The creation of the government body now monitoring anti-AI and datacenter protestors is most alarming.
We are staring down the throat of the surveillance state ushering in "economic promise".
Alberta scraps environmental assessment for Kevin O'Leary's 'world's largest' data centre By Marc Fawcett-Atkinson News April 3rd 2026
Danielle Smith's government is exempting celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary's massive Wonder Valley data centre near Grande Prairie, Alta., from a provincial environmental assessment, Canada's National Observer has learned.
A Tuesday letter, obtained by Canada's National Observer and addressed to Paul Palandjian, CEO and co-general partner of O'Leary Ventures, from the Alberta environment ministry stated the project does not require a provincial environmental impact assessment. The project was announced in December 2024 but appears to still be largely in planning phases with no shovels in the ground.
The Wonder Valley data centre project "is not a mandatory activity for the purposes of environmental assessment," wrote Karen Tomashavsky, acting manager of the province's approvals program in the ministry of environment's regulatory assurance section. "I have decided that a further assessment of the activity is not required. Therefore, a screening report will not be prepared and an environmental assessment report is not required."
"This decision is based on the current information about the project and that I reserve the ability to review this decision should different and/or new information come to light," she wrote.
When O'Leary (of Dragon's Den fame) first announced the project a year and a half ago alongside municipal and provincial representatives, they described the project as "the world's largest AI Data Centre Industrial Park." The project is slated to need about 7.5 GW of power when fully built.
That's roughly seven times the amount of electricity generated by the Site C dam in northern BC.
Much of that power is poised to come from natural gas. The company's initial announcements about the project claimed it would use geothermal power and gas. However, emails Canada's National Observer obtained through a Freedom of Information request from the municipality where the project is located suggest O'Leary's company rapidly ditched plans for geothermal power in favour of exclusively using natural gas.
If the project is entirely powered by natural gas and doesn't capture any of those emissions, it will set Canada back 20 years in carbon emissions reductions and wipe out the reductions gained by phasing out coal, according to Will Noel, senior analyst with the Pembina Institute's electricity team.
Wonder Valley's proponents also estimate the centre will use about 24 million cubic meters of water annually " the equivalent of roughly 460,000 people's lifetime consumption.
Court documents filed late last year by the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, on whose territory Wonder Valley is located, note that the nearby Little Smoky River has been placed under a no water withdrawal order in the past. The filing noted that the Little Smoky was Alberta's most overdrawn watershed in 2016, with the Smoky River coming in second-most overdrawn.
The Municipal District of Greenview, where Wonder Valley is located, declared an agricultural disaster last summer because of drought.
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