CANADA

Four provinces set different rules for data centres

Jennifer Friesen
August 21, 2026

DIGITAL JOURNAL

Photo by Geoffrey Moffett on Unsplash

Before anyone pours concrete, a Canadian data centre proposal comes with a bevy of local questions.

Can it get enough power? What will that power cost? Who controls the data? And who gets to say yes?

Ontario added its own on Aug. 13 with a draft Data Centre Playbook.

Alberta, Quebec, and B.C. already have their own rules, and they all look pretty different.

Ontario is proposing to charge new data centres a premium for electricity. Any data centre pulling more than one megawatt (MW) would pay more than the province’s largest factories.

Ontario isn’t offering subsidies, just faster permitting and what it calls white glove service.

Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce said the plan makes data centres pay for “every single cent” of the power they use.

Paying up is only part of it. Projects would be judged on the benefit they bring the economy, the investment they make locally, and their plan to keep Canadians’ data in Canada, according to the government.

Ontario calls the playbook an early part of its coming AI strategy, and pitches that strategy as $122 billion in economic growth by 2035 and 17,000 jobs a year.

That last pillar puts the big U.S. cloud providers on watch, and it’s a harder promise than it sounds.

Data sitting on Canadian soil isn’t automatically beyond American reach.

Under the U.S. CLOUD Act, a U.S.-based provider can be compelled to hand over data it controls wherever that data physically sits. Who controls the provider matters more than where the building is.

All of this is still a proposal. Ontarians have until Sept. 12 to tell the province what they think.
Alberta, Quebec, and B.C. drew three different lines on power

A single large AI data centre can draw as much power as a city, and the requests are arriving faster than any province wants to approve them blindly.

Alberta, Quebec, and B.C. are each sorting them in different ways.

Alberta gives priority to data centres that bring their own power. Those projects move to the front of the line, and the developer pays for whatever grid upgrades their power needs.

Normally a data centre deals with the grid operator, the energy regulator, and the local municipality separately. Alberta’s concierge program, as the province calls it, gives them one provincial point of contact instead.

The largest project to break ground is Meta’s $13 billion campus in Sturgeon County, its first in Canada.

Bigger builds have been announced, including a $70 billion project near Grande Prairie, but many are still in the planning stage.

Meta’s first phase is expected to connect up to 970 MW to Alberta’s grid. Its dedicated gas plant, a 932 MW facility being developed by Pembina Pipeline and its partners, doesn’t open until the second half of 2030.

Alberta Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish said the province used no grants, tax credits or incentives to land Meta.

“We did not want to be first and rush in blindly,” he said at the Calgary announcement in July. “We wanted to be smartest.”

Alberta Minister of Technology and Innovation Nate Glubish, speaks at The Princeton in Calgary on July 8, 2026. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

The Pembina Institute warns that Alberta’s reliance on natural gas could raise consumer electricity costs and make them more volatile. But the province points to a different line in the bill, saying Meta is covering its own transmission costs and could lower the transmission portion of other customers’ bills.

Quebec markets some of the lowest power rates in North America to data centres. Now it wants to charge the large ones more, roughly doubling the rate for any new data centre over 5 MW to about 13 cents a kilowatt-hour, so it can save that cheap power for the users it wants most.

Operators are already lining up to fight the increase at the province’s energy regulator this fall, since low-cost hydro has been one of Quebec’s main draws.

B.C. makes data centres compete for a limited slice of power, and it keeps its big resource industries out of the contest.

AI and data centre proposals are competing for a capped pool of about 400 MW over two years.

The province scores those bids partly on data sovereignty and First Nations participation. It says data centres deliver fewer jobs and less revenue than natural-resource projects, so traditional industries like mining, forestry, and LNG sit outside the competition altogether.

Energy Minister Adrian Dix said B.C. built it that way because the province “learned from other jurisdictions that have had an extremely negative economic effect.”

South of the border, some Americans are already paying more because of them.

Right now, everyone else gets stuck with the bill. The fight is over whether data centres ever do.

All four governments want data centres to cover their own power costs. They’re going about it differently, of course, with Alberta using its own-power priority, Quebec its pricing, B.C. its rationing, and Ontario a separate rate. Whether it holds at this scale is untested.

None of this is a sure thing, either.

Companies love to announce capacity they haven’t built yet. The industry even has a word for it, bragawatts, the megawatts that live in a press release and never get built.

In B.C., Conservative MLA David Williams, the party’s critic for BC Hydro and electricity self-sufficiency, calls the process rationing, one that in his words “avoids the root problem” of a province without enough power to go around.
Skipping consultation is what stops these projects

Even where a province says yes, a local council can still say no, and many residents are asking them to.

Oakville became the first Ontario municipality to pass a one-year moratorium on new data centres, two days before the province released its playbook. Hamilton said no to a similar freeze while Mississauga is preparing its own, and residents in Toronto are fighting two projects over water and noise.

Ontario now holds the final say on grid connections, but municipalities still control zoning and development approval. No project has yet tested what happens when the province says yes to the grid and a municipality says no to the site.

Communities fight these projects when they see the risks landing on them (the water, the power bills, the emissions) while the payoff goes somewhere else.

In Manitoba, Premier Wab Kinew said no to a gas-powered AI data centre near Île-des-Chênes, saying it threatened the environment with little economic upside, as a petition against it passed 13,500 signatures.

The energy sector spent 60 years learning this, and its veterans brought the lesson to the AI industry at Upper Bound in Edmonton earlier this year.

“The person who doesn’t get a cheque has the ability to disrupt the whole project,” said energy economist Peter Tertzakian. “It’s a big learning for AI.”

Peter Tertzakian, energy economist and founder of Studio.Energy, speaks at Upper Bound in Edmonton. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

The developers who get ahead of it build the community into the deal.

In Alberta, Woodland Cree First Nation holds 51% of a proposed data centre on its traditional territory that is planned to reach 650 MW, with revenue funding housing, education, and elder care. A few hundred kilometres away, Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is in court challenging a water licence tied to Wonder Valley, arguing Alberta failed to consult it. The Nation also says it was not consulted on the land sale.

Same province, same technology, and a very different answer on who got a say.

The frameworks for doing it already exist. Canada spent a decade building them for pipelines and mines, through Indigenous equity ownership and community benefit agreements, and the First Nations Major Projects Coalition that advises on them now represents 186 First Nations.

The data centre industry can use that playbook or repeat the fights.

Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward, who chairs Ontario’s Big City Mayors, wants consistent federal and provincial rules so individual councils aren’t writing data centre policy from scratch.

Ontario’s comment window closes Sept. 12, and the province says the final playbook will support its AI Industrial Strategy this fall.

Four provinces have staked out their terms. What no one can say yet is which of these projects gets poured, powered, and switched on.

Final shotsThe province a company builds in sets its power cost, its approval odds, and who can legally reach its data.

Data on Canadian soil can still fall under U.S. law. Provider ownership and control belong in the vendor contract.

Grid approval can still leave a project facing a municipal vote or a court challenge.

Monsters, Coyotes and Other Native Tales of Resistance

Jan Haaken

 July 24, 2026

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Image by Tristan Frank.

Part I

“We live in a time of monsters,” Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was thought to have said in the 1930s. He was describing the rise of fascism in his time. Another quote by Gramsci circulates in the fascism of our time: “The old world is dying and the new struggles to be born.”

We are witnessing that struggle across the land as a dying American Empire bludgeons popular resistance. Our monsters seem intent on taking the planet itself with them to their graves. Yet everyday people band together to try to stop them. We see this in the revolts against AI companies and their massive data centers. In protests against this corporate devouring of land and resources, we hear the echo of longstanding indigenous resistance to extractive industries: Water is life!

As a psychologist and documentary filmmaker, I have for decades followed stories that circulate in social movements. In many Native-led climate actions, fables and legends are enlisted to place the struggles of the moment and the sense of urgency in a wider temporal and existential frame. We understand how important fables are for the moral education of young children. When my son was little, he was particularly fascinated by West Africa fairy tales, many centered on small animals outwitting the bigger ones. In Native cultures, however, animal fables are not left behind in childhood. Non-human animals inhabit our shared planet and make moral claims on us. They teach us about our world if we know how to listen.

In my two documentaries on climate resistance, the Necessity Series, Native traditions of storytelling are more than just allegorical tales. I came to understand the stories as carrying vital symbolic power in the climate justice movement. Facing off against the pipeline companies and oil trains, imagined as black snakes, circulated as a powerful signifier of the deadly oil pipelines. In countering the climate denial promoted by reactionaries and the individualistic carbon-tracking of liberals (“Don’t fly, don’t drive, don’t eat meat!), Native evoking of the black snake represented an old struggle against ongoing colonial forces. Rooted in the folklore and visions of Lakota People and other Indigenous elders, prophecies warn of a great black snake that will stretch across the land, poison waterways, desecrate sacred sites, and bring sickness and destruction. The image and the prophecy circulated widely during the Standing Rock resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.

During that valiant struggle, I was reminded of bible stories in my childhood about cunning snakes that do the devil’s work. The lessons inevitably led to submission before the Almighty. In Genesis Chapter 3, Eve is seduced by a serpent into eating the forbidden fruit. And for acting on that desire, she was condemned by God to everlasting suffering: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This was one of many bible lessons that led me to leave the religious fold of my childhood and to look to feminism for adult wisdom.

The first Necessity film opens with a more local allegory. “The Monster Who Came Up the River” is a fable passed through oral traditions of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation here in Oregon. One version of the story was told in the 1950s by Esther Motanac, a beloved Umatilla storyteller. Chief Peo-Peo Mox-Mox (aka Don Sampson), a hereditary chief, narrated the story for the Necessity film and talked with me about how the Monster in the fable works as an allegory for settler colonialism in the Columbia Gorge region.

This huge monster came up from the ocean. He would open his huge mouth and inhale anything that was in his path. He soon had all the salmon and other fish like sturgeon and eels, all eaten and because he was so huge he began taking in the deer and all food animals of the forest. Soon there was nothing left for the people and they were getting hungry, and babies and old people began to die. Finally, someone went to Coyote and told him he would have to kill the monster. He got a length of a vine that is called coyote’s rope. He tied one end around his waist and coiled the other around his arm. He got some pitchy kindling and flints for starting a fire. He stood on a far hill and called the monster a shameful name, he teased him until the monster began trying to eat him. Every time the mouth opened, coyote would throw out some useful thing. The monster was near collapsing. The fire got so hot that the monster died and went back into the sea. Some parts of him clung to the sides of the river bank so it was rough like it was before Bonneville Dam was built.

The enormous mouth and insatiable appetite of the monster symbolize sanctions against greed. Passed on through oral traditions, stories such as these reflect the tragic losses and deprivations people have suffered as well. The monster devours salmon, other animals and people and produces starvation among Indian survivors. The powers of Coyote lie in its clever tactics of resistance as well as in the stupidity of the monster.

While listening to this story, I was struck by parallels between Motanac’s tale and the Judeo-Christian story of Jonah and the Whale (or the Big Fish). The tale of Jonah may have been particularly popular in the fundamentalist Christian church we attended in Ballard, a neighborhood in Seattle settled by Norwegian fisher families. My family, like many others in the congregation, had lost relatives at sea so this allegory held special resonance. In my Sunday School class the lesson of Jonah centered on punishment, submission to authority, and rebirth through suffering. The rebellious Jonah was spit out onto the beach, subdued after three days in the creature’s stomach.

Unlike the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, where the Whale engulfs Jonah under the disciplinary control of the Almighty, Coyote allows himself to be consumed by the Monster as a ploy. Jonah is belched onto the land after being devoured by the creature, transformed from rebel into loyal supplicant. Coyote, in contrast, outmaneuvers the monster and is then able to destroy it and cast it back into the river. In the biblical tale, Jonah is redeemed through engulfment by the great fish and his three days and nights of endurance in its belly. “The Monster Who Came Up the River” unfolds around a more active contest of wills.

While listening to Chief Don Sampson’s interpretation of the Monster story, I was struck by another difference between Jonah and Coyote. Sampson explains how the monster represents the potential for greed and selfishness in all people, and that Coyote in Native stories is both a deliverer and sometimes a betrayer of his people. Coyote enters stories as a morally ambiguous figure. The forced assimilation and the destruction and displacement of Native peoples generated a rich trove of literature where the powerful spirits, both good and bad, are more dispersed across the cosmos than are the spirit forces in the Abrahamic traditions. While respect for elders carries enormous moral weight in tribal cultures, the tribes in the Northwest also stress respect for children and for their independence. Fables with Coyote tricksters abound. There is considerable latitude for children to explore the world around them and to find their own animal spirits or guides.

Colonial powers returned to Indian Country last year with an aggressive push by tech companies to build their monstrous data centers on tribal lands. Honor the Earth’s Stop Data Colonialism Manifesto has gathered support, even in Oklahoma where battles among tribes over Big Oil and now Big Tech are most fierce. After intense opposition, the Muskogee Nation, 40 miles south of Tulsa, rejected a rezoning plan that would have converted 5,570 acres of farmland to a data center “park.” The coyotes may not be clever enough to outsmart these new monsters. But they carry a long history of surviving and subverting their conquerors. And they have many tales to tell.

This is the first piece of a four-part series. The other three parts can be read this fall for free on my Substack page.

Jan Haaken is professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist and documentary filmmaker.

 

Historic WWII Submarine Arrives at Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding for Repairs

USS Silversides under tow to Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding (Keith Gill / USS Silversides Museum)

Published Jul 14, 2026 10:26 PM by The Maritime Executive

The historic WWII submarine USS Silversides has arrived at Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding for a much-needed drydocking. The sub's last yard period happened during the Cold War, and she needs preservation in order to continue in service as a museum ship. For the first time in 50 years, this decorated icon of the Pacific Theater will come out of the water for steel renewal, sandblasting and painting. 

Silversides is a Gato-class diesel-electric attack submarine commissioned on December 15, 1941. The boat entered service eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and swiftly deployed to join the war in the Pacific. Over the course of 14 patrols, Silversides attacked and sank 23 Japanese ships and damaged many more. Credited with destroying more than 90,000 tons of Japanese shipping, Silversides ranks in the top-five most successful U.S. Navy submarines of the war. She received 12 battle stars for her wartime service, along with a Presidential Unit Citation, the military's highest honor. 

After the war, Silversides retired to a berth in Chicago and became a stationary training vessel. After finishing her service to the Navy, she was taken over by a volunteer-led historic preservation association in 1973, and was gradually restored to habitable condition. She relocated to Muskegon, Michigan, home of the Great Lakes Naval Memorial and Museum, and has been welcoming visitors there ever since.

Silversides got under way for a long-awaited drydocking on July 13, under tow on a 20-hour voyage to Sturgeon Bay. (Her propellers were removed long ago, but her Fairbanks-Morse diesel engines still run.) Having arrived at Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding, she will undergo a $3.5 million preservation project led by Valkor Energy Services. The National Parks Service is contributing $750,000 to the cost of the work, but private donations make up most of the budget. The museum is still raising funds to close a small gap, but has achieved most of its fundraising goals; donations may be made at https://silversidesmuseum.org/dry-dock-uss-silversides/ 

Meta bets $13 billion on Alberta with first Canadian data centre

Chris Hogg

July 8, 2026

DIGITAL JOURNAL

Nate Glubish, Alberta’s minister of technology and innovation (left), and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speak to press following the announcement on July 8, 2026. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Meta is building its first Canadian data centre in Alberta, a campus worth more than $13 billion that the province calls one of the largest private investments in Canadian history and Meta’s biggest anywhere outside the United States.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced the project at a news conference in Calgary on Wednesday, midway through the Stampede, alongside two ministers, the mayor of Sturgeon County and Meta’s data centre chief.

The 2.9-million-square-foot facility will sit on 1,750 acres in Sturgeon County, inside Alberta’s Industrial Heartland. It will be powered in part by the Greenlight Electricity Centre, the $4.6-billion natural gas plant that Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor announced last week.

The province says the campus will create more than 3,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent ones, and return about $250 million a year to Albertans through royalties, taxes, levies and fees. Meta is putting roughly $60 million into local roads and water infrastructure.

Alberta Minister of Technology and Innovation Nate Glubish, speaks at The Princeton in Calgary on July 8, 2026. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Alberta courted Meta for two years and closed the deal without incentives

The first phase draws 970 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a mid-sized city. The campus is designed to grow to 1,800 megawatts, more than the city of Edmonton uses at peak.

The co-located Greenlight plant is what lets the site reach that ceiling without drawing more from the public grid. Under Alberta’s rules, Meta pays for the new power generation and the grid upgrades its own connection requires, rather than passing those costs to other customers.

The province says that arrangement will lower bills for everyone else.

“In this case, in this project, Albertans could see a reduction of up to 6% on the transmission portion of their utility bill,” said RJ Sigurdson, Alberta’s minister of affordability and utilities.

RJ Sigurdson, Alberta minister of affordability and utilities. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Every Albertan who uses electricity pays a share of the cost of building and maintaining the province’s high-voltage grid, the network of transmission lines that moves power across long distances. On a power bill, that cost is the transmission charge and the total is roughly fixed, so it gets divided among everyone connected to the system. 

Sigurdson said that when a customer as large as Meta joins the grid and takes on a big portion of that cost, the amount left for households and businesses to cover shrinks, which is where the 6% reduction comes from.

“Without this grid connected pathway, Alberta may not have landed this massive new tenant,” he said.

Meta’s Gary Demasi speaks to press in Calgary. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Nate Glubish, minister of technology and innovation, said he first met Meta’s data centre team two years ago at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, where Alberta was not yet on its list of places to build.

The province’s answer was a system it calls the concierge, a single provincial contact that walks a company through the electricity regulator, the grid operator, the utilities commission and the municipality at once instead of leaving it to file with each separately. Glubish said that team is now working with about 60 more projects, several of them at the gigawatt scale of the Meta campus.

Glubish said the province used no grants, tax credits or incentives to attract Meta, and that Alberta instead wrote a levy so data centres pay a share back to the public. He said Meta spent two years and hundreds of millions of dollars on engineering, permitting and consultation before the announcement.

Nate Glubish is Alberta’s minister of technology and innovation. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

He also drew a line between Meta and projects that have failed in Alberta. Regulators rejected the Synapse proposal near Olds, and Rocky View County council turned down a separate campus after a hearing that ran most of a day.

“Meta is the customer, they are the user, they are the engineer, they are the designer, they are the builder, they are the operator,” Glubish said. “Whereas the proposed project in Olds is a developer who has an idea and believes that if they build it, someone will come and buy it.”

Smith repeated the pitch Alberta has been making for more than a year: affordable electricity, flexible power generation, a cool climate that eases the job of cooling servers, a skilled workforce and homegrown AI expertise.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming the global economy, and Alberta is making sure we lead rather than follow,” said Premier Danielle Smith. “We created the right conditions to attract world-leading investments while protecting the interests of Albertans.”

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at The Princeton in Calgary on July 8, 2026. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Meta’s pledges, and its record elsewhere

Water has been a flashpoint in Alberta’s data centre fights. The servers that fill these buildings run hot, and many centres cool them by evaporating large volumes of water, pulling from the same supply households and farms rely on.

Meta led with water for that reason.

The company said its Sturgeon campus, which does not have a completion date yet, will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system with dry cooling, which recirculates a fixed volume of liquid instead of constantly drawing new water, and needs no operational water for cooling. On-site water is limited to washrooms, fire protection and equipment maintenance.

“The water that’s used by this data centre, it’s less than a typical golf course in Alberta over the course of a year,” said Gary Demasi, vice-president of data centre strategy and development at Meta.

Gary Demasi is the vice-president of data centre strategy and development at Meta. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Meta committed to being water positive by 2030, meaning the company will fund restoration and conservation work that returns more water to local watersheds than the site consumes. Its first step in Alberta is a partnership with the conservation group ALUS and local farmers to protect 200 acres of grassland, trees and wetland in the North Saskatchewan River watershed, land that stores and filters water for the basin.

“We look forward to putting down roots in this community and building a strong and positive partnership for many years to come,” he said.

Meta has made versions of that promise where it has built before, and the record is mixed. 

In Richland Parish, Louisiana, the site of Meta’s Hyperion campus, the company secured the land through a shell company and pushed state tax legislation forward under non-disclosure agreements before the public knew it was involved, according to a Bloomberg investigation. After regulators approved the gas plants built to power the campus, consumer and environmental groups asked the state to investigate whether ratepayers would be left exposed if Meta walked away.

In Alberta, the rules came first. 

The province set its data centre requirements before opening the door to investment, making projects bring their own power and pay for their own infrastructure, and the county zoned and reviewed the Sturgeon site before the announcement, so Meta is funding its own power and grid work rather than leaving costs to other ratepayers.

The site also sits inside a zone set aside for heavy industry decades ago, with buffer zones between the plants and homes and no farmland or housing on the land itself. Sturgeon County Mayor, Alanna Hnatiw, said the county held the project to its controls on power, water and land use.

Meta said it will offset the campus’s electricity use by paying for an equal amount of clean power to be added to the grid elsewhere, a common industry practice, though the electricity that actually runs the site comes largely from natural gas.

Alanna Hnatiw, Mayor of Sturgeon County. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

The country’s biggest AI campus

Smith said the facility will power Meta’s own technologies, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and its AI products. 

Last week Meta said it may start selling excess computing capacity to outside customers, a business it is still weighing. But no one at the announcement said whether Canadian companies would be able to buy time on the Sturgeon campus.

Data sovereignty is the deeper question, as putting the hardware on Alberta soil does not put it under Canadian control. 

The U.S. Cloud Act lets American authorities compel a U.S. company like Meta to hand over data it controls no matter where that data physically sits, so a data centre in Sturgeon County does not by itself keep what runs inside it under Canadian law.

The Government of Canada’s own cloud policy states that as long as a provider operating in Canada is subject to the laws of a foreign country, Canada will not have full sovereignty over its data. Storing data in Canada gives residency but sovereignty depends on who controls the data and which laws bind the company that holds it. 

At the press conference today, Glubish said Meta is the first of many projects the province expects, and it now has a reference customer to point to as it courts the rest.

Alberta puts $50 million behind Amii’s AI research

Jennifer Kervin

July 9, 2026   DIGITAL JOURNAL

Cam Linke, Amii CEO, speaks at the funding announcement at Platform Calgary.

 — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Today, the province of Alberta announced a $50 million investment over five years for the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), home to two decades of reinforcement learning research.

Aimed at accelerating AI adoption across public services and industry, part of the plan includes leveraging the newly-established Alberta Intellectual Property Office to ensure IP is owned, protected, and commercialized in the province. 

Amii is one of Canada’s three national AI institutes, alongside Mila in Quebec and the Vector Institute in Ontario, operating under the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. Established in 2002, it has a focus on reinforcement learning, a field in which the province is recognized as a world leader.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced $50 million in funding for Amii. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Five ministries, one investment

When a government funds something like this, it’s often one ministry writing the cheque. 

This time it’s five.

The ministries of Technology and Innovation and Advanced Education are co-leads, investing $15 million each, with Assisted Living and Social Services at $10 million. Primary and Preventative Health Services and Education and Childcare are each contributing $5 million.

“Alberta has been a leader in the AI space for decades, and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute… has played a major role in keeping Alberta on top,” said Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, announcing the funding at Platform Calgary. “They have worked closely with the government over the years to see how AI can be implemented into our everyday lives.”

She explained how the funding is the work of five ministries together, “because we know the significant impact that this could have on making the lives of Albertans better.”

Nate Glubish, Alberta’s minister of technology and innovation, credited Myles McDougall, Minister of Advanced Education as an equal partner on the file. 

Nate Glubish, Alberta’s Minister of Technology and Innovation, speaks at the Amii funding announcement at Platform Calgary. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

“I couldn’t have done it alone. I found some of the money in my budget, but my good friend and colleague [McDougall] here is an equal partner with me in that through his budget,” Glubish said. 

Glubish also pointed to the province’s history with Amii. “Alberta began investing in AI research more than two decades ago. That early bet paid off,” he said, noting how Amii’s chief scientific advisor, Dr. Richard Sutton, was a co-recipient of the 2024 A.M. Turing Award, frequently dubbed ‘the Nobel Prize of computing.’

“This $50-million investment is a vote of confidence in that team,” Glubish added. “It will put AI to work for the people of this province: better healthcare, faster public services, and more Alberta companies solving real problems.”

McDougall said that this technology is helping modernize systems for skilled tradespeople. 

“We apply AI to apprenticeship delivery, streamlining the path to graduation, cutting the paperwork for employers, and getting Alberta’s skilled trade system ready for the workforce demand that’s coming.”

He also gave credit to Alberta’s post-secondary system.

“Our universities, colleges, and polytechnics are training the next generation, the engineers, the entrepreneurs, researchers, and skilled professionals who will lead in an AI-driven economy,” he added. “This investment backs them and strengthens an ecosystem where students can learn, researchers can lead, companies can scale right here in Alberta.” 

Myles McDougall, Alberta’s Minister of Advanced Education, speaks at the Amii funding announcement at Platform Calgary. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Bigger than a funding announcement

Evan Solomon, Canada’s Minister of AI and Digital Innovation, was in attendance at the funding announcement, using the stage to put Alberta’s investment in a national context. 

“We have classically, as a country, been great at research, and we’ve sucked at commercialization,” he said. “Alberta has led the way to show how we have to do that better.”

Solomon cited a commercialization gap, where companies often end up relocating outside of the country, taking their talent and patents with them. 

“We are losing our best IP and brains, so we are stopping that,” he added, later tying that loss to a broader argument about sovereignty. 

“If we don’t build the infrastructure here, we’re going to have to rent it from someone else,” he said. “If we don’t build the innovation here, we’re going to have to buy it from someone else. And if we don’t make the rules here, we have to follow someone else’s.”

This funding comes the day after the news that Meta is building its first Canadian data centre in Alberta.

It also comes on the heels of a Government of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) announcement made at the Upper Bound AI Conference in Edmonton in May. Solomon announced the appointment and renewal of 42 Canada CIFAR AI Chairs, backed by a $24 million investment, all affiliated with the three national AI institutes.

Evan Solomon, Canada’s Minister of AI and Digital Innovation, speaks at the Amii funding announcement at Platform Calgary. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Canada’s recent “AI for All” national strategy goes further, pledging to strengthen the national AI institute network and increase the Chairs program from 130 to nearly 200 researchers. He outlined an investment of $130 million into the national AI institutes, and mentioned $700 million in affordable sovereign compute for Canadian SMEs, an expansion of the Compute Access Fund.

Finally, Solomon revealed a $1.8 billion talent attraction strategy to attract 1000 of the top researchers and their labs to Canada.

“We need the talent to come to Canada,” he said. “It’s the best place to be, it’s the best place to build, and it’s the best place to start a company.”

Building on two decades of research

According to the province, Alberta’s government has invested about $100 million in Amii since 2002. Through its work under the province’s first Technology and Innovation Strategy, Amii has worked with 786 companies to adopt or advance AI, supported 318 startups, and reached 1.2 million people through its literacy programs.

The institute currently has more than 500 active researchers and 71 Amii Fellows/Canada CIFAR AI Chairs.

“We and our strategy have promised to do a free AI literacy course for every Canadian, because we believe everybody should have access to literacy, and we’re going to give an AI tool and agent to every post-secondary student in Canada for five years, free and available, because they need tools to build,” said Solomon, giving kudos to Amii CEO Cam Linke on his work with training and education.

“What’s happened here in Alberta at Amii is the model for the nation.”

The new Amii funding is meant to work against the ‘brain drain” pattern Solomon described. With the Alberta Intellectual Property Office, patents developed with public funds are kept in the province, framing the investment as a way to grow new jobs, attract private investment, and keep ideas developed in Alberta from moving elsewhere.

Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

Linke said the investment builds on that foundation. 

“This investment enables Amii to strengthen the foundations of Alberta’s AI ecosystem by supporting startups, accelerating AI adoption across industry and the public sector, and building the AI literacy needed to prepare the workforce of the future,” he said. 

“Together, we are ensuring Alberta remains a destination for AI talent, innovation and investment while creating lasting economic and societal benefits for Albertans.”

Healthcare is a priority

Justin Wright, minister of primary and preventative health services, said the investment is meant to support faster, better-targeted care. 

“Alberta’s primary and preventative health system depends on getting the right information to the right provider at the right time,” he said. 

“By investing in Amii, we are supporting made-in-Alberta AI solutions that can help improve screening, earlier detection, system navigation and front-line decision-making. Used responsibly, this technology can reduce administrative burden, strengthen prevention-focused care and help Albertans access timely, high-quality services closer to home.”

Linke closed the announcement by tying the funding to Amii’s origins. 

“When you look at the history of Amii, it was an ambitious thing back in 2002 for the province to invest in AI,” he said. “We’re excited for what we can do with the province,  and what we’re going to do with this announcement, not just to be the place that powers AI globally, but also the place that produces the researchers, the talent, and the startups that are going to solve the world’s biggest problems right here.”