To the families of Tumbler Ridge.
I’m a father in Thornhill, three thousand kilometres from your town. Sam Altman’s apology last Friday brought your grief back into the open. He wrote that he can’t imagine losing a child. Every parent has to. I’m sorry. Whatever else gets said this week, your grief comes first.
According to Mr Altman’s own letter, OpenAI banned an account in June. They did not call the police. A shooting followed. Six children and two adults are dead. Two more children were shot and survived. One came home. One is still in hospital, slowly improving, not yet able to talk, walk, or use her right side. A company’s call about a flagged account and the lives of eight children should never end up on the same page. They did. They will, until we change the rules.
Mr Altman has now apologized, and I don’t think he is faking it. But you should know who is apologizing. He has spent ten years warning that AI could destroy humanity, and ten years building it faster than anyone else. He has not shown that he puts society first.
Take the apology. Don’t mistake it for a plan. Don’t let it become the headline that closes the file.
The real failure here is not at OpenAI. It is in our Parliament. Months have passed. Nothing has been done. Tens of thousands of Canadian jobs are about to disappear to AI, with millions more behind them before this Parliament’s term ends. Families’ ability to earn a living is being cut down in real time, with no plan to retrain workers and no law to hold AI companies responsible. Meanwhile, the headlines are about fuel tax.
The Stanford AI Index 2026 counts AI laws in the world’s biggest economies. The United States has 25. South Korea has 17. France and Japan have 10 each. Canada has one, and it died in a previous Parliament. Canada gave the world Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three living godfathers of modern AI. They have sounded the alarm for ten years. Our answer in law has been one dead bill.
Tumbler Ridge is the snowflake on top of an iceberg. Twenty years ago, no one knew that apps for sharing photos with college friends would, within a decade, be linked to a 145 percent rise in teen-girl depression, the worst political division in our lifetime, and a measurable drop in our ability to read or think for ourselves. That technology is the most basic AI we have ever built. The next kind is a thousand times more powerful.
On Friday, I sent draft federal laws, written for the Tumbler Ridge families, to every MP and Senator in Canada. The bill asks for three things. First, real liability when AI causes harm, the way cars, drugs, and airplanes carry it. Second, a National AI Transition Body, accountable to Parliament. Third, a global summit on AI safety, called and hosted by Canada, modelled on the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the 1997 Ottawa Treaty on landmines. Canada hosted both. The world signed both. As of this evening, one MP’s staffer has written back.
Prime Minister Carney has the power to call the summit and the standing to lead it. Parliament should stand behind him. This is a safety question, not a party question. It is whether, the next time an AI company sees a flagged account, the call goes to the RCMP instead of an apology to a town.
We cannot convene a global summit on AI if our own political discourse is run by a recommendation engine. Politicians pass laws to keep children off these feeds, then use those same algorithms to shape our opinions, pushing emotion and virality over clear thinking and truth. They are using the very tool that wedges us apart, when this country needs to come together most.
I am writing for the six children who did not come home, for the one who came home through what no child should ever survive, and for the one still fighting to come home. I am writing for the two adults who fell with them. Their names belong to you, not to a webpage.
If this letter has earned your trust, you have the power to spare another family. A name on the petition at operationimaginal.org. A line to your MP. So that the next time an AI platform sees what OpenAI saw in June, a phone call is made before another family lives through what you are living through.
I am sorry. May your children be remembered, and may we earn the right to speak their names when we name what we are working to prevent.
Joshua Han, CFA, is a father in Thornhill, Ontario, and the founder of Operation Imaginal (operationimaginal.org).
