digital sovereignty

Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Gaps and What I Think We Should Do About Them

Just this past week, Canada announced Digital Transformation Canada, with a mandate “to deliver better, faster, more reliable government services to Canadians.” The announcement validated something I find pretty exciting: Canada is deepening its investment in digital infrastructure.

I do, however, have some concerns about what I see as gaps in the current initiatives and objectives under the broader banner of digital sovereignty. I have been doing my best to follow along through public documents, including:

Some of the gaps I describe below are as much concerns as assertions, because I care a great deal about these efforts. Many are also based on observations of how we define digital sovereignty in Canada, where the European Union is right now, both in policy and in practice, what I have observed firsthand at convenings like FOSDEM and OTESSA, and what I’ve continued to see and write about since.

With that in mind, I contributed some recommendations to Canada’s budget pre-budget consultation process this week (why not?). I believe that, done well, these efforts can tackle some of our most important digital sovereignty challenges while also advancing broader priorities around Canadian competitiveness, productivity, resilience, and economic security.

Observed Gaps

Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Framework is too narrow in scope

Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Framework is focused primarily on the Government of Canada’s own digital operations. That work is important, but I think our conception of digital sovereignty needs to be broader - taking from the European Union's Berlin Declaration focus on everyone: for individuals, businesses and institutions to act autonomously, freely choose digital solutions, reduce strategic dependencies and build technological capability.

That work is critical, but I think our conception and goals for digital sovereignty needs to become broader, sooner, to keep pace with the risks facing Canada’s economy and technological independence.

Open collaboration remains a policy gap

Canada’s Digital Sovereignty Framework includes open source among its future considerations, including questions of how open source and open models are governed, maintained, operated and secured. I think this deserves to move from a future consideration into a more deliberate part of our sovereignty strategy.

Open is not, by default, sovereign. Determining such, requires evaluation of governance, including who makes decisions, whether they are employed by a company, and the geolocation of that governance. In addition sustainability of a project directly impacts critical outcomes like security.

Canada, like many countries pursuing sovereignty through openness, lacks a standard for evaluating, with a degree of certainty, which projects it currently depends on, or is considering, that it can rely on and trust through a sovereignty lens.

We need software sovereignty expertise. Canada has the talent.

Software sovereignty requires people who understand enterprise technology, foreign technology platforms and open source.

That means understanding how organizations use these technologies, how open source projects and communities operate, and what it takes to move from proprietary platforms to open alternatives when doing so makes sense.

At the same time, experienced, talented technologists are entering the labour market as large technology companies restructure and reduce their workforces. There is an opportunity for Canada to bring some of that experience into public service and apply it to Canadian priorities - while employing Canadians (I saw a post this morning similarly describing the issue).

What I think Canada should do

1.Establish a procurement strategy for open and sovereign solutions

Canada should establish a federal evaluation standard for open and sovereign options in significant digital procurements, building on work already underway with European partners and through Canada’s existing digital sovereignty efforts.

For open solutions, evaluation should go beyond traditional procurement criteria. It should build a new standard to consider critical attributes like maintainer capacity, governance (ownership), security, dependency health, licensing and compliance, as well as Canada’s ability to contribute upstream, participate in governance and maintenance.

The purpose of an evaluation framework should be to determine the right approach for a particular technology. That might mean adopting and contributing to an existing open source project, sovereign hosting, investing in a critical dependency, developing something domestically, or choosing a proprietary solution under terms that adequately protect Canadian interests.

Sovereignty is about having meaningful choices and the capability to exercise them.

2. Establish a Canadian Sovereign Tech Fund

Canada should create dedicated funding to strengthen critical open source software that Canadian infrastructure depends on, including its security, maintenance and long-term sustainability.

We do not need to invent this model ourselves. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency provides an example Canada can learn from, and there are opportunities to collaborate internationally when Canada and its partners rely on the same critical technologies.

Canada is already investing significantly in sovereign AI compute infrastructure. That infrastructure runs on and depends on open source software.

The security, maintenance and sustainability of those dependencies are sovereignty issues too.

Investing in them helps protect infrastructure Canada has already paid to build while giving Canada a role in sustaining and influencing technologies on which we depend.

3. Establish a national open code and content commons

Canada should create a national commons for publicly funded code, AI models, datasets and open educational resources, designed for discovery, contribution and reuse by governments, businesses, institutions and individuals across Canada.

Governments and publicly funded institutions should be able to share, improve and maintain what we collectively pay to create, while making those resources easier for Canadians to discover, reuse and contribute to.

There are already examples and technologies to build on. Open source platforms such as Forgejo provide building blocks for sovereign code hosting and collaboration. The B.C. Open Collection demonstrates a Canadian model for curating, adapting and reusing publicly supported open content, while Germany’s openCode provides an operational example of public-sector software discovery, reuse and collaborative development.

4. Create a sovereign technology fellowship

Digital Transformation Canada’s newly announced fellowship model creates an interesting opportunity.

I would like to see a digital sovereignty stream that brings experienced open source, platform, infrastructure, security and AI practitioners into government for defined assignments.

Those fellows could help develop sovereignty evaluation standards, assess software dependencies, support a national open code platform and, importantly, transfer their expertise to permanent public-service teams.

This is an opportunity to build sovereign technology capability inside Canada, and to help address massive job loss we are seeing in the tech sector.

Closing

Canada does not need to choose between digital sovereignty, fiscal responsibility, innovation and competitiveness. Our digital sovereignty goals can and should include and empower individuals, businesses and institutions as an extension of the government itself.

Reducing unnecessary vendor dependency can improve our ability to negotiate and make technology choices. Reusing publicly funded software can reduce duplication. Investing in critical open source dependencies can protect infrastructure we already rely on. And building expertise inside Canada gives us greater capacity to make those decisions for ourselves.