Saskatchewan MLAs Are Using Personal Gmail and Outlook Accounts for Official Correspondence Thats a Sovereignty Risk

To the Members of the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan,

I'm writing as a Saskatoon Westview constituent, and copying provincial media, because this is a pattern every MLA should account for, not something to raise quietly with one office.

Looking through the current MLA contact directory, a significant number of constituency offices list a personal Gmail, Outlook, or ISP email address as their official point of contact not a government-issued account. If that's how MLAs communicate with constituents, it raises the obvious question of whether provincial business is handled the same way internally.

That matters because these are U.S.-owned platforms. Consumer Gmail and Outlook accounts run on Google's and Microsoft's infrastructure, governed by consumer terms of service rather than any government security or data-retention standard, and subject to U.S. law regardless of where the data is stored because of the CLOUD Act, which can compel these companies to hand data to U.S. authorities on request. Google has also begun rolling out features, like the "Personal Intelligence" mode launched this January, that draw on personal Gmail content to power AI features for subscribers. Whatever today's settings are, the direction is toward more of these companies' AI systems touching account content, not less and Saskatchewan has no way to audit or control that.

This isn't hypothetical. The U.S. has already used its leverage over American tech companies against its own allies. In 2025, after Washington sanctioned the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor over its investigation into Israeli officials; Microsoft cut off his official email and cloud access, then did the same to several ICC judges. one of whom also lost her bank cards and Google account. This past May, Microsoft was accused of handing Dutch regulators' unredacted internal data to the U.S. House of Representatives regulators whose job is enforcing EU law against U.S. platforms. And this past weekend, after President Trump ordered Lake Ontario renamed "Lake America," Google complied within a day, and the change rippled into Ontario government and Crown corporation websites including the LCBO, Hydro One, and Infrastructure Ontario before anyone in Ontario had agreed to it.

If the U.S. is willing to use tech dependency as leverage against an international court and against a fellow G7 ally's regulators, there's no reason to assume Saskatchewan is exempt, particularly if a future trade or political dispute gives Washington a reason to apply more pressure on Canada. Europe has stopped waiting to find out: France is migrating 2.5 million civil servants off Microsoft and onto Linux, Germany runs its own open-source suite and a dedicated sovereign technology fund, and several other EU governments are doing versions of the same.

I'm asking every member of this Legislature, government and opposition alike, to:

1. Move all official constituency and government correspondence onto secured, government-issued accounts not personal Gmail, Outlook, or ISP addresses.
2. Push for a public audit of how much of Saskatchewan's government and Crown corporation infrastructure depends on U.S.-owned platforms.
3. Support a made-in-Saskatchewan or made-in-Canada plan to reduce that dependency, rather than waiting for it to be used against us.
4. Stop using Microsoft Windows, Microsoft 365, Teams, Zoom, or any of Google’s Workspace suite for the reasons mentioned above.

Reann Legge
I use the pronouns She/her
reannlegge.ca