Dozens of experts, academics and organizations have released an open letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to swiftly “defend Canada’s digital sovereignty” and protect the country from the whims of the Trump administration. 

The letter says Carney has argued Canada must become an energy superpower and get big projects built, but not spent enough time talking about the need to secure Canada’s digital economy. 

“Empires once built railways. Now they build algorithms,” said Barry Appleton, a Toronto-based international trade lawyer and one of the letter’s signatories.

“If Canada cannot govern the code that governs Canadians, then we are no longer a sovereign democracy. We will be tenants in Trump’s regime.”

The signatories ask Carney to stake out protections for social media, cloud systems, AI engines, digital transactions and other data that can be “weaponized by a Trump regime seeking unchallenged technological dominance.”

The letter said action must be taken because 90 per cent of Canada’s internet traffic is currently routed through the U.S. or through U.S.-based tech giants.

Those tech giants, the letter said, make more than $20 billion tax-free annually from Canadian digital creators at the expense of Canadian artists.

It also said that foreign social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook play a big role in shaping Canadian political discussion without domestic oversight.

Canada also needs to act now to secure its digital sovereignty, the letter says, because U.S. companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google control most of Canada’s cloud infrastructure and CUSMA trade rules prevent the federal government from requiring those companies to store Canadians’ data north of the border.

Updating some legislation, scrapping others

Among the signatories of the letter are: Canadian writers Margaret Atwood and John Ralston Saul; filmmaker Atom Egoyan; former Gov. Gen Adrienne Clarkson and organizations such as the Canadian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Medical Association.

They want the Liberal government to take a number of steps to re-establish Canadian digital sovereignty including launching a public consultation with Canadians and experts on the issue.

Once experts and the public have had the chance to weigh in, the signatories want the federal government to publish an independent threat assessment on Canada’s digital infrastructure. 

That would be followed by updating the Consumer Privacy Protection Act and the Online Harms Act — a bill tabled by the Trudeau Liberals that died on the order paper and which the Carney government is considering reviving.

The letter also calls on the federal government to reconsider its decision to kill the digital services tax (DST) which the Liberal government cancelled in June amid threats from the Trump administration. 

A Google logo at a store in New York.The letter wants tech giants like Google to pay three per cent tax on revenues earned in Canada. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

The DST would have required tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb pay three per cent on revenues from Canadian users.

And the signatories want the Liberal government to “withdraw entirely the deeply flawed, anti-privacy Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act.” The legislation was introduced in June and currently sits at second reading. 

The Strong Borders Act would give increased powers to Canada’s security and intelligence services, expand the ability to open and inspect mail and allow officials to cancel or suspend immigration documents.

The legislation also proposes changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Oceans Act, the Sex Offender Information Registration Act, the Criminal Code and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, among others.

The letter says Bill C-2 “opens the door to unprecedented surveillance and cross-border data sharing with the U.S. that, under President Trump, has become increasingly unreliable, authoritarian and out of step with liberal democracies around the world.”

CBC News has reached out to the Prime Minister’s Office for a response to the letter but has yet to receive an answer.