Public sector · Halifax, NS

Private AI for public bodies in Halifax

Halifax municipalities, agencies and public bodies work inside Nova Scotia’s own rules. Digby answers from your documents with the passage attached, keeps stored data in Canada, and runs the models on Canadian-located hardware — so the answer is checkable and the question “where does it go” has a short reply.

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What Nova Scotia asks of a public body

Nova Scotia public bodies operate under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which establishes the public’s access right and the body’s protection duty together.

Small teams with wide mandates are usual here: the person answering the request may also be the person who set the retention policy.

How Digby describes its own limits AI for Canadian public bodies — the national page

Halifax’s public-sector reality

Halifax holds the provincial government, the municipality and the region’s universities and health bodies, operating under the province’s access and privacy framework.

Small teams with wide mandates are the norm — the person answering an access request may also be the person writing the information-management policy.

What Digby does — and what we do not claim

Digby does not decide access requests, does not apply severances, and does not replace the records schedule. It helps staff find and read; the statutory decision stays with the public body and its delegated officer.

01
Policy and bylaw Q&A
staff ask in plain language and get the section that answers it, from the current text rather than a memory of it.
02
Access-request support
find the records that respond to a request, and summarise them, with a person deciding what is released and what is severed.
03
Briefing preparation
turn a bundle of reports into a short briefing note with the sources attached.
04
Plain-language service
rewrite a form or a notice so a resident can understand it, in English or in French.

Where the data lives, and where the models run

Stored data — accounts, conversations, memory and files — sits in Canada, in AWS Canada Central (Montréal). The models that write answers run on NVIDIA GPU hardware located in Canada and operated from Canada. That second part is the one most vendors gloss: storage residency is not the same claim as inference residency, and for a Halifax public body the difference is exactly the one a privacy review will ask about.

If the requirement is that nothing leaves infrastructure you control, Digby can be self-hosted with Docker Compose against any OpenAI-compatible model server. That is a different trade — you run it — and it is documented rather than implied.

Where Digby’s inference and storage actually are Run Digby on your own servers What private AI means at Digby

A sensible first month for a Halifax public body

01
Published documents first
start with material that is already public, so nobody debates whether it was allowed.
02
One team, one question set
prove it on the five questions a front counter actually gets asked.
03
Bring records management in early
the people who own the schedule should shape what goes into a project.

Other Canadian cities

Halifax firms and organisations often work across provincial lines, and the statute changes at the border. The same public sector material, set up for the next province over:

Public Sector · Victoria Public Sector · Vancouver Public Sector · Calgary AI for every Canadian industry

Frequently asked questions

How does FIPPA apply to a Nova Scotia municipality using AI?

FIPPA sets the access right and the protection duty together. A tool that helps staff find records is useful, but it does not move the statutory decision, and personal information should stay within the body’s control.

Does Digby offer any certification Nova Scotia procurement can rely on?

No. No PIPEDA, SOC 2 or ISO certification is held. The defensible ground is architecture — Canadian storage, Canadian inference, and a self-hosted option for infrastructure the body controls.

What does Digby cost for a Halifax public body?

Free to start, billed in Canadian dollars: the entry point is CAD $0 and no account is needed to begin. For larger engagements — more seats, more volume or a dedicated deployment — pricing is set with you rather than listed here, so contact us and a person replies with a written number. Heavier features such as deep research have daily limits.