Private AI for public bodies in Victoria

Public bodies in British Columbia operate under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which sets out both what the public may ask for and what the body must protect. Personal information must be collected for a stated purpose and stored in accordance with the Act’s rules on where it may be kept.

That is why a public body asks about storage location before it asks about model quality: the answer has to survive an access request, a privacy review and a change of government.

As the provincial capital, Victoria holds the ministries, Crown agencies and boards that write and apply British Columbia’s access and privacy law — the same law that governs what they may do with the documents in front of them.

Public bodies here are not shopping for the most impressive model. They are shopping for an answer they can defend in a records-management review and put in front of an access request without a scramble.

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 Victoria public body the difference is exactly the one a privacy review will ask about.

Digby is built here: the tuning and evaluation lab where the open models are adapted and tested runs in Victoria, British Columbia. That does not make Victoria queries faster than Toronto ones — inference serves every Canadian customer from the same Canadian-located GPU hardware — but it does mean the people who tune the models are a short drive from the firms and clinics using them.

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.

1. 01

   Published documents first

   start with material that is already public, so nobody debates whether it was allowed.

2. 02

   One team, one question set

   prove it on the five questions a front counter actually gets asked.

3. 03

   Bring records management in early

   the people who own the schedule should shape what goes into a project.

Victoria 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: