Someone Could Turn It Off: Vass Bednar on Digital Sovereignty and What Canada Is Missing

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