Data centres: Beyond opposing or developing, Canada faces choices about responsible growth

A framework, not approval

Data centres house servers, storage, network equipment, backup power and cooling systems. Their role in services such as medical records and bank payments comes with demands on local resources.

The principles call for projects to avoid shifting electricity costs onto households and existing businesses, and to provide transparent, independently verifiable information. They set a common national baseline alongside provincial, territorial, municipal and Indigenous processes, but are not binding federal law, permits or approvals.

Measuring local effects

Common measures include power usage effectiveness, or PUE; water usage effectiveness, or WUE; and carbon usage effectiveness, or CUE. These ratios track efficiency, but do not show a facility’s absolute local impact or public value.

Costs and community commitments

The article calls for mandatory disclosure before approval, independent measurement, public reporting and enforceable consequences if projects depart materially from commitments. Developers should cover connection, grid-upgrade and reliability costs they directly cause, while clean-power requirements reflect local grid capacity and emissions.

Water planning should account for basin conditions and drought, since cooling can trade water use against energy use. Community benefits, including training, local and Indigenous procurement, research partnerships, municipal infrastructure and local access to computing, should be enforceable and last beyond construction.