“Canadian owned and operated”: that new sign has adorned many storefronts in Canada since January. Despite that, the clearest sign of dependence is not physical, but digital. In fact, American office software provided by Microsoft and Google has a 93 percent market share in Canada. Consequently, the vast majority of stores owned and operated by Canadians would grind swiftly to a halt if their office software were cut off.
Even a cursory glance at Canada’s digital providers exposes substantial reliance on foreign firms. As Guillaume Beaumier, assistant professor in political science and international studies at l’École nationale d’administration publique, points out, Canada’s “dependence on American companies” is the main risk to its digital sovereignty. US companies provide services for 60 percent of the cloud market in Canada, including for the Government of Canada, which uses Microsoft products and spent nearly $300 million with the American firm in 2021–2022 alone. Additionally, there is no Canadian social media network (even if two are currently in development).
Fears of access being cut off are not just fantasy. In May, Microsoft blocked Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), from accessing his email. This was done in response to US sanctions against the ICC. The move triggered further discussions about technological dependence in the Netherlands, where the ICC is headquartered.
Those discussions tapped into a broader movement to create a so-called EuroStack. Spearheaded by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, EuroStack is meant to be “a European Industrial Policy initiative bringing together tech, governance and funding for Europe-focused investment to build and adopt a suite of digital infrastructures: from connectivity to cloud computing, AI and digital platforms.” Canada can learn from this initiative and start by urgently assessing Canadian vulnerabilities throughout the digital ecosystem. We cannot build a CanStack until we know what we need to build. More broadly, we can use this moment to evaluate and address the broader vulnerabilities in the fragile Canadian information ecosystem.
Canada’s sovereignty can be threatened via any of the many factors of its national information ecosystem.
How to Assess the Canadian Landscape
A systematic approach to assess the Canadian stack is to divide it into four domains of platform governance, as Heidi Tworek suggested with Taylor Owen and Nanjala Nyabola a few years ago in a CIGI essay series exploring global platform governance. These four domains are content, data, competition and infrastructure. A follow-up essay series from the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia provided a preliminary investigation into these four domains in Canada and found that “while a knowledge base already exists in Canada on these four domains, it is lacking in some areas and is often not connected across these four areas.”
It would be reasonably easy to trace Canadian dependence across these four domains ranging from social media to fibre-optic submarine cables (which supply over 95 percent of international internet data across oceans). This would be a crucial first step in deciding where to place initial investments to reduce Canadian vulnerabilities. In some cases, such as creating a public alternative to social media, funding for a Canadian equivalent would be comparatively cheap. In others, funding would form part of a wider set of ambitious investments in Canada.
Assessing the digital stack is a good place to start, but it does not go far enough. Instead, we must assess Canadian vulnerabilities within the broader information ecosystem. Canada’s sovereignty can be threatened via any of the many factors of its national information ecosystem.
Canada’s national information ecosystem is formed by all the interrelationships between people, technology and outputs that enable Canadians to build and maintain shared realities. Too often, the complexity of this ecosystem is overlooked as researchers and policy makers focus on specific topics or interventions, such as media literacy and fact-checking. This is highly problematic, as the following two examples suggest.
Issues Beyond Technology
First, a focus solely on digital mediums ignores vulnerabilities in more traditional media. Even 10 years ago, in 2015, only seven daily newspapers in Canada were independent or privately owned. By March 2025, around 2.5 million Canadians have “almost no local news.” What newspapers remain are heavily consolidated into the ownership of a handful of corporations. One of the biggest conglomerates, Postmedia, is majority-owned by an American hedge fund with ties to US President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, some politicians campaigned in the recent federal election around promises to defund the CBC.
Second, it is important not to conflate specific tools, such as social media, with the broader system. Canada could develop its own digital capabilities, but if Canadians are ill-equipped to be critical consumers, they remain vulnerable to manipulation. In 2023, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Adult Skills Survey reported that 19 percent of Canadians have only basic literacy skills and 20 percent have only rudimentary math. An earlier study, from 2012, found that nearly half of Canadians had inadequate literacy skills. Both reports indicate differences across demographics, which present further vulnerabilities.
These are many other areas where the Canadian information ecosystem might have challenges. In prior work, we identified 16 categories of factors for assessing ecosystems. Examining national information ecosystems can help leaders identify better interventions.
For example, if the aim is to make an information ecosystem more resilient to foreign interference, a systemic approach might lead to beneficial insights. Most obviously, such an assessment might find that some diaspora communities, for example, do not have local news available in the language they are most comfortable consuming, leaving community members susceptible to other sources and opening a gap that could be filled by funding more multilingual municipal media. Another discovery could be an overreliance on a specific technology, such as satellite internet or social media, that needs to be addressed. Lastly, it could reveal that researchers lack funding, thus making foreign grant sources more palatable. In taking a systems approach, democracies can develop more comprehensive approaches and prioritize interventions.
Outside of a military invasion, many threats to Canadian sovereignty occur within our information ecosystem, a space that isn’t well understood. The good news is that building a systemic understanding is within reach. It simply requires bringing together the many excellent Canadian researchers to paint that bigger picture collectively. Ultimately, if Canada hopes to create a CanStack that really works, leaders must first assess the state of the information ecosystem across all factors instead of just digital technology.
