Since publishing A Parent's Guide to Artificial Intelligence, I've heard from parents and educators in other provinces who want something similar — but specific to their jurisdiction. That makes sense. Education is a provincial responsibility under the Canadian constitution.1 The school board policies, the privacy laws, the specific tools being deployed, and the local crisis resources all differ depending on where you live.

The national resources — MediaSmarts, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Cybertip.ca, Kids Help Phone — apply everywhere. The rest needs local research.

This post is a practical roadmap for anyone who wants to build a province- or territory-specific version of this guide. The original guide is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, which means you're welcome to adapt it as long as you credit the source, don't use it commercially, and share your adaptation under the same licence. The source files are on GitHub. Not only that, if you or your community want to build a guide for your province or territory, I will happily adapt https://parentsguidetoai.ca to support regional guides and recommendations!

Why a province-specific guide matters

The core content about AI — what it is, how it works, why it sounds confident when it's wrong — is the same everywhere. But a parent reading a guide needs answers to questions that are specific to their situation:

  • Which AI tools has our school board approved or deployed?
  • What does our province's privacy law say about how student data can be used?
  • If something goes wrong, who do we call?
  • What does our province's curriculum say about digital literacy and AI?

A guide that says "check with your school board" doesn't answer those questions. A guide built on local research does.

Resources to locate for each province or territory

Start with official sources. These are the most important things to track down before you write a word of the guide itself.

1. Ministry or Department of Education guidance on AI

Every province and territory has a Ministry (or Department) of Education. Most have published, or are in the process of publishing, guidance on AI use in schools. The quality and specificity of this guidance varies significantly — some provinces have detailed frameworks, others have a brief statement acknowledging that AI exists.

Look for: - Any formal policy or administrative directive on AI use in K-12 settings - Guidance documents for teachers and administrators - Statements on acceptable use of AI for student work - Any provincial digital citizenship or technology strategy

File a freedom of information request if policies aren't publicly posted. Timelines and fees vary by province — in BC, FIPPA allows 30 business days to respond, with no fee for personal requests.

2. Provincial or territorial privacy legislation

Canada's provinces and territories have their own privacy laws that may overlap with or supplement federal legislation (PIPEDA).2 These vary significantly:

  • Quebec has the strongest student data protections in Canada under Law 25 (Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector), which requires explicit consent and data minimization
  • Alberta and BC have their own private-sector privacy statutes (PIPA)
  • Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and others rely primarily on federal PIPEDA for private-sector data, but have public-sector privacy laws that cover schools
  • Territories are largely governed by federal law

Your guide needs to tell parents what protections actually exist in their jurisdiction — not just what they should hope for.

3. School board policies — especially the largest boards

Provincial guidance sets the floor. Individual school boards set their own policies on top of it, and those can vary widely. Start with the two or three largest boards in the province, since they tend to lead on policy development and often have the most detailed documentation.

Look for: - Acceptable use policies that mention AI specifically - Any board-level decisions on specific AI tool deployments (like the VSB's Copilot 13+ rollout) - Data governance or vendor agreements for AI tools used in schools - Parent communication that has gone out about AI

Board meeting minutes are usually public. If a board approved an AI tool deployment, it will be in the minutes.

4. The provincial privacy commissioner

Every province and territory has an Information and Privacy Commissioner (or equivalent) whose jurisdiction includes how public bodies — including schools — handle personal information. Most commissioners' offices have published resources on children's privacy and emerging technologies.

The commissioner's guidance is often more accessible than the legislation itself, and more directly useful for parents trying to understand their rights.

5. Provincial teacher federation positions

Teacher federations in Canada are often ahead of government on emerging education policy questions, including AI. They represent frontline educators who are navigating these issues in classrooms every day, and their position statements and professional guidance documents are usually well-researched.

Every province has a teacher federation. Find their published statements on AI in education, and look for any professional learning resources they've produced for members.

6. Provincial digital citizenship and curriculum frameworks

Most provinces have integrated digital literacy or digital citizenship expectations into their curriculum frameworks, though the depth and specificity varies. Some provinces (BC, Ontario, and PEI notably) have more developed frameworks than others.

These frameworks are worth including in a provincial guide because they define what children are supposed to learn about navigating digital environments — including AI — and give parents a reference point for what to expect from schools.

7. Any legislation specifically addressing AI, children's data, or online harms

This is a moving target. Several provinces are actively developing or have recently passed legislation that intersects with AI and children's rights. Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec have all moved on related issues in the last few years. Check for:

  • Legislation on online harms or cyberbullying
  • Amendments to education acts that address student data
  • Legislation on non-consensual intimate images (most provinces now have this)

8. Indigenous education frameworks and commitments

Each province and territory has different commitments under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action, and different relationships with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities and governments. AI has specific implications for Indigenous students and families — including questions about whose knowledge and perspectives are reflected in training data, and about data sovereignty.

A responsible provincial guide needs to address this, and to do so it needs to understand the specific context of the province. Look for:

  • Provincial Indigenous education frameworks
  • School board Indigenous education strategies
  • Statements from First Nations education authorities in the province
  • Any Métis Nation guidance on data and technology

Organizations to connect with for feedback

Building a guide without community input is how you end up with a guide that answers the wrong questions. These are the types of organizations whose feedback will make the guide more accurate and more useful.

Parent and family organizations

  • Provincial parent advisory federations — most provinces have a provincial body that represents school-level parent advisory councils. In BC that's BCCPAC; in Ontario it's the Ontario Federation of Home and School Associations (OFHSA); in Alberta it's the Alberta School Councils' Association (ASCA).3 These organizations know what questions parents are actually asking.
  • School-level parent advisory councils — talking to a handful of PACs from urban, suburban, and rural contexts will surface very different concerns and information gaps.
  • Newcomer and settlement organizations — families who are new to Canada may face additional barriers around language, familiarity with the Canadian school system, and trust in institutions. Their perspective is essential for making the guide genuinely accessible.
  • Disability advocacy organizations — AI tools have significant accessibility implications. Organizations representing parents of children with learning disabilities, autism spectrum conditions, or physical disabilities will have specific questions and insights.

Educators and school staff

  • Teacher federations — you'll already have read their published guidance; ask if you can speak with their professional development leads or their policy staff
  • School librarians and teacher-librarians — often the most practically informed people in a school on questions of information literacy, research, and AI tools
  • School counsellors and social workers — they deal with the harm side of this directly; their input on what goes wrong and what parents need to know is valuable
  • Indigenous education workers and cultural support workers — essential for the Indigenous education section of any provincial guide

School trustees and district staff

Trustees are elected officials accountable to the community. District technology directors and privacy officers deal with the operational questions — vendor agreements, student data, acceptable use policy — directly. Both are worth talking to.

Provincial and territorial government offices

  • Information and Privacy Commissioner staff — they will often speak informally to people developing public interest resources about how the legislation applies in practical terms
  • Ministry of Education curriculum staff — useful for understanding how AI fits (or doesn't fit) into the provincial curriculum framework
  • Children's Commissioner or Advocate — most provinces and territories have an independent officer responsible for children's rights; their perspective on AI's implications for children is worth seeking

National organizations with local reach

  • MediaSmarts — Canada's centre for digital and media literacy has regional contacts and may be able to connect you with people doing similar work in your province
  • Canadian Centre for Child Protection (which runs Cybertip.ca and NeedHelpNow.ca) — can speak to the harm patterns they're seeing and what resources are most needed in your region
  • Local chapters of national organizations — community legal clinics, public libraries, and children's mental health organizations often have provincial or regional branches that can review the guide for local accuracy

Post-secondary education

Faculties of Education at provincial universities often have researchers working on exactly these questions. Academic review adds credibility and catches errors; in return, the guide can help their research reach a public audience.

Questions your guide needs to answer

Use these as a checklist when you're evaluating whether you have enough local research to actually write:

  • Which specific AI tools are being used in schools in this province, and under what policies?
  • What does provincial privacy law require before a school can share student data with an AI vendor?
  • Is parental consent required? At what age can a student consent independently?
  • What are the largest school boards doing, and where can parents find their policies?
  • What does the provincial teacher federation recommend that teachers do and not do with AI?
  • What provincial curriculum expectations address digital literacy and AI?
  • What are the provincial-specific crisis resources (for deepfakes, NCII, sextortion, cyberbullying)?
  • Who is the provincial privacy commissioner, and what resources have they published?
  • What Indigenous data sovereignty considerations apply in this province?
  • Are there French-language resources available for Francophone families?

If you can answer all of those questions with sources, you have enough material for a useful guide.

Practical notes on building and maintaining a provincial guide

Start with the national baseline. The BC guide covers the national content — AI fundamentals, national organizations, federal legislation — that applies anywhere in Canada. Don't re-research what's already documented. Fork the existing content (it's CC-licensed), replace the BC-specific sections with your province's equivalents, and add the local resources.

Date everything. AI policy is moving fast. Every policy reference, every resource link, every statistic should have a date attached. Readers need to know how current the information is.

Publish it openly. A guide that lives behind a paywall or a login doesn't reach the parents who need it most. Publish it under a Creative Commons licence so others can share, translate, and adapt it.

Plan for maintenance. A guide published once and never updated will be misleading within a year. Either commit to reviewing it at the start of each school year, or build a community of contributors who can flag changes. GitHub is a reasonable infrastructure for this — version history is public, anyone can open an issue to flag something outdated, and pull requests allow community contributions.

Get a plain-language review. Academic reviewers will catch errors. A plain-language review by someone without a background in education or technology will catch everything that's technically accurate but still not useful to a non-expert parent. Both matter.

If you're building a guide for your province or territory and have questions, open an issue on the GitHub repository or reach out through the blog. I'm glad to share what worked and what didn't in developing the BC version.

Read the original guide: parentsguidetoai.ca

Fork or adapt the source files: github.com/ygjb/parentsguidetoai.ca — published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Notes

  1. Constitution Act, 1867, s. 93. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-6.html ↩

  2. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. "The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)." Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 2024. https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/privacy-laws-in-canada/the-personal-information-protection-and-electronic-documents-act-pipeda/ — Note: Bill C-27 (Consumer Privacy Protection Act), which would have replaced PIPEDA, died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued in January 2025. PIPEDA remains in force as of June 2026. ↩

  3. BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils (BCCPAC): https://bccpac.bc.ca — Ontario Federation of Home and School Associations (OFHSA): https://www.ofhsa.on.ca — Alberta School Councils' Association (ASCA): https://www.albertaschoolcouncils.ca ↩