Ahead of the final provincial town hall to address Alberta’s growing data centre industry, one Grande Prairie resident wants to see details of a land purchase agreement signed between a municipality aiming to host the “world’s largest AI data centre park” and O’Leary Digital Ltd. (ODL), the company planning to build it.

“Release the O’Leary files,” Grande Prairie resident Casey Klein wrote on social media, referring to a heavily redacted version of the agreement that celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary’s company filed in an Alberta court.

O’Leary’s Wonder Valley data centre is embroiled in an Alberta court case over a lack of consultation with Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation (SLCN).

O’Leary Digital and proposed host the Municipal District of Greenview attempted and failed to have the First Nation’s court case thrown out. The company provided the March 25, 2025 purchase and sale agreement signed with Greenview as evidence of its standing. But Justice P.K. Johal ruled it was “impossible to determine” ODL’s contractual rights due to extensive redactions made to the agreement.

The judge also ruled the company had no standing in the upcoming judicial review. The company has filed an appeal of the decision, arguing it has “a direct stake in the case,” reports Windspeaker.

Court records show that O’Leary Digital CEO Paul Palandjian refused to provide the entire document, and now, the judge isn’t the only one who has questions about what is in the agreements between Greenview and the company.

Klein told The Mix she had been poring over hundreds of documents she received from an Access to Information request filed by Canada’s National Observer ,when she discovered that a letter of intent was in place between Greenview and O’Leary as early as Oct. 22, 2024.

She posted her findings to Facebook, showing that the letter of intent with Greenview was not disclosed before council made changes to the municipality’s Land Use Bylaw a few weeks later. Those changes allowed data centres to be approved without a public hearing. Wonder Valley hadn’t yet been publicly announced.

“Democracy is being hollowed out,” Klein told National Observer. “The public-facing process still exists, but the consequential decisions happen somewhere else… How are we supposed to accept that?”

In a statement, Palandjian said Greenview “decided what went before residents,” not O’Leary.

Greenview did not respond to questions sent by The Mix about whether they would release the details of the agreement, and whether they are in a conflict of interest acting on behalf of a company whose data centre development they’re also regulating.

New audio released by Klein indicates a council member identified as Reeve Ryan Ratzlaff complained in a meeting about the social media posts, saying council doesn’t have time to “spoonfeed” information to residents. The Mix has not been able to independently verify who was speaking in the audio, and Greenview did not respond to a request for confirmation.

Alberta Innovation and Technology Minister Nate Glubish will be in Grande Prairie Sept. 11 to talk about Wonder Valley and other planned data centres across the province, in the last of a series of town halls that have turned adversarial.

The minister was previously “jeered, badgered and booed” by a room packed with hundreds of people, The Canadian Press reported.

“Your words are nice, you explain things well, but I don’t trust you, and I think that the people in this room agree with me,” one woman said to applause.

According to the Alberta Data Centre Watch website created by volunteer researcher Sarah Yurchevich, the province now has 30 new data centres approved or proposed across 26 different municipalities. The requests for grid power for data centres is up to 13.1 gigawatts (GW), which is 127% of the province’s average electricity demand in 2025.

Another 8 GW of onsite power generation is proposed across 13 active projects, all of it to be produced from methane gas.

On Sept. 3, the federal government sent out amended regulations exempting fossil fuel-fired power generating facilities from environmental impact assessments, clearing the way for bring-your-own power data centres in Alberta, including Wonder Valley.

The provincial Minister of Indigenous Relations and the Minister of Environment and Protected Areas (EPA) are also named in SLCN’s judicial review scheduled for December. The judge will look at whether “duty to consult” obligations were followed before granting the water licence for Wonder Valley.

The First Nation had filed 42 concerns over planned water withdrawals as part of Greenview’s initial planning process, but those concerns went unanswered.

Greenview, the holder of the licence for six million cubic metres annually from the Smoky River, agreed to seek the water permit on behalf of O’Leary as a condition of the purchase agreement, reported National Observer.

There was also a preliminary certificate granted for 24 million cubic metres of water in 2025, the same year Greenview declared an agricultural disaster due to drought. It’s unclear whether the project is dependent on the larger amount.

The Greenview Industrial Gateway, where Wonder Valley is planned, is located on Treaty 8 land, about 460 kilometres north of Edmonton, It’s also on SLCN’s traditional territory, which spans from north of High Prairie, east past Edmonton, south to Jasper, and west across the British Columbia border.

According to court documents, the provincial Aboriginal Consultation Office told Greenview no consultation with the First Nation was needed before EPA granted the water licence.

Last week, the federal government announced with great fanfare its five “responsible data centre development principles” signed by 23 data centre companies, but O’Leary Digital wasn’t among them.

Palandjian told The Mix in an email that O’Leary Digital “intend[s] to make the pledge.”

“More importantly, we designed Wonder Valley to these standards before they were a federal framework—so when we read the Responsible Data Centre Development Principles, they describe the project we are already building,” he said.

One of the principles is that “proponents must engage early and transparently with impacted local governments and Indigenous communities on data centre projects and respect local approval processes.”

Palandjian detailed how Wonder Valley was specifically addressing four of the five principles, but did not mention how the project would answer the transparency principle, a commitment to “provide clear, project-appropriate and independently verifiable information on expected local impacts, including power and water use, infrastructure requirements, sound, and emissions.”

“Canada has now set out what responsible development looks like,” he said, and, “we are not asking for an exception to any of it.”