Foundations of Digital Sovereignty
Canada has spent decades ceding control of the digital economy to foreign private actors. Without a comprehensive governance framework, billions in new public spending on “sovereign” AI infrastructure will fail to deliver real sovereignty — and the window to act is now. Compute spending without governance is money wasted. Canada must build the policy and institutional foundations first.
Over eight weeks, the Canadian Shield Institute is publishing serialized chapters of this project.
Read the first six chapters here, and get the next policy drop straight to your inbox:
Governance is the Foundation of Digital Sovereignty
Canada has spent decades ceding control of the digital economy to foreign private actors. Without a comprehensive governance framework, billions in new public spending on “sovereign” AI infrastructure will fail to deliver real sovereignty — and the window to act is now.
Compute spending without governance is money wasted. Canada must build the policy and institutional foundations first.
The Weaponization of Governance
The postwar international rules-based order was built on a comforting fiction: that governance frameworks are neutral. They are not.
Standards bodies, trade agreements, and international legal systems are active battlegrounds where savvy nations carve out competitive advantage — and Canada has largely been asleep at the wheel.
Invisible Assets: Canada's IP Blind Spot
Intangible assets now make up more than 90% of the value of the S&P 500 — yet Canada treats intellectual property as an afterthought. This is not just an economic problem, it is a sovereignty problem.
Control of IP is how foreign multinationals fortify their market dominance and entrench digital platforms in everyday life.
Exploited and Underutilized: Canada's Broken Data Economy
Canada’s data governance regime is built on legislation that predates smartphones, socialmedia, and generative AI.
The result is a broken dynamic: Canadians feel surveilled and exploited by data-driven firms, while vast troves of high-value institutional data sit unorganized and untapped.
Clouds Without Borders: Data Residency is Not Data Sovereignty
For decades, Canadian policymakers have operated on the assumption that data residency is enough to guarantee Canada’s digital sovereignty. That assumption is wrong.
The fixation on data residency and “sovereign” compute capacity fails to engage with the most important dimensions of the digital economy.
Procuring Sovereignty in the Cloud
Canada doesn’t need to build sovereign cloud capacity overnight, but we need a strategy for greater sovereign control and governance over cloud infrastructure. This chapter argues that government procurement is one of the most powerful tools Canada has for advancing digital sovereignty, and proposes a four-tier framework for categorizing government cloud use cases by the level of sovereign control required.
Back to Basics: Using Existing Powers to Assert Digital Sovereignty
Digital sovereignty is not just a question of building Canadian alternatives to the dominant, foreign firms that currently mediate much of our digital economy. Many existing policy tools that were developed for shaping the economy for shared prosperity and public good are still relevant today. Digital platforms and hyperscaler multinationals may be extremely large businesses, but they are still businesses.
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