Charlie Kratovil

And

it's the type of development that it's the opposite of job creation, right?

Normally, we are in this sort of like environmentalist versus jobs dynamic.

But these facilities have, you know, very few permanent jobs.

And in fact, the artificial intelligence industry is famous for

replacing human workers with computer technology and putting people out of work.

So those arguments don't carry water.

I have gotten a little taste of how strong the opposition is, and I knew that it was something that we needed to tap into here in New Brunswick because...

At the end of the day, I wanted our city council to remember this moment next time a data center is proposed.

And they'll just say no because they understand that the people don't want it, at least not here in our city.

And, yeah, I think, you know, Food and Water Watch is right to support a moratorium on this stuff because otherwise we're going to be making decisions that we're going to be locked into and we're going to come to regret.

Yeah, I mean, in New Brunswick, we have a lot of development and redevelopment going on, so I know there's a lot of frustration over it.

But it's often, you know, some people love it and some people don't love it.

In this case, this is a piece of land that had been completely vacant for years.

The developer kicked out small businesses to, you know, supposedly had big plans and never delivered on them.

So I knew the local people were not going to support a plan that was going to –

basically change what was supposed to be a park to a big data center.

I also knew that more broadly, people are very frustrated with artificial intelligence and the impact it's having, how we're seeing so much misinformation and slop in our feeds that we didn't see just a few years ago, and how it's ultimately a big moneymaker for the extremely wealthy,

And virtually nothing is trickling down to regular folks.

So different people have different reasons for opposing it.