Digital sovereignty in Canada isn’t a policy debate happening somewhere above you. You opened Gmail this morning, took a Zoom call after that, and wrote everything up in Microsoft Office, and every bit of it is sitting on an American server right now. The Department of Homeland Security is already using administrative subpoenas to pull data from people who criticize ICE, and Canadians are not outside that reach.

France has already moved off Zoom and Teams in favour of a homegrown platform called Visio, while Germany and Austria have stripped out Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat entirely. The lesson from Ukraine is worth sitting with: Elon Musk decided whether a warzone kept its internet running, then changed his mind, and Ukraine had no mechanism to override that call. Deleting your account won’t insulate you either, because cloud data doesn’t disappear when you unsubscribe. It exists somewhere, still searchable, still usable by people who don’t share your interests.

Tech analyst Carmi Levy’s starting point is email and office software, because your entire professional and personal life already lives there, and right now it’s running on infrastructure that belongs to someone else entirely.

Topics:digital sovereignty Canada, American big tech data risk, Canadian tech alternatives, Starlink Ukraine dependency, Microsoft Office privacy

Originally aired on2026-02-17