Governance is the Foundation of Digital Sovereignty

Sometimes when you listen to Canadian policymakers talk, you’d think that the physical location of a data centre matters more than what’s happening with the servers inside a data centre.

You probably don’t know anything about the cables, servers and systems that fed these words through the internet to ultimately be displayed on your screen.

All you know is that you open your inbox and get emails (too many!) You scroll through feeds on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and Meta-owned Instagram. You click on a link that a friend dropped in the group chat. Nearly half of Canadian adult internet users spend five or more hours online every day.

An overwhelming portion of our lives now happens through screens — checking the feeds on your phone in the morning, more screens at work, and then Netflix (or Reels, or YouTube, or TikTok, or Fortnite) in the evening.

Throughout all of this, do you know or care where the data centre is? How much does data residency affect your experience whether the content is being transmitted from Mississauga or from Michigan?

If the data is being transmitted from across the border, maybe some government could be spying on your activity. But how much does that really matter, when we all know that Google and Meta and Amazon and everyone else are monitoring all our activity anyway?

But when you listen to our leaders talk about digital sovereignty, they’re rarely talking about any of these downstream issues. Usually digital sovereignty amounts to making sure that data centres and AI compute capacity is physically located on Canadian soil.

For months, the Canadian Shield Institute team has been studying digital sovereignty, and the bottom line is: We have a governance problem, more than we have an infrastructure problem.

Canada doesn’t have a serious data governance system.Canada doesn’t have a serious governance system for owning and commercializing the intellectual property that we generate.

Canada doesn’t have a national strategy for shaping and adopting technical standards that define the landscape of technology systems — often stacking the deck in favour of foreign giants.

Starting this week, we are rolling out Foundations of Digital Sovereignty. This eight-part series will take a comprehensive look at how Canada can meaningfully shore up our digital sovereignty.

Right now, we are being pressured to throw money at sovereign compute capacity. In many cases, the people who are making the case for public spending on “sovereign” infrastructure are on the payroll of the foreign hyperscalers who are most likely to profit from a rush to build with no clear plan.

In the weeks ahead, Foundations of Digital Sovereignty will present a clear plan for overarching governance that meaningfully engages with the key elements of the digital realm.

Once we get the governance right, then we can get back to a serious conversation about what kind of physical infrastructure we need.