Vancouver AI Meetup #33: What BC Told Ottawa
Vancouver AI Meetup #33: What BC Told Ottawa
What BC told Ottawa. The AI transparency takeover.
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.
Twenty people in one room worked through Canada's five AI transparency questions on August 4. The federal consultation closes September 23. A week later, under the dome, we open the receipt: what British Columbia sent to Ottawa, how a room of clinicians, artists, builders, parents, and public servants got there, and what happens next. Not a panel about trust. A working room about it.
September Program
6:00 PM Doors, food, and open networking.
7:00 PM Opening with Johnny Williams of the Squamish Nation.
Following the opening: How the room worked. Peter Van Garderen facilitated the August session and published its entire record the next morning: the recording, the transcript, the notes. He walks through what happens when twenty people take a federal consultation apart as one room instead of twenty separate survey forms.
7:30 PM What BC told Ottawa. Sara T helped pull together the AI Ethical Futures Lab’s federal consultation response. She walks through the submission and what accountability, inclusive decision-making, and authority for the people affected by AI systems mean in practice.
8:00 PM The floor opens, and networking runs to close.
Further session details will be added as they are confirmed.
Meet Sara T
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.
Opening with Johnny Williams
Johnny Williams of the Squamish Nation returns to open Vancouver AI. At past meetups, he has shared Squamish language, ceremony, and his cultural advisory work with the room.
Read the submission before you come: https://bc-ai.ca/communities/futures-lab/ai-transparency
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. Program starts at 7:00 PM. Open networking runs throughout the night.
Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
Who This Is For
People building with AI and people trying to understand what it is changing
Creatives, technologists, researchers, organizers, students, educators, and public-sector teams
Anyone looking for a local, grounded room to sort through the hype, the useful parts, and the hard questions
No gatekeeping. No pitch parade. No requirement to have it all figured out.
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.
Other Upcoming Events in Our Community
Vancouver AI is one node in a much bigger organism. The BC + AI event calendar has film nights, education meetups, ethics labs, community gatherings, and other places to plug in across the province.
The Sponsors
Big thanks to the folks helping keep the lights on, the doors open, and the community infrastructure real:
Rival Technologies: Vancouver-grown leaders in conversational research and insight communities. Rival put more than $10,000 in prizes behind our data storytelling hackathons and gave the crew real BC survey data to build with.
Segev LLP: Lawyers who can actually talk about tech without reading from Wikipedia. They have backed this community since the early days and help builders navigate business, IP, gaming, and emerging technology.
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.
TheUpgrade.ai: Practical AI training for people and organizations that want to put these tools to work without treating anyone like an idiot. Their workshops and certification programs help fund the community infrastructure around this meetup.
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.
Join / support: bc-ai.ca/membership
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.
Kris Krüg & the Vancouver AI Community