André Côté
Interim Executive Director
COMMENTARY
By André Côté
In the dog days of summer, with attention focused on the latest tariff deadline, the White House’s new artificial intelligence strategy largely escaped notice north of the border. But it shouldn’t.
America’s AI Action Plan is an alarming read. With the Trump Administration’s typical brashness, the Action Plan frames the objective as “achiev[ing] and maintain[ing] unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” It would do so by accelerating AI innovation and building out AI infrastructure like semiconductors and data centres – areas where America is already a powerhouse.
Framed as a race with China and geopolitical adversaries, the vision leaves no room for concern about safety and consumer protection in how powerful AI tools are designed and deployed, despite the fact that ChatGPT, Perplexity or the Gemini chatbot for kids under 13 are mass consumer products, with clear potential for harms and security risks like financial fraud, deepfakes, and privacy violations.
Even more menacing for countries like Canada, the third pillar of the plan on international AI diplomacy and security commits to exporting the United States’ “full AI technology stack”—hardware, models, software, applications, standards—to countries in America’s so-called AI Alliance. Failure to go along means becoming a “rival.”
In practical terms, this is about extending and solidifying the control that America’s already-dominant big tech companies—Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others—hold over the most significant and transformative technologies of our time. It reflects the unprecedented alliance President Trump has forged with big tech CEOs to use technological power as a lever to coercively advance the America-first agenda.
This is a major threat to the economic security and digital sovereignty of Canada, Europe and other Western alliance nations, and the latest signal that we need a bold, new strategy of our own for AI and the digital economy.
So, how should Canada move forward?
A clear starting point is defining digital sovereignty in the Canadian context, why it is essential to our national security, to our nation-building economic agenda, and to the everyday lives of Canadian citizens, consumers and users of digital tools.
In short, it’s about having the power to decide how digital technologies and data are used and governed within national borders, free from external influence or control. It requires the ability to set and enforce laws and public policies for digital technologies, with some meaningful level of domestic ownership of digital infrastructure and platforms. The concept of sovereignty can also extend from the nation state to specific communities and groups within, such as Indigenous peoples with inherent rights to self-determination.
The harsh reality for Canadians is that past choices (and inaction) has created a severe digital sovereignty deficit. The result: we’re subject to the dominance of, and dependence on, major foreign tech companies across the “AI tech stack” of large language model providers (e.g. OpenAI), computing data centres (AWS) and semiconductor chips (NVIDIA). This dependence extends toother key digital sectors, including online advertising (Google), e-commerce (Amazon), business software (Microsoft), social media (Meta), and more. Their dominance means Canadians are subject to foreign laws and vulnerable to foreign pressure, as we’ve already experienced under President Trump’s trade extortion compelling Canada to rescind the Digital Services Tax.
As groups like the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP) rightfully highlight, Canada’s pursuit of digital sovereignty must include confronting the dominance and influence of big foreign tech across our digital economy. This does not mean wholly rejecting or evicting these companies from Canadian soil. Rather, it requires bold steps to ensure their market power and alignment with the US administration is not a threat to Canada’s national or economic security, a limit on the ability to grow strong Canadian tech companies in a competitive marketplace, or a risk to the online safety and security of citizens.
Through that lens, a strategy for asserting AI and digital sovereignty should do two things.
First, address the dominance of foreign tech giants – using laws and regulatory enforcement to protect Canadian citizens, consumers and businesses from online harms and predatory commercial behaviour.
This should build on efforts in the last parliament to reintroduce legislation to establish essential frameworks for online safety, consumer privacy, and data protection, including provisions to govern high-risk AI uses like deepfakes or tools built for children.
We at the Dais and many others are contributing to the evidence and advocacy for shaping a new Canadian digital governance agenda, and policymakers have no easy task. But the core objective is clear. Canadians need a framework that assures online protections for Canadians while establishing conditions to grow Canada’s digital economy, with a focus on competition, transparency and sovereignty in digital markets.
The legal framework should be coupled with efforts to strengthen regulatory enforcement activities and penalties for large platforms and other online actors that are harming users and engaging in predatory commercial behaviours, like discriminatory pricing, market gatekeeping or self-preferencing their own services. This should include launching new institutions for AI safety and regulatory enforcement, and bolstering and strengthening existing oversight and enforcement bodies like the Competition Bureau, the information and privacy commissioners, and newer institutions like the Canadian Cyber Centre, Anti-Fraud Centre and Financial Consumer Agency to increase support to citizens, businesses and public institutions with cybersecurity and online financial scams.
Second, reduce our dependence on foreign big tech platforms – by backing and building alternatives in Canada and with values-aligned international allies.
While authoritarian states like China and Russia have sought to establish their own “national stack” of tech platforms, the current geopolitical realignment has made similar efforts a priority across Western capitals. The EU’s EuroStack launched this year as a form of industrial policy for establishing sovereign digital infrastructure independent of US platforms. For AI, Europe has committed investment and focus to accelerating domestic AI innovation, infrastructure and adoption.
In Canada, a strategy should focus on prioritizing the most important or vulnerable parts of the “Canadian Tech Stack” through an economic and national security lens.
Some government inventions already fit the bill. For example, the $2.4 billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy in Budget 2024—while modest relative to investments globally—can create the conditions for reduced dependence on dominant foreign tech if it spurs co-invest in Canadian supercomputing and domestically-owned AI cloud infrastructure. For AI technical standards used by industry and other organizations, the government is supporting a Standards Council of Canada process to align national efforts in helping shape international ISO standards. A renewed Pan-Canadian AI Strategy could include elements to reduce dependence in other parts of the ‘AI tech stack,’ like models and applications.
Public-private initiatives should catalyze alternative Canadian industry-led efforts to build digital infrastructure and platforms. A new partnership between Bell and Cohere to sell AI tools to Canadian enterprises and governments, using Cohere’s LLM and agent models and Bell’s compute data centres, is a start. Others could kickstart or back domestic efforts at creating alternative platforms, such as nascent initiatives on payment, online ad sales, or even social media. Governments and Corporate Canada have a major role to play in shifting procurement and purchasing to Canadian technology vendors – and in making bolder bets as funders and users of these types of alternative platforms. As federal spending shifts to defence-related systems, efforts to map “dual-use” tech in fields like AI and cybersecurity is critical.
Where there is a compelling national interest but no commercial potential, digital public infrastructure (DPI) offers another path for building Canada’s sovereign stack.
There are now hundreds of DPI examples around the world, notably in digital payment, data exchange and credentials. For instance, South Korea implemented a new nationwide ID system with encryption and blockchain. The EU is creating a digital wallet for citizens, residents and businesses to use for public and private services. Sweden has launched an AI digital assistant to help citizens navigate government services, and a Swiss LLM for the public good just launched. Denmark and Germany are piloting the development of open source business software tools to get governments off of entrenched vendors like Microsoft.
Lastly, policymakers and industry leaders must recognize that projects to build Canada’s digital infrastructure are essential to nation-building in 2025, alongside the export infrastructure, nuclear energy and oil pipelines on the Carney government’s “shared priorities” list. Major digital infrastructure projects, which are essential to digital sovereignty and prosperity, should be considered for public investment and expedited delivery.
Digital sovereignty isn’t just about technology—it’s about reasserting control to serve Canada’s national and economic interests in an increasingly hostile world. America’s AI Action Plan is the latest wake-up call, turning up the heat on Canadian policymakers as Ottawa springs back into action after a steamy summer.