From AI ‘slop’ to AI backlash?
AI Minister Evan Solomon pictured in Toronto announcing the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative. ‘Canada will need a vast increase in its data centre capacity if we are to stay relevant in the global strategic and economic push for AI,’ writes Ken Polk. / TWITTER PHOTO
In case you missed it, “slop” was chosen as the 2025 Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster’s. Its frequent use last year was not in a familiar context, such as a reference to pig feed or water overfilling a container. Rather, the 2025 slop popularly referred to sloppy, low-quality AI content.
This is fitting for a year in which debate about AI — pro and con — surely overfilled the banks of Canadian public debate. No doubt executives in both the public and private sectors will have ample opportunity in 2026 to see such slop as employees below the C-suite struggle to integrate AI into their existing work processes, if only to demonstrate their bona fides in the use of a technology that may actually replace some of them.
But if “AI slop” was in vogue this year, “AI rebellion” may be the hot topic of 2026.
Still waiting for promised federal AI strategy
As with most new digital technologies, the use of AI is outpacing the efforts of adopters and regulators to come to terms with its awesome potential. Daily, Canadians are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, Google’s Gemini, and more for everything from drafting briefing notes and speeches to planning workflows and travel itineraries. Meanwhile, Canada’s AI Minister, Evan Solomon, has yet to table the refreshed AI Strategy the Liberals promised in the spring election; indeed, he has delayed it from the initial promise of a December 2025 unveiling to an as-yet unspecified date in 2026.
In fairness to the minister, AI is advancing at such a rapid pace that it may be beyond the government's sclerotic policy development processes to produce a strategy even momentarily relevant. Even so, the growing hum being felt across Canada’s digital infrastructure is a result of the relentless increase in AI's annexation of the country’s existing broadband bandwidth and data centre processing capacity.
Notwithstanding Solomon’s apparent dithering, Canada will need a vast increase in its data centre capacity if we are to stay relevant in the global strategic and economic push for AI. Budget 2025 presented a suite of tax credits and strategic federal investments aimed at enhancing Canada's AI capabilities in government and business, including the allocation of over $900 million to develop a sovereign AI infrastructure.
However, this pales in comparison with the aggressive plans that Canadian businesses have announced to expand existing capacity or build new data centres. Microsoft Canada announced a $19 billion four-year plan for new digital AI and AI infrastructure. Bell is planning six new AI data centres in British Columbia. And Telus has opened the first fully sovereign AI factory in Quebec.
Will U.S. rural AI rebellion catch on in Canada?
Yet all of this forward momentum is already beginning to slow in the United States. Its AI giants are coming face to face with hot opposition from local governments (primarily in rural settings) who are opposing and in some cases outright rejecting opportunities to host AI data centres and the promise of new jobs that come with them.
A Washington Post article this week described the growing struggle Silicon Valley is having quelling a burgeoning rural rebellion against proposed AI data centres. “From Archibald, Pennsylvania, to Page, Arizona, tech firms are seeking to plunk down data centers in locations that sometimes are not zoned for such heavy industrial uses, within communities that had not planned for them. These supersize data centers can use more energy than entire cities and drain local water supplies,” it notes. Going further, the article suggested that “anger over the perceived trampling of communities by Silicon Valley has entered the national political conversation and could affect voters of all political persuasions in this year’s [U.S.] midterm elections.”
The pushback is also bipartisan, gathering force in Republican red states and among left-wing groups who have organized in Republican Indiana and Democratic Maryland. The article also notes the findings of Data Center Watch that in the second quarter of 2025, “20 projects were blocked or delayed amid local opposition, affecting $98 billion in potential investment.”
A rural data centre pushback could jumble federal politics
One must be cautious about directly grafting American political trends onto the Canadian political landscape. At this point, there is no sign of similar energized rural pushback in Canada. But, to put it mildly, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre discovered to his regret last spring that U.S. politics can jumble complacent partisan expectations.
As in the United States, the galvanization of opposition in Canada could be bipartisan in impact. As the populist spokesperson for rural Canada, Poilievre may find himself torn between his agenda to “bring home” jobs, economic growth and his professed contempt for big corporations. For his part, Prime Minister Carney may find himself on the defensive against a caucus that remains decidedly progressive, notwithstanding his rightward shift of his government, and may feel the need to reassert these credentials once the NDP has a new leader in March.
Whatever the meaning and impact on Canadian politics of this burgeoning rural U.S. rebellion, it serves as a useful reminder to governments at all levels that rural support for the development of AI capacity cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, as with so much of Carney’s nation-building agenda, rural buy-in is indispensable, not an afterthought.
Hopefully, the Minister of AI is following these developments south of the border and will champion grassroots local support for data centres when he finally takes the wrapping paper off of his final AI strategy.
