Answers are hard to come by. That’s what a group of concerned Saskatchewan landowners have learned.
The seven families live immediately adjacent to the site of Bell’s proposed AI data centre, and they’ve been asking questions for months, receiving little in the way of solid replies.
In a written letter to the council at the RM of Sherwood, Sask., the group writes, “At every stage of this process our concerns have been deferred, reduced, or ignored.”
They are not expressly opposed to the project, but they have concerns about how their quality of life — and their property values — will be affected.
Doug McKell’s family has lived in the area for close to 150 years. He says that getting answers from the RM of Sherwood has been like pulling teeth.
“We have the governance system in place so that these kinds of concerns should be able to be handled through their regular process,” McKell said. “And for them to ignore that and not deal with us in their normal fashion, everybody in the area is very frustrated with that.”
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The group says that, between January and March 2026, they submitted four formal requests to the RM of Sherwood Administration and Council. They were seeking binding conditions addressing noise, lighting, drainage, storm-water management, groundwater protection, and roadway management.
The first submission, made on Jan. 29, is the only one that made it onto the public record, posted on the RM of Sherwood’s website. Their second submission, made on Feb. 8, was never posted. Neither was the third, made on Feb. 17, or the fourth, made on March 4.
When the group’s first three submissions went unanswered, Doug McKell and others submitted a formal complaint to the Ombudsman on Feb. 25. The RM’s publicly posted agenda for the council meeting on Monday, March 16th shows that the Code of Ethics and an Ombudsman Complaint was discussed.
By Wednesday, March 18, two days later, four out of seven council members, including the Reeve and Deputy-Reeve, abruptly resigned. No reason was given.
On Friday, April 10, the province’s Ministry of Government Relations confirmed to Global News that they had appointed former SARM president Ray Orb as Reeve. Mitch Huber, Donna Strudwick and Judy Harwood were appointed to fill the other vacant council positions.
On March 25, McKell and the rest of the group submitted another letter to the RM seeking a formal resolution directing council to include specific binding conditions. They asked for a response within a week.
One week later, on April 2, an executive summary for a development agreement was publicly posted on the RM’s website. So far, it is the closest thing they have gotten in terms of a response. On the surface, it seems to address many of the landowners’ concerns.
Regarding noise, the document promises to “ensure that sound levels at the property boundary remain consistent with existing ambient conditions.” It goes on to say that roadway upgrades “will be completed at the Developer’s expense” and that lighting issues will be handled by “full-cutoff, dark-sky-compliant fixtures equipped with specialized house-side and backlight glare shields.”
But for McKell and the rest of the group, promises are one thing. Binding conditions are another.
A letter from the group to the RM reads, in part, “A good faith process is not the same as a binding obligation and we cannot accept one in place of the other.” They are asking for measurable commitments with enforceable penalties for non-compliance to be included in the final development agreement.
On Tuesday April 14th, the group met with the RM’s of Sherwood council — including the newly-appointed replacement councilors — to discuss their concerns and advocate for binding conditions. By almost all accounts, the residents left the meeting with a sense of optimism. They seemed pleased that the newly appointed councilors were seriously listening to their concerns, and pleasantly surprised with the presentation put forward by President of Bell AI Fabric, Dan Rink.
After things wrapped up Tuesday afternoon, Doug McKell said, “I think moving forward, we’ll be able to work with this… I think they heard our issues and concerns, so that was positive.”
No commitments were made at the meeting, and it remains to be seen if binding conditions will be incorporated into the development agreement, which is set will be reviewed on April 20th.
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