Canada-First Digital Solutions Initiative

This initiative aims to shift Canadian businesses over to Canadian-based digital solutions and promote domestic data sovereignty.

Please contact me or schedule a call with me if you are able to support this initiative or have any questions.

Highlights

Businesses who switch from non-Canadian to Canadian digital solutions:

  • Improve business cybersecurity and Canadian defense
  • Grow the Canadian economy
  • Encourage innovation where monopolies may exist
  • Invigorate the health of Canadian businesses and relationships
  • Create and support Canadian jobs
  • Support new and existing digital transformation programs
  • Reduce reliance on and risks of foreign data management

The Canadian government can:

  • Market this initiative, which is already started at a personal level
  • Provide business loans, grants, and subsidies for large-scale changes to digital solutions, with training programs for clean adoption
  • Budget for other business incentives and mandates for adoption goals

Audiences for this initiative, by order of adoption ease and interest:

  1. Businesses with needs for new digital solutions
  2. Businesses already considering a change in digital solutions
  3. Businesses with digital solutions that may be challenging to change

Proposal

The Canadian government, provincial governments, financial institutions, non-profit organizations, and technology businesses—can help develop an early framework for this initiative. This can consist of new laws and regulations, budgetary line items, support programs, marketing, digital solution recommendations, and programs to create digital solutions in Canada that do not currently exist here. There may be good alignment with existing grant programs, too.

In the cases where no Canadian digital solution option exists, we can and should consider open source solutions that can be hosted in Canadian data centers. Data sovereignty critical for business and national security. Open source solutions are often owned by the public, and not bound to geographic, political, or corporate controllers.

An early version of support in this initiative can target the easiest audience, then work to support more challenging scenarios. For example, a new business can choose to use a Canadian or a non-Canadian digital solution, like Sync.com versus Dropbox. This is easier to adopt for a company that does not currently have such a digital solution, where a company that does will have a larger investment in migration, replacement, and staff training costs.

Canadians are already thinking about Canadian products when they make purchasing decisions. The mindset is primed for application in business, allowing for an easier marketing campaign, which could be led by the Canadian government.

Challenges

Understanding obstacles allows us to navigate them. We can identify them to work through possible solutions.

There may be government officials, politicians, and business owners who invest heavily in non-Canadian companies. Those investments could be negatively impacted by this initiative. Arguably, the optics of supporting Canadian businesses could overshadow such losses. Those individuals and groups can consider shifting their investments into Canadian businesses as a gesture of national faith and good will. Investing early comes with its own benefits.

Making changes in government to support this initiative will take time. There are smaller and local efforts that may help gain momentum and demonstrate the idea for scaling.

Resources