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On Tuesday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra weighed in on the debate over artificial intelligence in Canada, which came into sharp focus this week, after Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — announced it is building its first data centre outside the United States, and it's going in Alberta.

Ezra noted something conspicuous about the announcement: federal AI minister Evan Solomon was nowhere to be found.

"Because Carney can't take the credit for it, because there's no tax dollars involved, the Liberals haven't said a word about it," he said, arguing the silence from Ottawa says as much as any statement would.

Whether people like it or not, Ezra said, artificial intelligence is coming, the same way smartphones did.

"The question is whether we'll have AI run by ChatGPT or Grok, or run by the People's Liberation Army," he said, pointing to Nvidia, Apple and SpaceX as evidence that the world's leading tech giants are still, for now, American.

Ezra acknowledged the anxiety many Canadians feel watching the technology advance, including footage circulating online of a man physically beating up a driverless taxi. He said the frustration is understandable, but compared it to past waves of automation, noting that 250 years ago, roughly 90 percent of North Americans worked on farms, a figure that has since fallen dramatically, with those displaced workers moving into jobs that didn't yet exist.

He reserved sharper criticism for Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who scrapped a proposed data centre for his province, catching the company behind it off guard. Ezra called the move "so weird and conspiratorial," saying Kinew's suggestion that a data centre itself could "spy" on people misunderstands what a data centre is.

"Blaming the processors in a factory would be like blaming a farm because the steak you ordered in the restaurant was undercooked," Ezra said.

He also noted what he called an inconsistency in Kinew's record: as Manitoba's opposition leader during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kinew repeatedly pushed the government to go further on enforcement and surveillance of citizens under lockdown measures, making his newfound worry about corporate data centres, in Ezra's words, "a bit weird."

Turning to the substance of the objections, Ezra said the Alberta project will employ about 3,000 workers during construction and roughly 300 permanently, and that Meta plans to build its own natural-gas power plant rather than draw from the existing grid, along with a closed-loop cooling system it says will use less water than conventional facilities. He noted the company has pledged $60 million toward local infrastructure and community grants.

Ezra sorted the opposition to the project into three camps. The first, he said, opposes all industrial development on principle, comparing them to past opponents of pipelines and oilsands projects. The second is more sympathetic in Ezra's telling: people wary of Facebook's track record on privacy and its role during pandemic-era content moderation, whose concerns he said deserve straight answers rather than dismissal.

The third group, he said, is the one that concerns him most: those who oppose the West's dominance in AI outright. He pointed to warnings from CSIS about foreign information operations tied to China and Iran operating in Canada, arguing that critics who stay silent on authoritarian versions of the same technology reveal where their real objection lies.

"They're against Palantir, but not against the Chinese version of Palantir," he said.

Ezra will continue to examine the issue further in the months ahead. In the meantime, if you want to stop using a cell phone or stop using AI, go ahead. Take back control of your life. 

But trying to stop a data centre in Canada? Don't make the Chinese Embassy’s day.