Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
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You made it all the way to the bottom of the article. That makes you some serious Tyee Builder material.
What’s a Tyee Builder, you ask? It’s a person, a reader, who has decided they want to be part of the team that helps keep open-access, public interest journalism alive.
Without them, without you, the Tyee’s newsroom, staffed with fiercely independent reporters and editors, would not be able to devote all their time to getting to the truth and sharing it freely with the world.
The Tyee is not part of a big news chain or owned by people who are trying to turn a profit. Our non-profit newsroom doesn’t stuff our pages with annoying ads or lock our work behind a paywall. But we still have bills to pay, and good journalism costs a lot. The only way we can square this circle is if a certain percentage of our readers agree to support our newsroom. And luckily, over 10,000 people have decided to do so.
With the help of our readers, we’ve bucked the doom and gloom trend in Canadian media – we’ve grown our team, reach more people than ever, and publish impactful journalism that sparks conversations, reveals truths and moves social change.
Back the team that powers our newsroom – you choose the amount, the frequency, and you can cancel at any time. Plus, you’ll get a tax receipt for your contributions over $5.
If you value the work The Tyee does, please consider becoming a Tyee Builder today.
— Jeanette Ageson, Publisher
Katie Hyslop is a reporter for The Tyee. Follow them on Bluesky @kehyslop.bsky.social or send story tips to khyslop[at]thetyee.ca.
With just over two months until Vancouver residents cast their ballots in the Oct. 17 election, the campaign period is officially on.
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Although with the Vancouver Liberals’ Kareem Allam declaring his mayoral candidacy in June 2025 — the first candidate to do so — you would be forgiven for assuming Vancouver had a yearlong election race.
But a lot can change in a year. For example, this time last year, the federal government and Telus hadn’t yet announced plans to build two AI data centres in the city.
The Vancouver School Board’s staff were talking about rolling out AI chatbot accounts for students 13 and above. But most people were unaware of the plan before students received their Microsoft Copilot accounts late this past spring.
Today, both AI topics are key issues for Vancouver voters as they head to the polls this fall — especially as the public hearing for the proposed rezoning required for the Mount Pleasant data centre was punted by the ABC-majority mayor and council until after the election.
While none of the main seven municipal parties have released a full campaign platform yet, many have indicated where they stand on AI data centres in the city and chatbots in schools. The Tyee reached out to all seven to ask what those stances are.
Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE
Earlier this year Vancouver School Board staff presented their plan to introduce Microsoft Copilot accounts for students 13 and older, to school trustees at the district’s education plan committee meeting.
It was an opportunity for trustees to ask questions. But they didn’t have a say in whether it should go forward or not, because as an operational decision, it is outside trustee jurisdiction. Trustees are responsible for establishing the policies and procedures that lay out the district’s overall direction. But they largely stay out of how staff achieve those goals.
That doesn’t sit right with COPE, which has been represented on the school board by trustee Suzie Mah.
Mah, along with journalist Derrick O’Keefe and former Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council chairs Melanie Cheng and Gwen Giesbrecht, is running for school board again.
COPE was the first to go public with its stance on AI chatbots in schools, as posted on the website for the Vancouver chapter of Parents for AI Caution in Educational Spaces, or PACES.
COPE wants a pause not only on Microsoft Copilot accounts for students, but on any student use of generative AI and chatbots in the district’s schools, at least until broader community and stakeholder consultations take place.
Concerns the party plans to address through consultations include student privacy and safety; lack of district policies and procedures on students’ and staff’s AI use; impact on learning; impact on mental health; and impact on the environment.
COPE’s presence and support for those gathering at the numerous AI data centre protests in the city have been very public this summer, too. The party is calling for a moratorium on all new AI data centre builds in the city, until further regulations protecting both the environment and residents are put in place.
Vote Vancouver
Vote Vancouver’s trustee candidates are entrepreneur and educator Tasha Doucas, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mandy Potter and entrepreneur and community advocate Amarys Joseph.
The party has yet to release a platform or policy on student access to AI chatbots in schools. But in an email to The Tyee, Vote Vancouver mayoral candidate Rebecca Bligh sent a statement on its position, adding the party will have more to share on this topic in the future.
“Student well-being and safety are paramount when it comes to the use of all technology in schools,” Bligh’s email reads. “Any decisions the VSB makes regarding the use of all technology, including AI tools, should be made in consultation with students, families and teachers.”
Earlier this year The Tyee sat down for an interview with Bligh, in which we asked whether her plans to strengthen the city’s economy would extend to approving potentially controversial projects, such as an AI data centre.
Bligh told us she didn’t hold strong ideological views on any particular sectors. But at the same time, protecting human rights and people was a “paramount principled priority” for her.
In her recent email to The Tyee, Bligh elaborated on her data centre position.
“Vancouver’s job is to ensure projects fit our city, protect neighbourhoods and meet some of the highest environmental standards anywhere,” she wrote.
“If we’re going to host this infrastructure, it should deliver clear public benefits through leading energy efficiency, waste heat recovery where feasible and compatibility with surrounding communities. Innovation and livability should go hand in hand, and every proposal should be evaluated carefully and on its merits.”
Green Party of Vancouver
The Vancouver Greens’ current school trustees, Lois Chan-Pedley and Janet Fraser, are not running for re-election this year. Instead, policy analyst Julie Strilesky and City of Vancouver social planner Alisha Masongsong are running this race with the Greens.
In an email to The Tyee, the Vancouver Greens’ campaign manager Nick Poppell wrote that the party believes students need to understand how to use AI chatbots “safely, critically, ethically and responsibly.” But with caveats.
“At the same time, we think there are real concerns around the ethics, privacy, learning, equity, cognitive development and the broader impacts of AI that need to be studied and taken seriously as its use expands,” Poppell said.
The Tyee responded with a followup question about whether the Greens would support the pause on implementing chatbot accounts for students while further research is conducted, as COPE has suggested. We have yet to receive a response.
When it comes to AI data centres, Poppell wrote that the party has similar concerns about their impact in the city. But it doesn’t have an official policy position on the issue yet.
“The Greens are concerned about the environmental impacts of AI data centres, especially around land use and noise pollution, as well as general energy and water use. We are currently speaking with stakeholders and working through what our position will be as part of our policy and platform process, which we will be rolling out in the weeks/months to come.”
A Better City Vancouver, or ABC
A Better City Vancouver, better known by its acronym ABC, has not released an election platform. Nor did it respond to The Tyee’s emails asking about its stance on AI data centres and AI chatbot accounts for public school teenagers.
Following the federal government and Telus’s AI data centre announcement, Mayor Ken Sim was quoted by news media as being in favour of the project.
He and his fellow ABC councillors defeated a late-July motion by OneCity Coun. Lucy Maloney to establish a regulation framework for data centre builds. ABC currently holds a majority on city council, and it’s thanks to their votes that the decision over whether to approve the Mount Pleasant data centre was moved to after the election.
Mayor Sim has been a champion of personal AI chatbot use, telling news media earlier this year that he has 11 “AI agents” running simultaneously to help him with work outside of his role as mayor.
It is not clear which current ABC school trustees are running in October. Elections BC’s website won’t list Vancouver’s registered candidates until after the nomination period closes on Sept. 11.
If you look at social media, however, you will see current ABC trustee Preeti Faridkot has been door knocking with ABC. Trustees Alfred Chien and Josh Zhang, the latter of whom missed 15 out of 23 board and public delegation meetings this past school year, are not featured in ABC’s social media posts. The Tyee has reached out to all three current trustees for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.
Chien chaired the district’s education plan committee and was the only ABC trustee present at the public meeting where district staff presented on the rollout of Microsoft Copilot accounts. Unlike Mah and current Green trustees Janet Fraser and Lois Chan-Pedley, Chien didn’t ask staff any questions.
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver
So far TEAM, a municipal party founded by former city councillor and now two-time mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick, has only one school trustee candidate. Kathryn Nystedt is a server and supervisor at a Kitsilano restaurant, with two young kids in the public system. She’s also Hardwick’s daughter.
Like COPE, TEAM would put a pause on rolling out Copilot accounts for teenagers, Coltin Lillico, TEAM’s executive director, told The Tyee via email.
“TEAM would halt the promotion of Copilot for the Vancouver School Board until more research is done and policies established. These policies must be established based on transparent research and supporting data for the public interest in advance of approvals,” he wrote.
It’s the same position the party has taken on building AI data centres in the city, similar to that of the Greens.
“TEAM supports a municipal moratorium on AI data centres in the City of Vancouver while local planning and regulation are established. Data centres have a huge impact on city infrastructure and it is questionable if the city is the appropriate location for data centres,” Lillico told The Tyee via email.
Vancouver Liberals
Party founder and mayoral candidate Kareem Allam told The Tyee he supports Canada having its own AI data centres as a matter of national security, sovereignty, health care and the economy.
“I don’t think it’s OK for Canada to be fully reliant on the Americans for AI,” Allam said. But that doesn’t mean the Vancouver Liberals would greenlight building data centres in the city.
“Why should we be using our most expensive and precious land for AI data centres?” Allam said. “Building AI data centres in Mount Pleasant, when we have a housing shortage, just defies any sense of logic or intelligence to me at all.”
The Vancouver Liberals have yet to declare any school trustee candidates. But Allam, who has sat on advisory boards at both Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the University of Victoria, believes there is a place for generative AI education in schools.
“Students are going out there and using AI, whether it’s part of the curriculum or not,” he said. When it’s not, Allam added, student outcomes decline as many use the technology to cheat or circumvent their learning.
“Where it’s integrated into the curriculum, with ethics, all the oversights that you would expect or want to see, the outcomes for students got better,” he said.
That being said, Allam would align with the position of the province and the BC Teachers’ Federation on providing students with AI chatbot accounts.
The Education Ministry does not require schools to provide chatbot accounts for students. But it has created AI ethical guidelines for districts, schools and teachers to make their own decisions.
The provincial teachers’ union has not taken an official stance on chatbot accounts, but earlier this year it released a research memo on the ethical considerations of generative AI use in education overall.
That research memo raised concerns about the potential for the de-professionalization of teaching, the privatization of resources, data privacy and electronic surveillance, and the implicit bias of AI chatbots, among other concerns.
But it also emphasized the agency of teachers to implement new technologies in their work, with ethical guidelines, strict policies and teacher education opportunities in place.
OneCity
Last month OneCity councillor and candidate Lucy Maloney introduced a motion at council asking staff to create a regulatory framework for building any AI data centres in the city. It was defeated by the ABC majority on council.
Maloney’s motion wasn’t a ban on data centres, OneCity mayoral candidate William Azaroff told The Tyee via an emailed statement. Rather, it would help the city determine where, when and if data centres should be built here.
“If we want our kids learning about AI safely in Vancouver schools, we also need a city government that understands and regulates it. Unlike Ken Sim and ABC who blindly boost AI, a OneCity mayor and council will lead on both fronts,” Azaroff told The Tyee via email.
“We’ll review data centre development through the lens of climate, equity, and digital rights. That’s how Vancouver becomes a global example of what responsible, democratic AI adoption looks like.”
OneCity’s sole school trustee, Jennifer Reddy, who criticized the district’s rollout of Copilot accounts in June and supported the one-year pause on the move championed by PACES, is not running this election.
In her stead are trustee candidates Krista Sigurdson, an academic and former Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council member; Christopher Lee, founder of the non-profit Helping Hearts Youth Foundation; Steve Cardwell, a former Vancouver School Board superintendent; Sherry Breshears, an academic and former secretary for the Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council; and Rory Brown, an academic and former president of the Vancouver Secondary Teachers’ Association.
OneCity hasn’t yet released its six-page policy on generative AI use in schools. But it did let The Tyee take a look at its proposed “harm reduction” position on the technology’s use in schools.
It includes:
- implementing safeguards for students’ privacy and mental health;
- focusing on AI literacy and education for students and teachers;
- encouraging teachers to support their students in struggling through difficult lessons without AI; and
- delaying chatbot use until Grade 10.
“The province has offered schools little more than vague ‘considerations’ on AI and called it a day, and the current ABC majority has been acting like AI cheerleaders when they should be acting like leaders,” reads a statement from trustee candidate Breshears, in an email to The Tyee.
“OneCity will take a considered approach to AI literacy and engagement that embraces age and stage development gates and guardrails so that children can learn, and their families can have confidence.” ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
Read more: Municipal Politics, Science + Tech
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