Over the past year, the digital sovereignty conversation in Canada has accelerated.

Last September, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the development of a Canadian sovereign cloud through the Major Projects Office. Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, has called digital sovereignty “the most pressing policy and democratic issue of our time.”

Microsoft has pledged $7.5 billion in the next two years for Canadian AI infrastructure along with a promise to defend Canadian digital sovereignty — a promise its own executives acknowledged under oath that they cannot keep.

Much of this discussion has focused on infrastructure, including where the data is stored, who operates the servers and which providers governments and institutions should trust.

Who governs the digital sphere? How U.S. proxy lobbying erodes Canada’s digital sovereignty Canada must ensure its digital sovereignty in the face of U.S. threats The right way for Canada to secure cloud sovereignty

Who governs the digital sphere? How U.S. proxy lobbying erodes Canada’s digital sovereignty

Canada must ensure its digital sovereignty in the face of U.S. threats

The right way for Canada to secure cloud sovereignty

Lawrence Zhang argues that sovereignty can be secured through contracts and encryption rather than physical infrastructure. Guillaume Beaumier emphasizes cloud-agnostic services and domestic capacity, while Natasha Tusikov and Blayne Haggart warn that Canada’s AI strategy risks deepening dependence on foreign hyperscalers.

But the conversation hasn’t yet reached the software layer, where my research indicates the vast majority of systems used by Canadian entities are foreign-owned or foreign-controlled.

That’s a key failing.

If Ottawa wants to truly protect the country’s digital sovereignty, it should require software vendors seeking federal government contracts to disclose their ownership and controlling parent, implement a classification system at the point of procurement that distinguishes Canadian-owned from foreign-controlled software, and weight that classification alongside price in bid evaluation.

The problem with software

One step above infrastructure sits the software that organizations interact with daily — systems that handle payroll, client records, patient files and internal........

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