Residents checking Google or Apple Maps from within the United States will find Lake Ontario relabeled as "Lake America" following a presidential executive order. The original name derives from the Wendat word Ontari'io, but the renaming reflects an administration strategy to weaponize economic ties with Canada. Google implemented the change for US-based users while keeping the traditional name visible to those accessing maps from Canada and elsewhere. Yet Canadian institutions and financial services—many relying on Google's API for mapping functionality—began displaying the new designation, exposing a deeper vulnerability: Canada's dependence on American technology infrastructure.
The Lake Ontario incident crystallizes a broader challenge facing Canadian technology governance. As US state power and tech companies have grown intertwined, Canada has struggled to maintain institutional autonomy for organizations and citizens reliant on American platforms. The Carney government has embraced rhetoric around building and digital sovereignty, generating memes and slogans that circulate widely—"build, baby, build" from election night and "build, partner, buy" as an industrial strategy for defense and artificial intelligence. Yet translating middle-power ambitions into coherent policy for managing tech companies aligned with US interests remains unclear.
Canada's technology policy framework lacks comprehensive doctrine. Instead, it combines rhetorical commitments to domestic development, tentative moves toward digital autonomy, and a broadly pro-acceleration stance on AI through initiatives like AI for All. Industry influence permeates the landscape—visible in Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller's proposed legislation on social media, trade agreements, conference participation, quantum computing investments, and public consultations saturated with corporate language. Miller's bills address legitimate concerns: child and teen safety on social platforms through Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, and artificial intelligence's role in the Tumbler Ridge tragedy. However, rushed consultations and inadequate distribution of decision-making authority across public and civic institutions—evident in ISED's AI transparency work and Ontario's data center consultations—mean these interventions lack grounding in systematic analysis of vulnerabilities and harms emerging from the convergence of technology and state authority.
A fundamental tension undermines Canadian tech policy: the "builder" mentality emphasizes industry deployment rather than government regulation. This framing constrains how Canadians conceptualize development and empowers technology actors to exploit policy gaps, embedding structural vulnerabilities into Canada's AI and technology governance.
Middle Power Approaches and Their Contradictions
A middle-power strategy toward technology acknowledges Canada's inability to force platform and AI companies to adopt Canadian values, principles, and legal standards. Regulatory restraint becomes reframed as partnership—a deliberate departure from the previous liberal government's approach. Different actors are pursuing this opening in conflicting directions.
Cohere exemplifies one trajectory. The company anchors itself in middle-power desires for digital sovereignty born from reliance on American technology providers. Through foreign acquisitions, commercialization of government research centers to attract AI investment, and deployment of large language models on enterprise infrastructure insulated from political interference, Cohere executives invoke sovereignty rhetoric to shape their technology and political strategy. They treat AI as a technical infrastructure, enterprise tool, and geopolitical supply chain concern for democracies—deliberately avoiding the AGI speculation, existential risk discourse, and effective altruism frameworks popular among US tech founders. When the Trump administration restricted access to an Anthropic model, Cohere reported a "huge number of inbounds" from businesses and governments seeking to reduce exposure to American political decisions. Both Carney and Cohere position this as charting a middle-power path grounded in partnership and sovereignty.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and his network represent a starkly different vision. Following Carney's 2025 election, they have organized around a framework far less committed to democratic alternatives to the American model. Lütke has reportedly endorsed restricting voting to economically productive citizens, with the wealthiest receiving up to five times greater voting power in Canadian elections. Build Canada, a political advocacy organization emerging from efforts by Lütke and Shopify executives, frames sovereignty through unleashing state capacity to circumvent democratic constraints. In their "Go!" memo, Canada's crisis stems not from Trump's weaponization of economic integration but from insufficient productivity. The future belongs to builders operating at "crisis speed" without government impediment, and accepting the grievances of workers, voters, and non-millionaires constitutes a prerequisite for builders deserving enhanced political power.
Build Canada has drawn comparisons to DOGE, and its influence on government discourse is substantial. Its organizers clearly gained momentum from Carney's building rhetoric and have shaped policy conversations. The organization formalizes the political ambitions of wealthy Canadian technology figures, some openly attracted to anti-democratic positions on the reactionary right. It functions as a test case for Canadian politics rather than a settled model.
What Has This Class Actually Built?
A critical question deserves consideration: What tangible accomplishments can this cohort demonstrate in Canada? Lütke is an entrepreneur, tech founder, and billionaire—a software person in the Silicon Valley mold. He constructed a company atop digital infrastructure, supply chains, energy systems, and material networks created by others. This approach manages existing systems, ships software, extracts revenue, and occasionally influences public discourse. While software engineering provides a useful label, it does not constitute nation-building. Tech founders of this background possess limited experience in hardware development, energy infrastructure, geopolitical supply chains, or maintaining federal unions.
Consider "Builder MP," an artificial intelligence member of parliament created by Build Canada. This entity is neither an actual MP nor an actual builder—it is an application constructed on an OpenAI chatbot designed to recommend how pro-builder politicians should vote on legislation and respond to parliamentary questions. Demonstrating how AI might enhance Canadian democracy by delegating representation and voting decisions to an American language model illustrates many things, but it does not exemplify what building means in the contemporary AI landscape.
Carney has disregarded Builder MP. He expresses genuine pride that Canada ranks among the few nations to develop a large language model independently, without relying on distillation or adaptation of American models. He might set aside the memes momentarily and explain, as he did regarding Lake Ontario, how this achievement occurred.
Such an explanation would necessarily acknowledge that Cohere's founders connect to the Gregory Hinton lineage through the University of Toronto and Google. Hinton, termed the Godfather of AI and among the world's most cited scholars, represents a crucial node. A complete answer would trace the exchanges facilitated by publicly funded universities, immigration policy, state investment, and access to American technology firms—alongside the possibility of departing those firms when regulation and policy create alternatives. Most significantly, an honest accounting would demonstrate how regulation and policy function as instruments of direction. As Hinton himself has contended, regulation operates as a steering mechanism to harness technological power, not as a brake or impediment.
Toward a Coherent Framework
These examples remain illustrative and incomplete. Canada possesses a lengthy history and multiple approaches to understanding technology and power, with numerous actors engaged in these questions. The current American model of state-technology integration also operates within international context, including technological organization in China and related concerns.
Yet these dynamics shape Canada's present technology and AI approach. Nomenclature carries weight—whether applied to geographic features or industrial strategies—and this moment demands abandoning nationalistic framings of builders, nations, and technology in constructing a genuine middle-power alternative.
Source: Tech Policy Press
