Vancouver AI Meetup #33: AI Safety & Transparency
On September 30, 2026, Vancouver AI returns to the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre for Meetup #33, and this month the AI Ethical Futures Lab takes the whole night.
What BC told Ottawa. The AI transparency takeover.
If an AI system makes a decision about your life, you should be able to question it, reach someone responsible, and get a bad decision fixed. Pretty reasonable things to ask. Much harder to deliver than a little label saying AI was involved.
We’re bringing a piece of work this community made together: our response to Canada’s consultation on AI transparency. We’ll look at what people asked for, how those ideas became a submission, and what we should expect from the people receiving it.
Bring your questions. Bring your disagreements. Bring the example from your own life that keeps getting left out of these conversations.
Together we worked through Canada's five AI transparency questions as part of the Canadian federal consultation that closes September 23.
For anyone who wants to read ahead:
The full AI transparency response, with findings, responses to the five consultation areas, and the public source record.
What Twenty People in a Studio Told the Federal Government About AI, the story of the people and work behind the submission.
The AI Trust Gap Is Not an Education Problem, our earlier response to Canada’s AI strategy and the assumption that more familiarity automatically produces more trust.
September Program
September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Jonny Williams opens for us. He's been part of this since the very first gatherings, his family too, and he starts us off in a good way every time. We're glad the night falls when it does and that he's the one who begins it. Wear orange.
This summer, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada asked Canadians what greater AI transparency should look like. Its consultation covers five areas: identifying AI-generated content, knowing when you’re interacting with AI, understanding AI systems, tracking serious incidents, and keeping a record of what AI agents do on our behalf. The deadline is September 23, one week before we gather at the Space Centre. Read the federal consultation →
On August 4, about twenty of us sat down at Parker Street Studios to work through those questions together. Tanya Slingsby opened the studio. Peter Van Garderen facilitated. People brought experiences from their work and their lives, and the conversation kept getting into the difficult stuff underneath the survey: consent, responsibility, and who has the power to say no.
We didn’t finish every survey question. We did leave a public record of the conversation: the recording, transcript, and facilitator’s notes.
Sara Taherzadeh turned that material into the collective report. The Lab reviewed it in September, and BC + AI emailed the submission to ISED on September 11. We also documented where AI tools helped and where people made the decisions. A submission asking for transparency ought to show its own work. Read how it was made →
The demand running through it is practical. Tell people what a system is doing and what information it used. Give them someone to contact. Keep a record they can challenge. Make correction and repair possible. Disclosure should leave a person able to do something with what they’ve learned.
People also questioned whether taking part would change anything. BC + AI is asking ISED to publish which recommendations it accepts, defers, or rejects, with reasons. Giving your time to a public process should come with a way to see what happened next. Read the findings →
At Meetup #33, Peter Van Garderen will talk through how the August session worked. Sara Taherzadeh, a registered nurse turned governance architect, will walk us through the submission and what accountability could mean in practice. Then we’ll open the floor.
You don’t need a policy background or a stack of finished opinions. Come curious and willing to hear somebody else’s experience. The useful part of Vancouver AI has always been what happens when people who would otherwise never meet start thinking together.
The Lineup
Jonny Williams
Jonny opens Vancouver AI the way this room has learned to start: locate the night in place before anybody demos a model. Squamish Nation. Cultural consultation that turns fat impact assessments into something a Nation can actually use.
He’s put AI to work on that paper mountain, and he keeps asking the ugly ownership questions out loud: who holds a model trained on Squamish language, and what happens when fluent speakers are still a small circle.
Sep 30 is National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Sara Taherzadeh: Governance Architect & Enterprise OCM
Sara is a registered nurse turned governance architect who has spent more than 25 years making healthcare technology work better for the people it’s meant to serve. She helped establish what became HealthLink BC 811 and has worked across British Columbia's digital health systems — from frontline care to provincial technology infrastructure governance and change management.
Sara knows how institutions work, where they fall short of the people they serve, and why the hardest questions are usually the ones most worth asking together. She brings that human-centered, lived experience to AI governance, championing accountability, inclusive decision-making, and real authority for the people affected by the systems being built around and for them.
Peter Van Garderen: Archivist & AI Researcher
Peter spent decades on digital archives (Archivematica, AtoM), the unglamorous stack that keeps records findable and contestable. Then he pointed that same provenance brain at AI.
He ran the Ethical Futures Lab room that answered Ottawa’s transparency questions as one group, posted the recording and notes the next day, and will not treat “AI-assisted” as a free pass on receipts.
Kris Krüg: Executive Director, BC + AI Ecosystem
Straight back from Montréal. ALL IN week. Centres of excellence by day. Ministers and the techno-power-broker set by night. And the citizen resistance that shows up when “innovation” forgets who pays the bill. Kris isn’t here to recite talking points.
He’s here to report what those rooms actually sound like when you hold critique in one hand and curiosity in the other. What that means for Vancouver on a night about transparency, trust, and receipts.
Demos from Metacreation Lab for Creative AI
Autolume: Michael Tjokrowardojo & Lionel Ringenbach
A no-code visual synthesizer for crafting generative visuals from small datasets. The newest version features many improvements and now includes macOS support alongside the Windows build.
Comic Overlay Translator: Timothy Zhang
A real-time comic translation application that automatically detects, translates, and overlays translated text directly onto the user’s screen. It supports Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), with optimizations for Chinese-to-English translations.
The Flow
Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT
Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9
Program: Doors at 6:00 PM. Auditorium opens at 7:00 PM. Program starts at 7:15 PM. Open networking runs throughout the night.
Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Futureproof Festival of AI, October 28 to 30
Four weeks after this meetup we're back in the same building, for three days instead of one night. Futureproof is BC + AI's first festival, more than thirty speakers at the Space Centre.
Ana Serrano, president of OCAD University, on why artists and educators need a real say in what gets built.
Amber Case, founder of the Calm Tech Institute, on technology that respects your attention instead of farming it.
Alexandra Samuel, on working with AI without handing over your agency, judgment, or humanity.
Taleeb Noormohamed, MP for Vancouver Granville and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of AI, coming from the same federal table we just wrote to.
If accountability and receipts are why you're coming on the 30th, Futureproof is where that conversation gets three days instead of three hours.
The Sponsors
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
Intellomx: Simon Haworth's crew is building an AI-powered drug discovery platform across transcriptomic, genomic, and proteomic data. Deep science, local roots, real support for the ecosystem.
Internet Archive Canada: Andrea Mills and the crew at The Permanent are preserving decades of the open internet while more knowledge disappears behind paywalls. They are also co-creating the Archive Builders Micro-Fellowship with us.
Community Partners
Metacreation Lab for Creative AI: Professor Philippe Pasquier and his lab at SFU's School of Interactive Arts & Technology have been pushing computational creativity long before it became fashionable.
CreativeMornings Vancouver: More than a decade of building Vancouver's creative community and cross-pollinating the people who make this city interesting.
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre: Our venue partner and monthly home under the dome. They keep opening the doors and letting a strange mix of technologists, artists, and curious neighbours turn a planetarium into an emerging-tech commons.
Ethọ́s Lab: Vancouver's Black and Indigenous youth-led studio where young people ship real products, experiment with creative technology, and build futures on their own terms.
About Vancouver AI
Vancouver AI is a neural network of curious humans mapping the terrain between technology and consciousness. We bridge art galleries and research labs, corporate towers and garage workshops because the future does not get built in one kind of room.
We run monthly gatherings where builders, researchers, artists, educators, founders, and students trade demos, tools, ethics, and hard questions. No outside agenda. Just a self-organizing community that gives a damn about where this revolution goes and who gets to steer.
About BC + AI Ecosystem Association
BC + AI is the province-wide layer: a community-driven nonprofit building public-interest infrastructure for AI in British Columbia.
This is where local meetups turn into working groups, prototypes, shared tools, member connections, and a stronger public voice for people doing the work. Vancouver AI was the first node. The ecosystem now reaches across BC, with every community bringing its own culture, needs, and experiments.
Code of Care
Be kind. Be curious. This is a harassment-free, consent-first room.
Credit people. Share code, notes, photos, and ideas with attribution.
Ask before filming or recording any person, conversation, or screen.
Make space. Help new people into the conversation and leave room for perspectives that do not sound like yours.
Get Involved
The meetup gets better when the community brings the sparks. We are always looking for volunteers, speakers, sponsors, demos, photographers, and people who know how to make a room feel alive.
Bring a demo, join BC + AI, or show up with an idea and find the people who can help you move it.