Canada’s been anything but absent from the tech-sovereignty fight. In just three years, Ottawa has pushed through the Online Streaming Act (C-11), the Online News Act (C-18), modernized the Competition Act, a draft Online Harms Act, and a problematic privacy bill that died on the Order Paper. Each were attempts to curb Big Tech’s reach where traditional competition law never really caught up - sometimes they felt like remedies for cases the Tribunal never heard. Anyways, each of these legislative proposals were deeply contested and heavily lobbied. And those laws were true battles: messy, imperfect, but undeniably fought. Our problem isn’t that Canada won’t swing in these fights or that we’re too quick to politely concede, it’s that every punch is landing on rails that we simply do not own.
The deflating retreat of the Digital Services Tax (DST) reveals a deeper weakness: even when Parliament raises a shield, runaway platforms sprint around it. With C-18, Google negotiated a capped payout and Meta blocked news entirely. With C-11, streamers will likely pass their CanCon levy straight to consumers, if the digital streaming tax moves forward at all, and the DST has already disappeared. It can make you wonder whether pursuing these policies is even worth it in the first place.
This same structural vulnerability looms over the future of the Online Harms Act and a much-needed refresh on privacy reform. Without the power to compel compliance through things like hosting mandates, data-localisation requirements, or market-structuring tools, the state is left essentially scolding multinationals to please play nice. It hasn’t worked well.
This keeps happening to us for two reasons. The first is jurisdictional leverage. Most of our data, cloud workloads, payment rails and ad exchanges all sit on infrastructure owned abroad. When the “factory” is elsewhere, public policy interventions become an act of persuasion rather than power. The second is reactive design. Each of those laws chases a symptom (i.e. news funding, hateful content, kids’ privacy) rather than attacking the platform business model that monetizes reach without liability head on. To continue the terrible fighting metaphor that we are all exhausted of, we may be aiming our punches at the wrong places.
We can use policy to change the terrain, and there are good examples to draw inspiration from. Take Europe’s Digital Markets Act, France’s ad-tech decree (which forces every intermediary in the ad stack to disclose impression-level prices and fees so publishers can see exactly what each middleman skims) and Germany’s Linux-for-government migration, which each show strategic ways to start to restore jurisdiction: mandate interoperability, insist on domestic hosting for sensitive data, and use procurement offsets to seed a home grown stack. Modest but meaningful shifts.
As it turns out, Canada’s toolkit is far broader and more imaginative than yet another levy or streaming surcharge, but we don’t seem to be using it to its full advantage. Consider that Indigenous governments are already insisting that their data stay on their soil. Quebec is quietly proving that a province can run its own digital ID without leaning on Apple or Google. If we can prototype a full EV drivetrain in Windsor, maybe we can do the same for a sovereign GPU cloud. And while Canada’s $2-billion AI Compute Strategy puts real money on the table, its success will hinge on governance; we should ring-fence at least half the fund for open-weights models hosted on Canadian soil and audited in public.
Canada has blown a bunch of political capital proving that Big Tech won’t negotiate in good faith, if the companies come to the table at all. So let’s redirect that energy. There are a lot of great proposals bubbling up right now around bolstering Canada’s digital sovereignty and diversifying away from Big Tech, including this open letter on resetting Canada’s Digital Policy. Builders are exploring how to build a more sovereign and secure stack, and people are changing their everyday digital practices in the same way they reallocated their spending. Part of the 5% defence spending surge should be used to underwrite a Canadian cloud and open-source workplace suites, with federal agencies as an anchor tenant. We could require platforms to keep Canadian user data in Canadian-owned data centres, threatening that without data residency, there will be no market access.
Other legislative attempts to level the playing field with Big Tech firms weren’t total failures of imagination. They were more like early-round jabs as we sized up our opponents. The lesson for Canada isn’t to stop swinging, but rather, to shift our stance. Because we do not own these digital infrastructures, the laws we’ve recently passed and hope to in the future rely on diplomatic courtesy and are constantly vulnerable during trade renegotiations. Big Tech firms have shown, time after time, that they prefer to pursue expensive and lengthy fights. Ottawa has spent five years proving to us that the negotiating table is pretty tiled. Maybe it’s time we built a new table. 🪑
The past week has offered a crash course in why media sovereignty still matters. When a single conglomerate can pay a sitting U.S. president US$16 million to make a nuisance lawsuit vanish, it’s hard to pretend corporate publishers and broadcasters are neutral conduits of information. Media scholar Victor Pickard captured the outrage succinctly in the tweet below.
Canada isn’t immune to that power imbalance. As we argue about a Digital Streaming Tax and other cultural-funding tools, the deeper question is who gets to set the rules of our media marketplace in the first place. University of Alberta professor Brian Fauteux reminds us that global platforms have long tried to write the script for Canadian cultural policy — satellite radio was only Act One. His thread follows.
Read together, Pickard’s alarm bell and Fauteux’s historical caution show two sides of the same sovereignty coin: concentrated ownership south of the border can warp democratic accountability, while hands-off regulation at home invites foreign giants to dictate the terms of our own cultural life. That’s the gap Ottawa’s next round of digital-policy reforms must close.
In my most recent column, I argue that Canada’s product-liability regime has never caught up to the software that now shapes our economy, politics and mental health. Platforms still hide behind the fiction that they are “neutral intermediaries,” even as they design recommender systems that decide what we see, buy and believe. Europe is already moving to treat code like any other consumer product: liable for defects and harms. Canada should do the same.
Solid writing Vass. Very insightful and helpful in understanding the full context and potential home-grown options. Keep up the excellent work.
The one thing I would agree with you on is that these interventions are reactive. That is why they will ultimately fail. They are not based on any conventional quantitative data or even any conventional theory. They are indicative of a political class responding to very very loud and misguided people expressing their feelings (all of which are negative) about yes, big and successful firms.