software from the Virginia-based Babel Street to spy on web users. Surveillance by the RCMP is not a new development, it was highly reported in the 2000’s that, “The federal government created a wide-ranging surveillance network in early 2007 to monitor protests by First Nations, including those that would garner national attention or target “critical infrastructure” like highways, railways and pipelines, according to RCMP documents obtained through access to information requests.”
This also occurred during the infamous Wet’suwet’en protests in which Amnesty International “documented that, since pipeline construction activities began, the RCMP, CRU and employees of Forsythe Security (the private security firm hired by CGL), have subjected Wet’suwet’en land defenders within their territory to intrusive and aggressive surveillance, harassment and intimidation.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council released a chilling 77-page report on the social impacts of mass surveillance. Including self-monitoring of speech on online platforms.
“Populations are already impacted by food system shocks, water insecurity, heat stress and infectious diseases. If unchecked, mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict become more likely.”
The Government of Canada’s ‘Sensitive Technology List,’ articulates the risks of new emerging technologies. “Artificial intelligence and advanced sensor technology are increasingly being applied to advanced surveillance technology to improve its accuracy and performance.” according to the Government website. This website goes on to state that, “Data warehouse systems allow for analytics to be done on large amounts of data (e.g. multiple petabytes of data).”
AI assisted surveillance technology is not uncommon outside of US AI companies. Both TELUS and Bell have infrastructure and software to do large scale AI monitoring of civilians. Bell, for example, offers “AI video analytics for on-site security.” This service, according to Bell, can: “Identify unusual behaviour within large crowds. Detects and accurately captures vehicle licence plates. Identify and track people, animals, vehicles and more.”
In 2019 it was reported that Bell wanted to track every customer’s meta-data. The article originally published by the Canadian Press said, “Bell Canada began asking its customers in December for permission to track everything they do with their home and mobile phones, internet, television, apps or any other services they get through Bell or its affiliates.”
Telus SmartHome security systems also feed all their acquired video data through an AI system. Telus states, “AI processes events to send you alerts when meaningful activity is detected. Video footage is not reviewed by humans.” It also has Voice recognition and visual recognition capacities.
On the other hand, the TELUS Digital AI App, is described as an, “intuitive data collection app, available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, enables our AI Community to work on your data collection projects.” According to TELUS, “We help you with custom data collection for model training,” their data collection services are used by development teams including Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.
The CitizenLab, which “investigates novel threats to democracy, human rights, and global security in the digital ecosystem” released a report on Canadian Government malfeasance, where the Federal Government collected large amounts of mobility data from Telus during the COVID Pandemic without the knowledge of the public and” inadequate consultation with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.”
In our conversation, Anna remarked, “We do actually have a lot of control and say over what happens. And I think it’s up to us and, you know, our representatives to put pressure on the systems that are trying to say this is inevitable, and this is happening, because no, you’re here to serve us. You work for us.”
