Ottawa’s city council passed a motion on Wednesday, directing city staff to create a framework for assessing data centre proposals. The motion was put forward by Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stéphanie Plante and tasks staff with developing a framework through which data centres can be assessed based on their size and expected impact. “Data centres are not going away. Artificial intelligence is not going anywhere. Cloud computing is not going anywhere, and frankly, governments have become increasingly concerned about how data about data sovereignty, which was mentioned earlier, and we should expect the demand for Canadian data centres’ capacity to grow,” Plante said at Wednesday’s council meeting. At August’s Association of Municipalities of Ontario Conference, Premier Doug Ford said the province would need to build data centres to protect Canadian data. The motion asks staff to bring their findings to council in early 2027. Until the framework is brought to council, staff will be directed to make council aware of any applications for hyper scale data centres. “We’re asking them to develop reasonable rules based on size and impact, environment, industry standards, infrastructure requirements, and potential community benefits,” Plante said. “Until that work comes back, we are recognizing that the industry is coming and that our job is to make sure we’re ready for it.” In June, Hydro Ottawa’s CEO Bryce Conrad said the utility had received 34 requests over the past two years for “large load customers” seeking to connect to the grid, which would require around 90 per cent of the average amount of power used by the city last year. In August, Conrad said requests to build new data centres in Ottawa had stabilized but Hydro Ottawa was still working to build capacity to meet rising demand. “I’m on the public record as saying the sheer number of requests that we’ve received for these very large loads is significant,” Conrad said. “We’re probably being asked to build in the next two or three years that which has taken us about 110 years to build.”
