Digital sovereignty Canada does not fully have, and Vass Bednar says the Trump administration has made the vulnerabilities harder to ignore.

The question she keeps returning to is simple: can you govern the economy you have? For a significant portion of Canada's digital infrastructure, the answer is no. The US Cloud Act reaches into Canadian data centres if the firm operating them has a meaningful American presence. The federal government runs on Microsoft infrastructure it rents annually at a rising price. Vass Bednar's own think tank received a warning from Google while making a copy of its digital sovereignty report, which she says illustrates the dependency cleanly.

European governments are already building open-source sovereign alternatives. Vass Bednar says Canada is moving in that direction but slowly, and that the possibility of a private company throttling Canadian businesses at the direction of a foreign government is not a fantasy.

Topics: digital sovereignty Canada, US Cloud Act, Canadian Shield Institute, Microsoft government dependency, sovereign AI

GUEST: Vass Bednar | @‌vassb

Originally aired on 2026-05-08