Canada is suddenly very interested in sovereignty. The word appears everywhere in conversations about artificial intelligence: sovereign AI, sovereign compute, sovereign cloud infrastructure and sovereign data.

Canada’s new national artificial intelligence strategy, AI for All, identifies sovereignty as a central priority. It calls for Canadian capacity in compute, data, talent and infrastructure as the country seeks greater control over the technological systems on which it increasingly depends.

These are important conversations. But the questions underneath them are not new.

An Old Question in a New Setting

Who owns information? Who controls it? Who determines where it is stored, how it can be used, who can access it and what happens when its original purpose changes?

First Nations have been asking versions of these questions for decades. The First Nations Principles of OCAP®, Ownership, Control, Access and Possession, emerged from a history in which information about First Nations people and communities was too often collected, interpreted, stored and circulated by institutions outside those communities, without First Nations exercising meaningful authority over what happened to it afterward.

OCAP® changed the question. Instead of asking only whether information was collected ethically, it asks who holds authority over it. That distinction matters enormously in the age of artificial intelligence.

A First Nations framework, Not a Universal One

It is also important to be precise. OCAP® is specifically a First Nations framework. It does not stand in for the distinct laws, governance traditions and approaches to data sovereignty of Inuit or Métis, nor does it erase the distinct laws, protocols and governance traditions of individual First Nations. Even among First Nations, its expression is not identical everywhere. The First Nations Information Governance Centre emphasizes that Nations assert these principles according to their own worldviews, traditional knowledge and protocols.

That distinction is not a limitation of the framework. It is part of the point.

Sovereignty does not mean applying one model everywhere. It means having the authority to determine the model in the first place.

Consent to Collect Is Not Consent to Train

Much of the public conversation about responsible AI centres on familiar ideas: privacy, cybersecurity, transparency, bias and consent. All matter. But artificial intelligence complicates what consent means over time.

Consider information contributed to a community health study. Recordings made as part of a language revitalization initiative. Oral histories deposited in an archive. Stories shared through university research. Information provided to a government so that citizens can receive programs or services.

Permission for those purposes does not automatically constitute permission to use the same information to train an AI system.

Digital information can appear........

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