Green Party calls for province-wide halt on AI data centres until safeguards are in place

By Anushka Yadav, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer A week after Mississauga became the first Ontario municipality to pause new data centre developments for one year, Green Party leader Mike Schreiner called for a province-wide moratorium until proper studies could be completed on the technology’s impact on the environment, energy and human health. AI data centres sprouting across Canada may have ignited a fear of an increasingly unpredictable future, but they have also exposed a deep crevasse in the provincial and municipal planning frameworks established long before artificial intelligence and its unprecedented demands on water, energy and public infrastructure due to hyperscale computing.