What Canada Can Learn From Europe on Digital Sovereignty

You can tell a lot about the ways that Canada and the European Union are approaching digital sovereignty, based on the official definitions that each government has published.

For Europe, digital sovereignty is “the ability of individuals, businesses and institutions in Europe to act independently in the digital world, allowing for autonomous decisions about the use, governance, and development of digital systems without undue reliance on external actors.”

By contrast, Canada’s definition of digital sovereignty explicitly concedes that full autonomy is simply impossible in an interconnected world. Instead, digital sovereignty is, “the capacity to operate effectively and make independent decisions about digital assets, regardless of where technologies are developed, hosted, or supported.”

We’ve written about the European Union’s leadership on digital policy before. As European and Canadian leaders gather to announce plans to work in close collaboration across a range of policy areas, it’s worth contrasting the EU’s ambition on digital sovereignty.

For example, several EU countries have introduced unilateral digital services taxes (DSTs) on the gross revenues of large digital multinationals, mostly from online advertising, digital intermediation and platform services, and the sale or transmission of user data. France, Italy and Spain have 3% levies, and Austria imposed a 5% tax on digital advertising revenue.

By comparison, Canada scrapped our digital services tax as a sweetener for trade negotiations with the U.S., and even after those talks collapsed, there’s no indication that we’re rushing to reinstate the DST.

We see another notable compare-and-contrast in the realm of satellite communication systems. 

Earlier this month, policy leaders in Europe were alarmed when the Ukrainian Military’s access to SpaceX’s Starshield system was restricted, creating a significant strategic loss with lasting effects. Back in 2025, a similar issue arose when the Starlink satellite service was temporarily shutdown over Ukraine, also affecting military operations.

We see the European Union coming together to address these concerns, with plans to use government policy and radio spectrum allocations to build up local alternative satellite communications systems.  

Meanwhile, Canada’s own homegrown low-Earth-orbit satellite communications company, Telesat, is struggling financially. If the chips are down, are we confident that the federal government will step in and say that Telesat is critical national security infrastructure, to reduce our reliance on SpaceX? We need to be thinking about what the risks of using non-Canadian essential digital and communications infrastructure could mean. 

Digital sovereignty is also national security. When we rely on digital systems in war, in daily communications, in commerce, or in maintaining infrastructure, those systems become strategically essential nodes in our digital ecosystem. If we cannot always expect those systems to be reliable, and if they can be restricted without notice, that fundamentally undermines our national security and strategic capacity.

Reducing dependency and avoiding monopoly create a more secure system, but it also allows for fairer and more competitive markets with more options for citizens to choose from. Fundamentally, this is about control over the physical and digital aspects of the information ecosystem, not what the information says, but who controls what can be said by whom and when.

As Canada and Europe circle around the idea of deeper integration, we need to recognize that our European friends have much loftier ambitions for digital sovereignty, and they are doing the work to make it happen.

The best result is that Canada linking up with European efforts will allow us to take a big step forward on our own digital sovereignty.