As Lawrence Zhang writes in Research Money, Canada should prioritize boosting productivity by adopting advanced digital technologies across firms and governments, rather than recreating infrastructure it already accesses through global markets in the name of “digital sovereignty.”
Zhang argues that Canada’s digital challenge is not a lack of access to world-class cloud services, AI, or advanced computing capacity, but weak adoption at home. Canadian firms underinvest in digital tools, struggle to integrate new technologies into existing workflows, and face internal capability gaps, while governments remain cautious users of cloud and data-driven systems. In this context, heavy investment in domestic “sovereign” infrastructure does little to raise productivity and risks tying up public funds in costly assets with thin markets and limited scale.
This ownership-first logic, Zhang notes, increasingly extends to data governance and industrial policy. Yet security and research integrity hinge on access rules, oversight, and enforcement, not on where servers are located. Treating sovereignty as a geographic problem raises costs and fragments systems without improving outcomes. The same mistake is evident in calls for domestic semiconductor fabrication: Leading-edge chip manufacturing requires enormous capital, deep expertise, and global scale, making self-sufficiency economically unrealistic for Canada. Integration into allied supply chains offers a more credible path.
Zhang emphasizes that economic value comes from application, integration, and scale. Countries capture value by deploying advanced technologies widely and building businesses around their use—not by insisting on owning every layer of the digital stack.
Zhang concludes that a serious digital strategy must put adoption first. Productivity, competitiveness, and real economic security are earned by using the best technologies available—widely and effectively—not by flag-waving efforts to localize infrastructure. Canada’s problem is not dependence, but underuse.
Read the full commentary in Research Money.
