The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday, June 26, edition that Hamilton's City Council voted on Wednesday in support of a one-year pause on all artificial intelligence data-centre development in the city. The Globe's guest columnists Anne Pasek and Nick Tsergas write that Hamilton is the first to confront a question all Canadian municipalities will soon face: What are the rules of the road for building AI data centres responsibly? These are questions Canada has put off asking. We don't have much in the way of regulatory guardrails for data centres. These facilities are governed by rules written well before the advent of AI. Hamilton is the first municipality to think about what those rules ought to be. It will not be the last. As the data centre industry increasingly deploys non-disclosure agreements and regulatory run-arounds, communities can be excluded from consultation. This creates controversy and confusion, and can lead to irreversible mistakes from local and regional governments. Hamilton is Canada's test-case. The city currently has three data centre proposals. Municipalities are uniquely positioned to facilitate informed public debate. But their success will depend on the presence of clear standards.