PauseAI Canada

PauseAI Canada is the Canadian national chapter of PauseAI, the international AI-safety movement calling for a coordinated, treaty-backed pause on the training of the most powerful general-purpose AI systems. The chapter operates a bilingual English / French national site at pauseai.ca routing supporters to its two documented local communities — Montréal and Toronto — and to its flagship "Warning Shot Protocol" emergency-mobilisation campaign focused on Canadian federal MPs. PauseAI Canada is the corpus's first Canadian local group of any kind and the corpus's first Canadian-anchored entity of any type, sitting alongside the in-corpus PauseAI San Francisco Bay Area, PauseAI NYC, PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands, Pause IA (PauseAI France), PauseAI London, and PauseAI Germany / PauseAI Deutschland chapters in the corpus's PauseAI cluster.

Leadership and structure

PauseAI Canada is a volunteer-run national chapter named within PauseAI Global's federation of national chapters, which lists Jeremy Eliosoff as the chapter's national leader alongside the federation's other national-chapter leads (the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Sweden, Czechia, Romania, Nigeria, Kenya, and Serbia). Within the federation PauseAI Canada sits among the chapters distinct from the federation's three paid-staff chapters — PauseAI US led by Holly Elmore, PauseAI UK led by Joseph Miller, and Pause IA led by Clémence Peyrot following Maxime Fournes's elevation to PauseAI Global CEO in late 2025 — and shares the volunteer-anchor pattern with the in-corpus PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands, PauseAI Germany, and the federation's other smaller national chapters.

The chapter's documented operational coordinator on its own public site is Nicolas M. Lacombe (Nik), who maintains the pauseai.ca website under the nikthink GitHub handle and is named as the Montréal community contact at nicolas.m.lacombe@gmail.com. The chapter's online infrastructure is comparatively recent — the pauseai.ca source repository shows its earliest commit on 28 October 2025 with continuing development through April 2026, after which the chapter's federation-listed national-leader presence and earliest documented public action (the May 2024 Ottawa protest) had been on the record for over a year.

The chapter in the global federation

PauseAI Canada is the corpus's third North American PauseAI chapter alongside the in-corpus PauseAI Bay Area and PauseAI NYC, and the corpus's first PauseAI chapter anchored in a country with a national leader in the federation but no documented frontier-AI-lab cluster on its own territory. The chapter shares with the volunteer-run continental-European chapters (PauseAI Utrecht / Netherlands and PauseAI Germany) the structural pattern of operating without paid staff and without a single national capital anchor, distinct from the paid-staff Anglophone (PauseAI US, PauseAI UK) and Romance-language (Pause IA) chapters with their respective frontier-lab city anchors in the Bay Area, King's Cross, and Paris.

Public actions and campaign work

PauseAI Canada's documented public-output record runs along three threads — single-action international-protest contributions in two Canadian cities, two named local-community organising bases in Montréal and Toronto, and the chapter's first emergency-mobilisation campaign aimed at Canadian federal Members of Parliament.

• 13 May 2024 — Ottawa, AI Seoul Summit international protest wave. PauseAI Canada was the Canadian anchor of PauseAI Global's first twelve-country international protest wave ahead of the AI Seoul Summit, with Ottawa as the named Canadian participating city and Partiful sign-ups for the action. This was the chapter's earliest sustained public action on the federation's record and the basis for assigning a 2024 founding date in this entry, ahead of the chapter's later online infrastructure (the pauseai.ca website source repository's earliest commit lands a year and a half later in October 2025) and complementary to its parallel local-community organising in Montréal and Toronto.
• 7-11 February 2025 — Victoria, Paris AI Action Summit international protest wave. The chapter joined PauseAI Global's twenty-city protest wave around the Paris AI Action Summit co-chaired by President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with Victoria, British Columbia as the named Canadian participating city and Canada among the named summit-attending governments. This was the chapter's first west-coast public-action contribution on the federation's record, with the named Canadian city moving from Ottawa in 2024 to Victoria in 2025 — a pattern the chapter shares with Pause IA's transition between its 2024 Paris-anchored and 2025 multi-city actions and the Anglophone chapters' rotation through Bay Area, NYC, and other coastal hubs across the federation's protest cycle.
• Montréal local community. The chapter's Montréal community page names Nicolas M. Lacombe as the local community contact, runs a Riseup mailing list (pauseai-mtl-subscribe@lists.riseup.net), a Luma calendar at luma.com/pauseaimtl, and a Discord server, and frames its named campaign tactics as meetup-based recruitment, AI-regulation discussion forums, poster campaigns throughout the city, and politician outreach. The Montréal community is the corpus's first French-speaking-anchor PauseAI local-community presence in North America and the corpus's first PauseAI bilingual public-channel mix on the Continent's two non-Romance-language official-bilingual federations (Canada and the in-corpus Belgium-bordering Netherlands chapter, where Dutch / English bilingualism operates differently as a federation-level reach into the Anglophone PauseAI public).
• Toronto local community. The chapter's home page names Toronto as a second active local community and routes supporters to a Toronto-specific Luma calendar, with the Toronto community sharing the chapter's national infrastructure (the pauseai.ca website, the Warning Shot Protocol campaign, the federation's protest cycle) but maintaining its own local event-discovery channel separate from the Montréal community's Riseup mailing list.
• Warning Shot Protocol — first emergency mobilisation. The chapter's flagship campaign artefact on its own public site is the Warning Shot Protocol, described as "PauseAI Canada's first emergency mobilisation" and routing supporters to email their federal Members of Parliament via postal-code lookup, sign petitions, share AI-risk information on social media, and contact local politicians. The supporting code for the email-campaign feature landed on the chapter's GitHub repository on 11 April 2026 as the named "Add Warning Shot email campaign feature" commit, marking the chapter's first mobilisation built around a custom-developed civic-engagement tool rather than the federation's general protest-and-petition infrastructure.

Beyond these named public actions PauseAI Canada contributes to the federation's continuing international protest cadence — including the in-corpus camp-pauseai-international-protests-2023-ongoing — and to PauseAI Global's continuing chapter-coordinated public-communications work.

Place in the movement

PauseAI Canada is the corpus's first Canadian local group of any kind and the corpus's first Canadian-anchored entity of any type — closing a substantial geographic gap, given Canada's deep frontier-AI organisational presence (the Toronto Vector Institute, the Mila Quebec AI Institute in Montréal) and its documented presence on the federation's protest cycle since May 2024. Its distinctive contribution to the corpus's PauseAI shape is fourfold. First, the chapter's named-leader status (Jeremy Eliosoff) on the federation's About page combined with a separately named operational coordinator (Nicolas M. Lacombe) in the chapter's own Montréal community gives the corpus its first PauseAI chapter where the federation-listed national leader and the chapter's own primary public-facing operational coordinator are documented as different people, structurally distinct from the chapters where the same person carries both roles. Second, the chapter's two-city local-community structure (Montréal, Toronto) running alongside two single-action public-protest contributions from two further Canadian cities (Ottawa in May 2024, Victoria in February 2025) gives the corpus its first PauseAI chapter operating across four documented Canadian cities spanning Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia rather than concentrating in a single national-capital or frontier-lab anchor. Third, the chapter's bilingual English / French national site at pauseai.ca and its French-anchored Montréal community give the corpus its first North American Francophone PauseAI presence — distinct from the in-corpus Pause IA (PauseAI France) chapter's France-anchored Francophone presence and complementary to it within the federation's wider Francophone public reach. Fourth, the chapter's "Warning Shot Protocol" emergency-mobilisation campaign — built around a custom-developed federal-MP postal-code-lookup email-campaign tool that landed on the chapter's GitHub repository on 11 April 2026 — gives the corpus its first PauseAI chapter to develop and deploy its own bespoke civic-engagement software tool for parliamentary outreach rather than relying on the federation's general protest-and-petition infrastructure.