🇨🇦 B.C. cities rolled out AI first, guardrails maybe later

Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby and Abbotsford have municipal staff using Microsoft Copilot, Richmond is running GovAI on OpenAI, and none of them would actually share their AI policies. That tells you everything. Our city halls can feed reports, emails, permit files and financial analysis into black-box systems, but taxpayers are supposed to trust the same people who turned basic permitting and infrastructure into a bureaucratic circus. Even election tech gets the AI treatment now, with Richmond using GitHub Copilot for its mobile app, as reported.

This is the managerial state in a nutshell: outsource public administration to giant foreign tech platforms, hide the rules, then mumble about privacy and efficiency. AI for wildfire detection is one thing. AI screening permits, handling citizen interactions, and monitoring garbage contamination is another step toward automated governance with zero democratic consent. Municipal Canada cannot fix roads on time, but suddenly we are told to trust algorithmic oversight from Microsoft and OpenAI. Sovereignty used to mean governing your own country, not renting your civic brain from Silicon Valley.

🍁 Maple Chronicles