CBC and CTV Say Canada's Cloud Market Is "Broken." They're Half Right.

The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project just called the Canadian cloud market "broken." Three U.S. firms — Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet — hold roughly 85% of it. CBC's Anis Heydari reported it this morning; CTV and The Canadian Press carried the same story the same day, the same week the draft federal AI strategy leaked.

None of this is new to anyone who's been paying attention. What's new is that it's on CBC and CTV now, in the language of antitrust rather than the language of vendor brochures.

Good. The diagnosis is correct. The prescription is half right.

CAMP's fix is international interoperability standards — make providers portable so customers can leave. That's a competition remedy. It addresses lock-in. It does not address jurisdiction.

The report half-sees this and walks past it. It says dependence on U.S. hyperscalers is "a sovereign risk as well as a competition problem." Correct. Then it spends its energy on the competition half — portability, standards, switching costs — and leaves sovereignty as the adjective.

Invert it.

Compelled disclosure doesn't care whether your data is portable. The CLOUD Act reaches any provider under U.S. jurisdiction regardless of where the bytes physically sit. Interoperability lets you move between providers who are all equally compellable. You've solved switching costs. You haven't solved the subpoena.

Then there's the domestic-alternative trap. CAMP calls it "maplewashed dependencies." I've been calling it flag-washing for a year — a Canadian flag on the website, hyperscaler infrastructure underneath, U.S. jurisdiction reaching straight through the maple leaf. Canadian ownership doesn't help if the workload runs in a hyperscaler region. A Canadian company can be served a warrant too.

Residency is not sovereignty. Ownership is not sovereignty. Visibility is not sovereignty.

What defeats compelled disclosure is architecture. If the provider cannot read the data — zero-knowledge encryption, erasure-coded shards split across jurisdictions, no single party holding the keys — then there is nothing to compel. A subpoena returns ciphertext. That isn't a policy position. It's math.

Carney's line at Davos — not wanting Canada forced to choose "between hegemons and hyperscalers" — is the right instinct. CBC reports the leaked draft strategy concedes Canada's cloud and data-centre options are mostly foreign-owned and that closing that gap will take significant investment. Good. But you don't escape the choice with a procurement preference or a standards committee. You escape it by building systems where the question of who controls the infrastructure stops mattering, because control was never the thing protecting the data.

So pursue the standards. Fine. Just be honest about what they buy: a more competitive market of providers who can all still be compelled.

Canada spent the last decade asking the wrong question — where is my data? The right question is the one nobody in the procurement process wants on the RFP: who can be forced to hand it over, and can they read it when they do?

Until that's the first line item, every dollar of the coming "sovereign cloud" investment is buying a better-decorated dependency.

Sources

• Anis Heydari, "Cloud computing powers everything from banking to AI. A new report says Canada's market is 'broken'," CBC News, June 2, 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cloud-computing-competition-9.7219996

• The Canadian Press, "U.S. big tech holds 85% of Canadian cloud market, report says ahead of AI strategy," CTV News, June 2, 2026. https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/us-big-tech-holds-85-of-canadian-cloud-market-report-says-ahead-of-ai-strategy/

• Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, report on cloud computing competition in Canada, 2026.

Originally published by Ross Norrie, founder of SkyeConnex, on LinkedIn.

Published June 2, 2026 · More from the SkyeConnex blog