Photo by Rosa Menkman/Flickr

A reckoning is coming between municipalities and upper levels of government, and today’s AI data centre fights are the opening salvo.

As provincial and federal governments race to build AI data centres, they’ve exposed a democratic faultline. Municipalities, the governments closest to the consequences, have the least power to decide what gets built and where.

The dynamic isn’t limited to data centres and it’s not new.

Nor is the idea, arising from constitutional law, that municipalities are mere “creatures of the provinces.” That is to say, our cities and towns are locally run, but ruled from afar by legislatures that can rearrange or combine them, nullify their bylaws, and dissolve them at will.

It’s an odd notion, since many cities pre-date the provinces. And fortunately, there is precedent for reanimating “settled” constitutional debates such as this. Canadian law has long treated the Constitution as a “living tree,” capable of growth as circumstances change, and in need of occasional pruning.

The late Canadian urban theorist Warren Magnusson challenged the logic directly, pointing out that no one would call First Nations “creatures of the federal government” just because the Constitution........

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