BC + AI · Vancouver AI Meetup #33 · Wed, Sep 30
What BC told Ottawa.
The AI transparency takeover
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 the AI Ethical Futures Lab sent to Ottawa, how a room of clinicians, artists, builders, parents, and public servants got there, and what happens next.
- Date and time
- Wed, Sep 30 · 6:00 p.m.
- Location
- H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9, Canada
The night
Not a panel about trust. A working room about it.
- 6:00
Doors
Food, the crew, and open networking. Come early, stay late.
- 7:00
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.
- Then
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. What happens when twenty people take a federal consultation apart as one room instead of twenty separate survey forms.
- 7:30
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
The floor opens
Questions, arguments, and networking to close.
Meet the speaker
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.
Three questions we will work on together
Bring your own example. Everyone has one.
- When an AI system acts on you, what would you need to know to push back?
- Who is answerable when it goes wrong, and how would you get it undone?
- Does a public consultation deserve the trust it asks for?
The record
Everything on stage is already public.
The submission, the recording and transcript of the room that produced it, and the AI disclosure that says which tools were used where. Read it before you come, or after. It does not change.
The practical bits
Wednesday night under the dome.
- When
- Wednesday, September 30, 2026. Doors at 6:00 PM, program at 7:00 PM, open networking throughout.
- Where
- H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver. Map
- Tickets
- Register on Luma. Members, check your email for the member rate.
Come late. Leave early. Nobody keeps score.
See you under the dome