A nurse who moves from Halifax to Calgary will prove who she is, separately, to at least four systems: a new health card, a new nursing registration before she works a single shift, a new driver’s licence, and new school registrations for her children, each with its own login. Almost nothing she verified in Nova Scotia follows her. Canadians encounter the same problem every day: separate logins, repeated verification, and systems that stop working when a service crosses a jurisdictional boundary. The systems were never designed to operate as one.

Canada is often measured against the wrong model. International rankings assess national performance, while service delivery in Canada runs through a federation. But the deeper issue is what Canada has not yet built. This is not a website problem. It is an infrastructure problem. The shared foundations that let identity, data, services, security, and accountability move safely across governments do not yet exist in coordinated form. Canada has strategies, portals, identity initiatives, cybersecurity institutions, cloud investments, and emerging sovereign compute capacity. What it does not have is an agenda for making those pieces work as a federated system.

That is the warning behind Canada’s slide in the United Nations E-Government Development Index, from third in 2010, its peak, to forty-seventh in 2024. Methodological changes account for part of the latest movement, but they do not eliminate the broader pattern: Canada has fallen behind countries that have moved further in areas such as shared identity, data exchange, integrated services, and digital access. The ranking is a signal, not a diagnosis. The diagnosis is that Canada is measured as a unified system while operating as a federated one, with delivery authority, data, funding, and accountability split across governments. That is where digital services actually break: not at the front door of a single portal, but at the seams between systems, rules, and responsibilities.

The missing piece is not another portal or strategy. It is a digital public infrastructure agenda.

As Canada pursues digital sovereignty through initiatives such as AI for All and sovereign AI investments, the question is no longer whether governments will digitize services, but whether they can do so on foundations they collectively trust and govern.

Digital public infrastructure is the connective layer beneath digital government: trusted identity, secure data exchange, payments, common service components, and the cybersecurity and compute capacity beneath them. Digital government is the services, portals, and policies people touch. Digital public infrastructure is what lets those services function across departments, programs, and jurisdictions. The first is the storefront. The second is the road network.

The concept is already established. The OECD defines digital public infrastructure as shared systems such as digital identity, payments, and data exchange.

The Canada School of Public Service has begun describing it as the foundation for how Canadians experience public services. What is missing is not the concept. It is a deliberate agenda to build shared, reusable, and governed foundations that span jurisdictions. That agenda does not require one national system. It requires a small number of capabilities different governments can trust and reuse: recognised identity, lawful and auditable data exchange, cybersecurity that travels with shared components, and accountability that stays clear when a service crosses a boundary.

What Canada Has and What Is Missing

Canada does not start from zero. The federal Policy on Service and Digital and Digital Ambition........

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