Resource Works has started saying that compute is a resource. That idea set the tone for a panel at the Get It Done B.C. event in Vancouver on Sept. 14, 2026.
Sponsored by Telus, the session explored AI infrastructure as B.C.’s latest resource sector. Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce CEO Alex Mitchell moderated, joined by Keely Hilario of Telus, Vancouver city councillor Mike Klassen and Shani Gwin, founder and CEO of wâsikan kisewâtisiwin.
Mitchell set out the stakes early, noting that cloud infrastructure requires electricity, land, fibre, water and community support.
A blender, not a storage bin
Hilario offered the clearest explanation of the day for how AI facilities differ from older data centres. She’s a cook, so she used the kitchen.
“Traditional data centres are kind of like a Tupperware container.”
You put information in, and it sits there untouched. Think of old photos or a resumé stored in the cloud.
An AI data centre works differently. Hilario compared it to a KitchenAid mixer or a blender. Inputs go in, the GPUs process them, and something new comes out.
That matters for how the public judges these projects. A storage warehouse and a processing plant don’t draw the same power or raise the same questions.
Hilario said Telus built its sovereign AI factory with those concerns in mind. She said its Quebec facility and planned Kamloops centre run on 99 per cent renewable energy. Gwin added that the Quebec site uses 70 per cent less water.
Hilario also pointed to work with the Vector Institute on an open-source model. It tracks energy use in heating, cooling and ventilation, areas she said waste the most energy at other providers.
Sovereignty starts with ownership
For Hilario, data sovereignty comes down to knowing where your information sits and who controls it.
“Data sovereignty is truly important to us as Canadians because it’s keeping Canadian ideas on Canadian soil.”
She pointed to the viral trend of people uploading selfies to foreign AI tools. Few asked where those photos went or what they now help train. Data held abroad falls under foreign laws, which can change.
Gwin brought a framework many in the room hadn’t considered. The First Nations Information Governance Centre developed the OCAP principles: ownership, control, access and possession. She said anyone can apply them.
Indigenous communities, she noted, spent generations without control over how Canadians saw them. Now the question of who controls information has become everyone’s problem.
Gwin uses Telus’s Quebec facility because it’s the closest she can get to OCAP today. She borrowed a colleague’s metaphor to explain why.
“Because it’s my little bread in their oven, nobody can touch it except for me.”
Hilario echoed a line from federal AI Minister Evan Solomon. Canadians can be AI takers or AI makers. Building at home, she argued, lets Canadian principles shape the technology.
Consent, royalties and real use cases
Gwin’s company is building a tool that flags and corrects anti-Indigenous bias in writing as you type. It also works as a chatbot, taking some emotional labour off Indigenous people who field the same questions again and again.
Her starting point is consent. She warned that users feed AI constantly without thinking about it.
“Whatever you put into AI, it is learning from you, from every prompt, every response, and you’re training it for free.”
Her answer is a royalty model. Communities that agree to share their knowledge with the tool get paid when it’s used.
“So every time your information is used, you get paid.”
She called it a chance at real economic reconciliation. She also held off scaling until she found a data centre that matched her values.
Klassen kept his focus on practical gains at city hall. Vancouver was an early adopter of an AI tool that reviews plans for smaller buildings and housing. It flags variances and problems right away, work that once took days or weeks. He said Kelowna is doing the same.
His test is simple. Any new tool has to clearly improve residents’ lives and city services.
Hilario added an example close to home. Telus uses AI agents to track wildfire movement, helping speed response when cell towers go down.
Who holds them to account
Accountability after construction drew the sharpest answers.
Klassen said senior governments will set the ground rules, but cities still carry local impacts.
“We want to make sure that this doesn’t affect energy rates, for example, or water use.”
Mitchell pressed him with an audience question. Data centres sit in the same property tax class as coffee shops and employ few workers. Yet they can use as much power as a major mine. Should they pay more?
Klassen didn’t commit. He said taxation gets weighed case by case and that Ottawa and Victoria likely have more say.
Gwin, who lives about 30 kilometres from a proposed Meta data centre in Alberta, said rural residents there have pushed back too. She wants feasibility studies, clear local impacts and lasting jobs.
Hilario suggested communities that want these facilities should ask who a centre serves and where the benefits land. A foreign-owned site sends the larger gains out of the country.
Gwin put the responsibility back on the public.
“We have to remember these people are in these positions because we put them there, and they’re accountable to us.”
In her closing, she described her company’s name as meaning kind energy. She sees AI as a chance to put relationships ahead of transactions, and to change the trajectory of the internet itself.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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