In Davos on January 20th, Prime Minister Carney told the world we are experiencing a generational “rupture”; that the old world of relatively benign values-based alliances is falling apart.1,2 Canada’s Internet is extraordinarily poorly positioned for this new world.
While we’re an economic middle power, we’re a digital nobody – lacking the networks, companies and policies to run a modern digital economy without heavy dependence on foreign support. Unless we change course now, that lack of capacity will define the future of our economy and our democracy. Let’s talk through the angles our problem:
1. Network Sovereignty: a Secure and Resilient Canadian Internet
Canadians should be able to keep our most sensitive data on secure, resilient networks governed by Canadian law, protected from foreign surveillance.
Under the current CUSMA trade agreement framework, Article 19.12 largely prohibits Canada from requiring that sensitive data be stored domestically.3 That’s a bad status quo for our sovereignty, and it’s getting much worse: since changes in 2024 to the US CLOUD Act, The U.S. government can demand access to data owned by their domestic firms, even if those servers are physically located in Canada.4
Doing all the things we want and need to do on the Internet on Canadian servers would not be reasonable or practical; but we don’t need to go nearly that far to be digitally sovereign. Over the years to come, investment in both private and public domestic cloud capacity, reducing automated routing of Canadian Internet traffic through the U.S., and diversifying our apps and services to products from like-minded democracies with strong privacy laws can put us on firmer, safer digital ground.5
2. Algorithmic Sovereignty: Opening the Black Box
Canadians should be able to see and change the algorithms that shape our online lives, adjusting them to suit our needs and respect our values.
Algorithms are no longer just recommendation engines for finding interesting online content. By determining the news, jobs, partners and more we find every day, they are becoming primary architects of our social reality. Without the right to audit and adjust these systems, Canadians are subject to "black box" governance that frequently prioritizes profit over public safety, factual accuracy, or our personal wellbeing.
Algorithmic sovereignty means granting Canadians broad power to opt-out of these manipulative designs, and forcing algorithm makers to to be transparent with their users and academic researchers about how their systems work.6,7,8
3. Market Sovereignty: Leaving the Periphery of Digital Markets
Canadians should be able to build and use a wide range of digital services that aren’t bought, blocked, or crushed by the anti-competitive practices of tech monopolies.
The Canadian tech ecosystem is currently a "vassal state" to a handful of global technology company gatekeepers. We provide our data, ideas, and workers to support their system, but receive little if any of the vast profits they collect from monopolizing those inputs. This handful of firms has so much market power they can easily buy, block, or crush any Canadian competitor before they reach anything like comparable scale.
To give Canadian upstarts a fair shot, we need aggressive pro-competition enforcement on domestic buyouts and mergers, strong consumer rights to take our data and contacts with us when we switch services, and close coordination with EU allies on standing up to Big Tech giants.9,10
4. Information Sovereignty: Protecting our Truths
Canadians should be able to easily find and share factual information and journalism online from a wide range of sources we trust.
The collapse of traditional news revenue has left a void that’s rapidly filling with low-quality, AI-generated content, scams, and outright disinformation. Canadians hold many truths; but we need tools to find factual content, identify who produced it, and distinguish it from AI slop.
To date, our government has introduced limited time subsidy programs for some journalism outlets in the belief the system will eventually work itself out. But as evidence mounts that journalism will not become self-sustaining in the age of AI, our government must be more agile in exploring long-term solutions. This could mean working with AI companies and information producers to ensure a sustainable compensation system for AI use of information sources; expanding tax credits and/or vouchers for Canadians who subscribe to news sources directly; and mandating labelling of AI-generated and manipulated content.11,12
5. Personal Sovereignty: Safeguarding our Digital Selves
Every Canadian should have control of our individual digital identity, including protection from unauthorized use of our data or likeness.
Letting data brokers build the modern Internet off of spying on us was a terrible mistake. In the age of generative AI, our "likeness"—our voices, faces, and other biometric data—is becoming the next digital commodity. Without explicit rights to control our digital identity, Canadians will be even more vulnerable to data harvesting, misusing our identity from everything from identity theft, to harassment and abuse, to political manipulation and attacks on our democracy.13,14