Essex mayor proposes one-year AI data centre moratorium

The mayor of Essex, Ontario has filed a motion for a one-year pause on AI data centre development in her town, CBC News reported. Sherry Bondy's motion, set for a vote at the Sept. 8 town council meeting, would direct municipal staff to prepare an interim control by-law, a mechanism under the province's Planning Act that lets a municipality halt certain kinds of development for a year while it studies its land use policies, with an option to extend for another year.

"I want to make sure that if one comes in my area, it's going to not affect me or the plants or the animals or all the other industries that already exist here," Bondy told CBC.

Essex County itself cannot impose the moratorium; individual municipalities have to pass their own interim control bylaws. Bondy's town motion is timed alongside a county-level vote on Sept. 2 over whether to proceed with a broader study of AI data centres. That county file was pushed earlier this summer by Kingsville deputy mayor Kimberly DeYong, who submitted a motion at the July meeting asking the county to build a policy framework and review land use planning policies. Bondy told AM 800 CKLW the town had received more than 150 emails from concerned residents, and added, "We may need to look at our zoning bylaw and to see how we can prohibit data centres. But we really need to do our homework too, because that could prohibit other operations that we may want."

Essex would not be first. Mississauga voted on July 29 for its own one-year moratorium, and Ontario's Green Party has called on the provincial government to pause all new AI data centre approvals across the province. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the CBC story, a signal that the municipal pushback is registering beyond Essex.