At Monday’s Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) Conference, Premier Doug Ford said the province needs a firewall to protect Ontario’s data. That protection would come in the form of data centres being built across the province to ensure Canadian data is not being housed in the United States. “Ontario has the choice. We can build the economy of the future and ensure Canadians’ data remains in Canada, or we can get left behind and risk Canadians’ data being sent to the U.S. and into the hands of President Trump,” Ford said in Ottawa. “That would be the worst thing we could ever do, let President Trump control our data. That guy would cut us off in about three seconds. So, we need to we need to make sure we have data sovereignty in our own hands.” Technology analyst Carmi Levy says internet traffic does not stop at physical borders, but countries can choose where its data is kept and which government oversees it. “If it ends up on an American server, it will be subject to American law, subject to American surveillance, and could be subject to Americans deciding we no longer have access to it. We live in a fraught political landscape right now,” Levy said in an interview with CTV News Ottawa. The city of Oakville has imposed a one-year halt to new data centres and Mississauga is set to consider a similar moratorium next month. Ottawa has at least half a dozen throughout the city. Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said in an interview on Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron on Monday that he is not aware of any applications to build a data centre in the city. “We need to take a very close look at this and if an application comes forward, we’re going to have to look at it very, very seriously,” Sutcliffe told Cameron. “I understand the concerns of residents, but I think we also know that there are going to be more and more of these kinds of developments in the future to support the growing demands that we all have.” The province recently launched a new framework called the Data Centre Playbook to create broad rules surrounding data centres in Ontario. “Up until now, it’s been up to individual cities, individual regions and governments to decide on the rules and it’s been somewhat chaotic,” said Levy. Ottawa’s biggest users in need of data centres would be the federal government and businesses like Shopify. In June, Hydro Ottawa CEO Bryce Conrad said the utility provider had received 34 requests over two years from large load customers to connect to the grid. “We’re probably being asked to build in the next two or three years that which has taken us about 110 years to build,” Conrad said on Aug. 13 on Ottawa Now. Levy adds: “Unfortunately, there is not enough capacity to handle all of the services that we run today.” “So, the truth of the matter is, Ontario needs more data centres.”
