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Why Canada Needs to Follow Europe's Lead and Move Off U.S. Big Tech

Brad Redekopp,

A few developments from the past year should shape how you think about Canada's reliance on U.S. tech platforms. This isn't hypothetical anymore it's already happened to us, and to our closest allies.

This past weekend, Ontario government and Crown corporation websites including the LCBO's store locator, Hydro One's outage map, Infrastructure Ontario's property listings, and Metrolinx displayed "Lake America" instead of "Lake Ontario" after Google updated its maps to comply with a Trump executive order. No Canadian government made that call; it happened because these sites embed Google's infrastructure, letting a foreign president's order ripple into how our own institutions present information to Canadians.

That's mild next to what's already happened elsewhere. In 2025, after the U.S. sanctioned the ICC's chief prosecutor over its investigation into Israeli officials, Microsoft cut off his email and cloud access, then did the same to several ICC judges one of whom also lost her bank cards and Google account. The ICC has since moved to an open-source alternative under Germany's digital sovereignty program. This past May, Microsoft was accused of handing Dutch regulators' unredacted internal data the officials enforcing the EU's Digital Services Act against U.S. platforms to the U.S. House of Representatives, exposing the very people trying to hold U.S. tech accountable.

Europe has stopped treating these as isolated incidents. France is migrating 2.5 million civil servants off Windows onto Linux, with every ministry required to eliminate non-European dependencies by autumn. Germany funds sovereign infrastructure through its Sovereign Tech Fund and built its own open-source suite, openDesk. Denmark, Italy, and Switzerland are doing versions of the same. This isn't about cost savings it is that governments cannot run essential functions on infrastructure a foreign government can reach into.

Canada is moving the opposite way, a recent analysis found 91% of Canadian government communication tools fall under foreign jurisdiction, with Mitel the only Canadian-owned option.

I demand to see you push for a real Canadian alternative: investment in and procurement preference for open-source and Canadian platforms comparable to Germany's openDesk and Sovereign Tech Fund, or France's shift to Linux across communications, cloud hosting, mapping, and collaboration tools. Europe isn't doing this out of paranoia; they're doing it because it already happened to them, and Canada just signed up for more of the same.

I have appreciated your speedy replies in the past, but I've noticed they've been taking longer to arrive lately. This issue is moving fast. I demand fast, concrete action on this.

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