Canada's Digital Crossroads
Why intelligent interdependence, not digital autarky, offers the path to Digital Sovereignty
This week's digital sovereignty symposium organized by McGill University's Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy brought together leading voices from government, media, security, and civil society to chart Canada's digital future. The event crystallized what many of us in the cybersecurity and policy community have long recognized: preserving Canada's digital sovereignty demands new thinking fit for the current times. The mechanisms for achieving this are not the blunt instruments of traditional statecraft - not simply regulation in the information space, but digital citizenship; not digital autarky in infrastructure, but strategic autonomy leading to intelligent interdependence.
Digital citizenship is what it sounds like: establishing the norms of citizenship which include rights and responsibilities as a fundamental building block for how we live and interact in digital space. It means creating rules that are applicable to our community, and ultimately accountable to our community.
But this doesn't start in the House of Commons - it starts at home. As parents, we need to take as much interest in our kids' online world as we do in their safety on the schoolyard or in school. That same ethos needs to be embraced by Canadian companies, and ultimately collectively, by us, as citizens.
This recalibrates our understanding of digital space as something that is global in reach but ultimately needs to be locally accountable. It puts the individual at the centre of decision-making - not antithetical to libertarians - while acknowledging that even libertarians live as members of a community. Part of that civic relationship means collectively agreeing, or even when we disagree, to act in accordance with rules we establish for and through the common good, with adequate recourse to dissent and challenge through elections and courts.
We need to re-intermediate the relationship between individuals and their media systems so that dialogue is not monopolized by influencers operating in the rule-free environment of platforms like X or Facebook, circumventing legitimate community concerns. Critically, digital citizenship is not a partisan issue - it does not pit private media against the CBC. Rather, it should encompass both within shared rules that protect what's essential: giving voice to individuals, the private sector, and public media alike and that allow us to grow and adjust our values as our society changes while protecting a common sense of what it means to be Canadian.
In other areas of digital infrastructure, we must recognize a fundamental reality: cyberspace was never built for sovereignty. The global digital economy's underlying infrastructure - fiber optic cables, satellite connections, cloud services - were designed for connectivity and efficiency, not national control. When extended to infrastructure, complete digital sovereignty becomes a non-starter.
Instead, we need to focus on playing to our strengths and identifying those areas where Canada can lead and successfully compete. This requires strategic autonomy: ensuring we have the least amount of supply chain dependencies in those critical areas where we possess natural advantages.
Consider Canada's unique position: we host 10% of the world's top-tier AI researchers - the second-highest concentration globally. We possess abundant clean energy resources, geographic stability, and robust democratic institutions. The global AI market, valued at $279 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2030, offers opportunities where these advantages matter.
The federal government's $2 billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy recognizes this reality, targeting $1 billion for Canadian-owned supercomputing systems and $300 million for supporting small and medium enterprises. This isn't about replacing global supply chains - it's about ensuring Canadian strength in strategically critical capabilities.
The goal is to build out these foundation capabilities to create what the Canadian AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster (CAISIC) terms "intelligent interdependence" - entering into relationships with others as equals rather than as dependents.
Intelligent interdependence distinguishes between areas where foreign dependence poses existential risks and domains where global integration enhances competitiveness. It's about selective sovereignty over the minimum viable set of capabilities required to maintain strategic autonomy while maximizing the benefits of global economic integration.
The urgency of this approach has become starkly apparent in what I have termed the "brutalist web" - the deliberate weaponization of digital dependency. When reports emerged of satellite communications and access to imagery being used as leverage in disputes between Presidents Trump and Zelinski , or when the United States disagrees with the judgment of the International Criminal Court and cuts off access to email and other services provided by Microsoft, both demonstrate how quickly digital infrastructure transforms from enabler to weapon of coercion.
For Canada, the vulnerabilities are real: between 64% and 70% of our internet traffic routes through American territory, and over 80% of Canadian businesses rely on foreign-owned cloud providers. But rather than attempting the impossible task of replacing these dependencies entirely, we need intelligent interdependence to leverage our strengths to negotiate from positions of equality.
All of this leads us to some uncomfortable but unavoidable truths. As the McGill symposium concluded, if we seek a bookend to the international system constructed in 1945, that date is 2025. We now inhabit a world where digital infrastructure has become geopolitical infrastructure, and assumptions about technological neutrality have been replaced by the reality of digital realism.
The implications extend beyond infrastructure to the very foundations of democratic discourse. Without frameworks for digital citizenship that protect Canadian media ecology - both private and public - we risk losing the capacity to maintain accountable dialogue rooted in our values.
Canada confronts a binary choice: seize this moment to establish leadership, positioning ourselves as a model for other middle powers, or accept permanent technological dependence while watching our information space fragment under foreign platform control.
The era of digital naïveté has ended. But for Canada, with our unique combination of research excellence, democratic values, and natural advantages, the opportunity to lead through intelligent interdependence has never been more achievable - or more urgent.
You can watch the full session and explore these ideas in greater depth on CPAC here.
Rafal Rohozinski is the founder and CEO of Secdev Group, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and co-chair of the Canadian AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster.