Canadian sovereignty is an American trade irritant

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer sat down with CBC’s Rosemary Barton on Wednesday for a long conversation about the state of Canada-U.S. trade. It’s worth a listen.

When Barton raised the discoverability of Canadian content on streaming platforms and French-language requirements, Greer downplayed the cultural side and pointed to the money instead: the Americans, he said, are focused on the tax element. “We understand why you’d want to have discoverability for francophone material.”

It’s a generous framing — and a much softer one than what his own office put in writing five months ago.

On March 31, 2026, the Office of the United States Trade Representative submitted the 2026 National Trade Estimate to President Trump and Congress. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It’s 534 pages of “Foreign Trade Barriers.” Basically, stuff the U.S. does not like. And there’s an entire Canada section (it starts on page 60).

The usual suspects, like supply management and alcohol, are there loud and clear. The Americans also flagged that they don’t dig our “zero plastic waste agenda.” Deal with it.

They also raised opposition to the Buy Canadian Policy that was published in December, outlining concerns regarding new obligations when competing for contracts. (Ahem. They have two.)

But then things get gnarly, because the United States increasingly treats other countries’ attempts to exercise jurisdiction over the digital economy as an impediment to U.S. commerce. And because American firms dominate so much of the digital stack, ordinary Canadian policymaking — like taxing platforms, regulating streaming, supporting domestic culture, and protecting government data — gets creatively reframed as ‘discrimination’ against American companies.

We note that they ALSO flagged that Shared Services Canada published a Request for Information for government purchase of cloud services, which would require that all data be processed, transmitted, and stored exclusively in Canada. The sovereign cloud proposal would require that all data be “under the control of cloud service providers, up to and including their ultimate parent corporations, that are not subject to foreign laws that permit foreign governments to obtain access to Canada’s data without Canada’s prior written consent.”

Other longstanding Canadian policy frameworks are recast as “services barriers.” Here, the Online Streaming Act, the discoverability of French-language cultural content, digital services taxation and the Online News Act are all flagged.

These initiatives represent our ability to govern our digital economy according to our values.

None of this was a secret!

The sovereign-cloud example is particularly jarring. Canada isn’t proposing to ban U.S. cloud companies; it’s just working to keep government data beyond the unilateral reach of U.S. laws.

And granted, some Canadian measures genuinely are preferences for Canadian suppliers and can be fairly debated as protectionism. But some of their other beefs are more about who gets to set the rules inside Canada.

The same logic is now creeping into labour policy. Keith Sonderling, currently Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor (no U) and Trump’s nominee for the permanent job, has argued that international rules governing platform work threaten American gig-economy companies. Questions such as worker classification, algorithmic management and pay transparency are normally understood as labour (with a U) regulation. But when the largest digital platforms are American, another country regulating them can quickly become an American “trade concern.”

That is the asymmetry of digital dependence: the more indispensable another country’s firms become to your economy, the harder it becomes to regulate them without creating an international economic “dispute” (or war).

And of course, this is bigger than just Canada. In July, the USTR attacked the EU’s enforcement against Google as targeting “the most competitive U.S. companies.” And this summer it actually imposed tariffs on Brazil after finding, among other things, that Brazilian digital-trade and electronic-payment policies “burdened” U.S. commerce. So the U.S. is also retaliating against any countries that attempt to introduce regulations that enforce sovereignty when it comes to the digital realm.

This is more than a quirky little bilateral dispute, Canada is part of a broader U.S. posture towards foreign digital regulation.

It’s amazing that the Americans foreshadow these complaints every year. It’s almost like the definition of trade is changing from whether American goods can enter our market to how freely American tech firms can operate once they are already inside it.

Very little of this is new. More than ten years ago, Washington was already calling Canada’s decision to locate government email data in Canada a trade barrier, and 2017 was the first year that the National Trade Estimates created a “Digital Trade Barriers” section.

So let’s not act surprised.

This is why it’s essential for us to ensure we have the ability to regulate foreign activities in the digital space in Canada. We demand this governance role in other industries, but we are content to let it slide when it comes to arguably the most important industry for the future. We’ve been offered continued economic integration on the condition that we exercise less jurisdiction over the economy happening inside our borders.

Sovereignty is the right to make rules that reflect the values of our country. While another country (or more likely the powerful companies in that country) may not like them, this is the fundamental basis of sovereignty. Canada is controlling its own destiny.

Part of the problem may be that we still don’t intuitively appreciate the scale of the digital economy in the same way we understand traditional sectors like cars, steel or aluminum.

Yet we talk endlessly about sovereignty in autos, steel, aluminum, energy and agriculture while treating digital dependence as something almost weightless, or invisible.

It isn’t. It’s annoying the Americans that we want to hold their firms accountable and build our own sovereign cloud. We should pay just as much attention to the new economy in this trade war as we do to cars.

Towards the end of the CBC interview, Barton raised an issue that Prime Minister Carney brought up:

“….that is that Canada says the United States wanted a say in new trade deals that it would be pursuing — particularly that you wanted to review and, even in certain instances, dictate terms for future deals, which the Prime Minister viewed as sort of [an] attack on Canada’s sovereignty.”

Greer protested that the Americans didn’t have language about what Canada “shall” do, but that they think we should do more to protect the North American market. Our market is not an extension of theirs.

Canada has every right to make the rules for how markets operate in Canada — including digital markets.

That’s sovereignty.