Standing Buffalo Sets Nov. 16 Deadline as Bell Declines to Share AI Data Centre Documents

Bell Canada has told Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation that it will not hand over the technical reports, commercial agreements and regulatory correspondence the First Nation asked for about the AI data centre BCE is building near Regina, CTV News reported on October 20. The Nation has now given the company until November 16 to say whether it will share the material and take part in Standing Buffalo’s own review of the project.

Chief Rodger Redman first wrote to BCE president and chief executive Mirko Bibic on October 2. He argued that the facility, in the Rural Municipality of Sherwood, sits on unceded traditional Dakota territory and is large enough that the Nation needs a clear understanding of its technical basis, environmental effects and approvals. His request covered correspondence with regulators and documents on the cooling system, the lifecycle of the computing equipment and any planned expansions, including power generation.

Dan Rink, president of AI infrastructure and strategy at Bell AI Fabric, replied on October 16 with publicly available information on cooling, water and power use, equipment recycling and the centre’s eventual decommissioning, and offered to meet the chief and band council. He stopped short of releasing the records, writing that Bell does not share such documents outside the regulatory processes or agreements they were prepared for. Standing Buffalo says any meeting would count only as information sharing, not as Crown consultation or consent, and it had earlier warned of far-reaching legal proceedings if BCE did not respond.

What it means in practice

The dispute lands on a project that has grown sharply. First planned at 300 megawatts, the Sherwood site is now slated to reach 1.2 gigawatts across more than 1,000 acres, the scale described in our earlier look at Bell AI Fabric’s Saskatchewan hub. Ottawa has also set out principles for responsible data centre development, and other builders are moving quickly, as shown by Anthropic’s long-term lease at Point Tupper in Nova Scotia.

For AI infrastructure developers, the case shows how quickly questions about water, power and land become questions about Indigenous rights. A refusal grounded in commercial confidentiality may be routine for a telecom company, but it reads differently to a Nation that wants to judge for itself how its rights were considered. CTV News is owned by Bell Media, a BCE subsidiary, which the outlet noted in its report.

What to watch: whether Bell answers before the November 16 deadline, whether provincial or federal authorities step in on consultation, and whether Standing Buffalo pursues legal action that could slow what CTV describes as one of the largest investments in Canadian history.