PV Saskatchewan Bureau
Bell Canada and its political sponsors, the Saskatchewan Party, have announced that the company will build a 300-megawatt AI data centre in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood, just outside of the City of Regina.
This data centre is a part of Bell Canada’s plan for a country-wide, Canadian-hosted artificial intelligence ecosystem called “Bell AI Fabric.” The project aims to build six privately owned AI data centres across the country. Construction in Saskatchewan will be leveraged with the existing infrastructure owned by SaskTel, and other public utilities such as SaskPower and SaskEnergy are also contributing.
Saskatchewan is one of the only provinces in Canada with a provincially owned telecommunications crown corporation, SaskTel. Founded in 1947, SaskTel has been an active force of development, traditionally introducing the latest technologies to the province (especially rural communities) with a commitment to equitable distribution and collective ownership.
In previous decades, NDP and Conservative governments have sold off publicly owned industries such as PotAsh Corp, SaskFerco and Sask Oil and Gas Corp, which has brought in massive revenues for the province. At the time, there was a push to protect these industries but not the public utilities themselves.
But workers in Saskatchewan have been fighting fiercely to protect public utilities like SaskTel from being sold off by the provincial government. The opposition is so strong that in 2017, fearing backlash and possible election consequences, the governing Saskatchewan Party under then premier Brad Wall rescinded a proposed bill to outright privatize SaskTel. Since then, the notion of privatizing SaskTel has been equated to political suicide in the province.
In the face of this opposition, the government has been forced to find new avenues to erode public ownership of telecommunications while avoiding public scrutiny – leading to AI data centres and Bell Canada.
The plan to build a privately owned data centre in the province actively undermines the crown corporation and puts public ownership in general at risk in the province. SaskTel operates four major data centres in Saskatchewan, with the last one built in 2017. Bell Canada’s development will be one of the largest private data centre developments in the province and, once complete, it will be the largest purpose-built AI data centre in Canada.
This P3 scheme – with the government leveraging public infrastructure and resources from SaskTel, SaskPower, SaskEnergy and other public utilities – will give Bell Canada a foothold in a market that has till now been out of reach to private monopoly corporations.
This development is a departure from the province’s reliance on publicly owned utilities, and it actively jeopardizes the 2,500 Unifor members employed by SaskTel. It also comes right after Saskatchewan Polytechnic’s AI-related decision to cut 154 union jobs. Notably, the polytechnic recently secured funding to develop AI drones for Canada’s “defence and security” and is one of the founding members of Artificial Intelligence Saskatchewan (AiSK).
The Saskatchewan Party under current premier Scott Moe claims that the data centre’s construction of the will create 1,600 new jobs. This is celebrated by the private trades industry and rural businesses, who see an opportunity for brief contracts to fill their boots. But the claim of job growth ignores the fact that the proposed 1,600 jobs will primarily be frontloaded for the construction of the centre, after which only 50-100 workers will be needed to operate the location.
The promise of generative AI, under private ownership, only acts as a means for the ruling class to displace workers for higher profits.
The private ownership of AI models and data centres relinquish any control workers may have on the code-of-conduct, ethical use of, and the way work is displaced by the technology. The current developments in Saskatchewan act as a warning for the rest of the country and are a significant step in a continuous process where workers are unable to dictate the function of societal structures.
Capitalism does not allow for workers’ needs to be the priority, as that would only restrict the return on investment for private companies. The Saskatchewan Party’s “anything-for-a-buck” mentality takes note of any resistance to private production and for-profit services, and produces new or reorganized products and services that dilute that opposition. This explains its plan to maintain SaskTel and use it to provide Bell Canada a foothold in the province – a plan that ultimately undermines the public utility.
As with all new technology, generative AI is a double-edged sword. It is capable of relieving workers of the burden of work, while equally capable of degradation. The ethical, fair and sustainable development of AI cannot be achieved under private ownership – for this to occur, it must be controlled by working people.
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