Canada Keeps Sabotaging Its Own Digital Sovereignty · Ethan Plant

Canada should know better.

That's the part that makes the past few weeks of digital policy discourse so frustrating. This is not a country without technical memory. Canada has been home to serious telecommunications engineering, security software, cryptography, mobile infrastructure, privacy law, artificial intelligence research, and some of the best computer science institutions in the world. The knowledge is here. The people are here. The institutions are here.

What's missing is the willingness to listen to them.

Kitchener-Waterloo alone should make Canada impossible to dismiss as a country that doesn't understand software. The University of Waterloo is one of the strongest computer science schools on the planet. In the 2026 QS subject rankings, the University of Waterloo placed 27th in the world for computer science (a position it shares with the University of British Columbia). Waterloo's coop program is the world's leader, with more than 8000 employers in more than 70 countries. Waterloo doesn't just produce papers, it's producing people who go directly into the systems, platforms, infrastructure, and companies that shape the digital world.

Research In Motion is personal for me in a way that is hard to separate from Kitchener-Waterloo itself. I grew up in Kitchener. I remember driving through Waterloo and being surrounded by RIM buildings. Many of my classmates in school had parents who worked there. In a very real sense, I grew up in the shadow of Canadian tech.

My own father briefly worked at RIM and once met CEO Jim Balsillie. Years later, in a Globe and Mail article about Waterloo during RIM’s decline, he described the company’s troubles plainly: “It’s sad. They have contributed a lot to this community.”

That's the part that is easy to miss from outside the region. RIM was not only a phone company. It was part of the local geography. It shaped jobs, buildings, philanthropy, housing, and the ordinary civic atmosphere of Kitchener-Waterloo. BlackBerry’s secure communications legacy matters technically, but RIM’s presence in Waterloo also matters because it showed what Canadian digital capacity looked like when it was rooted in a place.

And while Waterloo may be the top, it is far from alone. The University of Toronto, UBC, McGill, Université de Montréal, Alberta, Ottawa, Carleton, and others form a serious national base of computer science and engineering talent. Times Higher Education’s 2026 Canadian computer science rankings place Toronto 22nd globally, Waterloo 41st, Université de Montréal 52nd, UBC 57th, and McGill 74th.

The same holds true geographically. Canada has a handful of places that should, in theory, make the country punch well above its weight in digital policy. Waterloo has the talent pipeline. Toronto and Montréal have deep AI, privacy, finance, platform, and research ecosystems. Vancouver has cloud infrastructure, gaming, and cross-border west coast technical talent. Waterloo, UBC, McGill, and the University of Toronto give Canada globally recognized academic depth. This is not a country short on people who can explain how digital systems behave when the law touches them.

And maybe this is just the University of Ottawa grad in me, but Ottawa is arguably one of the more interesting places on this map.

It sits at the intersection of technical memory and public power. The federal government is there. Parliament is there. The regulators are there. The institutions are there. The policy schools, legal community, national-security apparatus, telecommunications history, and procurement machinery are there. And just outside Ottawa sits Kanata North, one of the clearest reminders that Canada once had an enormous telecommunications-industrial base.

Canada's largest technology park didn't just appear out of nowhere. Its lineage runs through Computing Devices Canada, Bell Northern Research, Nortel, Mitel, and Corel. Even when Nortel collapsed, the expertise didn't just vanish. Many of its people remained in the area. They joined other companies, became entrepreneurs, and helped Ottawa earn the title of "Silicon Valley North".

Ottawa is not just a national capital that happens to have some tech nearby. It is a capital beside a deep reservoir of telecommunications and infrastructure expertise. It has the people who write policy close to the people who understand networks. It has lawyers, regulators, engineers, security specialists, civil servants, researchers, and industry veterans in the same region. In theory, that should make Canada unusually capable of building world-class digital policy.

The tragedy, as it unfortunately often is, is that Canada has almost all of the ingredients. It has the schools. It has the talent. It has the security history. It has the telecom memory. It has the policy institutions. It has the legal expertise. It has the companies. It has the civil society groups. It has enough people who...