Canada

As Canada finds its sovereignty repeatedly threatened by the United States, it’s Donald Trump who plays the villain. The president seizes the spotlight by openly proclaiming the United States must dominate its geographic “sphere” that includes all of North America.

But it is Big Tech that truly rules the world and poses its own threat to Canadian sovereignty. And nothing the Mark Carney government has proposed to date is likely to blunt its efforts.

Yes, Carney has named the battlefront by declaring that Canada must have its own, sovereign, Canadian data infrastructure. What could that mean? That Canada has control over the chips, algorithms, data centres, models and data that comprise cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

There’s good reason for Canadian data infrastructure to be a priority. We don’t want a menacing United States snooping on our private information, and we don’t want our digital systems to be vulnerable to being scrambled or unplugged by a tantrum-throwing president.

Unfortunately, there are also good reasons that establishing data sovereignty has not yet become an actual project to be supported by the Carney government’s Major Projects Office. Many obstacles stand in the way.

Most major tech companies in Canada are U.S. owned and controlled and subject to U.S. laws. Sixty per cent of cloud capacity is owned by three hyperscalers (large-scale cloud service providers that operate massive data centres to offer vast computing power, storage and networking capabilities to large customers): Amazon Web Services or AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. A third of Canada’s nearly 300 data centres are U.S. owned.