🇨🇦 Vancouver bans lawn watering, but Telus gets AI temples

Metro Vancouver is heading toward Stage 3 water restrictions, regular people get lectured about hoses and sprinklers, and the regime still wants two Telus AI data centres gulping power and water in the middle of the city. That is the punchline. Ottawa calls this sovereign compute capacity, as reported, with Evan Solomon selling the fantasy while Mayor Ken Sim cheers world-class facilities and B.C. rolls out special power policy to feed them.

The absurd part is the language. Sovereign, they say, while every level of government bends over for a telecom giant and a trendy AI gold rush that ordinary Canadians never asked for. No regional policy for data centres, but plenty of policy for restricting households. Classic Canada in 2026: austerity for citizens, exemptions for corporate-political vanity projects. If this is national strategy, it looks a lot like managed decline with a server rack attached. Trudeau-era governance never really left, it just got rebranded with cleaner buzzwords and bigger electrical bills.

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