The Foreign Interference That Canada Isn't Tracking
For the past couple of years, the federal government has been quietly working on an important Canadian sovereignty issue — protecting us from foreign interference.
The Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act was passed in 2024, and then Cabinet drafted some proposed regulations, and published the regulations for public consultation in January 2026.
A lot of the ideas that Ottawa is considering are common sense — a better transparency framework and the creation of an independent commissioner to monitor state-sponsored foreign interference.
But there’s one big blind spot in the government’s proposed approach. Canada is not looking at the corporate foreign influence that is increasingly a feature of geopolitics.
(Back in January, Shield submitted a policy brief to the government making this point.)
Ottawa is clearly thinking about foreign governments and their agents acting to influence Canadian policy and undermine our sovereignty.
But foreign companies, billionaires, and NGOs can exert political influence without disclosure if they’re not directly acting on behalf of a foreign government. This gap matters as corporate and national interests increasingly intersect — as we are seeing with the Trump administration and firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta.
Earlier this month, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer complained that Canada’s sovereign cloud policies are a potential trade irritant. This is in line with the U.S. National Security Strategy published last year, where the government explicitly said that its aim is to use a geopolitically dominant position to secure sole-source contracts for American companies.
Is this foreign interference? What about when big technology companies have also sought to influence our policy discourse in deceptive ways?
In 2023 the University of Toronto Law Faculty came under fire for accepting US$450,000 from Amazon to fund research focused on competition and antitrust issues. When UofT was organizing events related to this research, Amazon provided a list of preferred speakers to select from. The Amazon money was not disclosed to faculty members or visiting participants in the program leading to concern about how such gifts might impact academic freedoms.
Academic freedom is not entrenched in Canadian law, but an independent higher education ecosystem is essential to our democracy. Maintaining a healthy academic culture is a more difficult prospect as institutions feel pressure to take donations from big corporations as funding dwindles.
Our current policy frameworks don’t capture this kind of corporate influence. The Lobbying Act doesn’t distinguish foreign from domestic lobbying. The Canada Elections Act only covers election periods. The Investment Canada Act only reviews acquisitions. CSIS must identify a clear security threat to act. There is clearly a no-man’s-land where foreign money is influencing Canadian politics, but nobody is mandated to act. And in fact, the foreign players aren’t even required to disclose their involvement.
So, what’s the solution here?
The issue isn’t clear-cut, and as we’ve illustrated in the past, it’s actually rather complicated to even come up with a firm definition of what a “Canadian” company is, versus a foreign one.
There are some targeted regulatory amendments as part of the foreign influence regulation that would help:
- Require specific disclosure of advocacy work from companies above a defined market-cap threshold;
- Mandate disclosure when lobbying positions closely track a foreign government’s stated policy priorities;
- Prioritize strategic sectors where the sovereignty stakes are highest.
The point is transparency—not prohibition, protectionism, or a blanket suspicion of foreign engagement.
More than anything, though, we think this issue highlights the enormous complexity of creating more resilient and sovereign systems for Canadian democracy.
Ever since Prime Minister Mark Carney visited the European Parliament in September, we’ve been thinking about what a deeper alliance across the Atlantic Ocean could mean. As we hit send on this email, Carney is meeting with António Costa, President of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in Montreal. At the end of it all, we’re expecting an announcement of … something. There have been a lot of anonymous tips in news reporting, but at the Canadian Shield Institute, we prefer to read the formal communiqué rather than trying to interpret whispers. In the run-up to the summit, we’ve been doing a bit of research, and we published a few articles to set the stage. EU Media Marketplace The Europeans are trying to break the AdTech duopoly. Canadian companies have tried to work together to create an alternative to Google and Meta’s dominance. So far, Canada’s efforts have fallen flat. Will this new EU enterprise fare any better? Read our analysis here. We find this whole situation very interesting for two reasons: First, Canada and Europe have a lot of the same problems right now. We’re all trying to figure out how to reduce vulnerability from the United States, and that vulnerability extends to digital reliance on private-sector technology platforms. It seems like we could benefit by joining forces, but it’s going to take some work figuring out exactly what that looks like in practice. Second, AdTech is just really interesting! Programmatic targeted advertising is the economic engine of the internet, and in turn this kind of advertising is hugely influential on culture and society. AdTech dictates what kinds of businesses thrive and what kinds of content gets posted online. Once you start researching it, AdTech quickly starts to look like one of the most important dimensions of digital sovereignty. If the online economy is entirely dominated by systems controlled by a handful of big American technology companies, realistically both Canada and the EU will always be on the back foot on digital governance. Digital Services Trade Speaking of being on the back foot, did you know that U.S. digital services exports to Canada are worth more than all the autos, steel, aluminum, lumber, potash and electricity put together? Why aren’t we talking about digital trade policy more in the negotiations with the United States? Read our analysis here. And the European Union is in a similar position. The EU has done a lot more to assert digital governance, but their trade deficit on digital services just keeps going up. This is a kind of reliance that creates a meaningful vulnerability if the United States keeps playing hardball. Read our analysis about EU digital trade here. Digital services might be a promising area for Canada and the European Union to work together. When the final communiqué is delivered from the Canada-EU summit, we will be combing through it for specific mentions of digital trade collaboration. Digital Sovereignty Policy Despite the EU’s digital dependence, we see a lot to admire in how the Europeans have been trying to assert their digital sovereignty. To be blunt: They’re trying things! Canada has often been slow to pass meaningful digital regulation, and quick to walk back policies that offend the Americans. The EU has enacted some really interesting regulations. Could Canada use “digital trade alignment” as cover to follow the EU’s lead? Read our analysis here. The Bottom Line Overall, when it comes to digital governance, we have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Digital policy is complicated and opaque, and it’s not enough to just pass a good law. Ongoing enforcement is a real challenge too. But this is one of the most pressing policy issues of our time, and with the accelerating deployment of AI systems, this issue is only going to become more urgent. It’s not as easy as striking a deal to sell soybeans, but digital governance is an area where Canada and the EU are natural partners, and it’s something we should be working on.
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