Canada's Cloud Sovereignty: Where Should the Lines Fall?

With billions of public and private dollars now in motion, Canadian digital sovereignty has moved from an abstract debate into active procurement. What control actually requires, and where the lines should fall, have become live policy questions with real money behind them.

Some proposals call for Canadian-owned infrastructure and pooled domestic demand, on the grounds that ownership and location are the only durable forms of control. Others argue that real control depends on procurement, encryption, and legal safeguards, and that domestic ownership without those tools is symbolism at significant cost. Still others question whether the sovereignty frame captures the harder problem: Whether Canada is building the firms and capacity needed to compete in the digital economy in ways that would make these concerns less consequential in the first place.

Please join ITIF's Centre for Canadian Innovation and Competitiveness for a virtual panel examining how Canada should think about sovereignty in cloud and compute, what current proposals get right and wrong, and what a more disciplined approach to digital dependence would look like.

Questions for the speakers? Ask on Slido.