“We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we’ve done it. With one signature of a pen, you’ve reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us, I am sure, to a colony of the United States—because when the economic levers go, political independence is sure to follow.”
Those were the words of John Turner, former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, as he debated Brian Mulroney during Canada’s 1988 federal election. Turner was attacking Mulroney’s decision to sign a free trade agreement with the United States—an agreement which, a few years later, would be replaced with NAFTA. Free trade was the defining issue of that election—arguably Canada’s last in which two genuinely distinct national visions went head to head. Sovereignty or integration?
Mulroney won that election, and economic integration with the United States became the unquestioned baseline of Canadian politics. Turner stepped down as Liberal leader and free trade hawk Jean Chretien replaced him, and even the NDP came around to free trade (with more guardrails). The question of sovereignty in Canada, just like in most of the increasingly globalized world, fell to the wayside. The debate was over.
Until it wasn’t. Despite being comatose for nearly three decades of neoliberal globalization, the 2020s have seen a dramatic revival of sovereignty as an animating force in global and domestic politics. From muscular state-led responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, to the United States’ growing rivalry with China, to racist panic around immigration and borders, the question of national sovereignty has returned to the foreground of politics across the world.
In Canada, just as in the 1980s, that revival has been driven by fears of being absorbed by an increasingly unhinged and fascist United States. Those fears drove the Liberals to an upset victory over the Conservatives in last year’s federal election, amidst the U.S. president’s threats to annex Canada and turn it into the 51st state.
Today, though, unlike in the 1980s, Canada has already effectively ceded an enormous part of its sovereignty to the United States. Gaining it back will not be an easy task.
Turner said that “when the economic levers go, political independence is sure to follow.” Those economic levers, today, are deeply tied into digital infrastructure—almost all of which is controlled by the United States. From cloud services to social media networks to data centres to media distribution, U.S. firms control global digital infrastructure.
Those U.S. tech firms are increasingly tied to the U.S. government and military-industrial-complex. Data collected as part of what author Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” which firms like Google and Meta use to sell ads, is easily converted into data that ensures U.S. global economic and military dominance.
The expansion of U.S. tech infrastructure to every corner of the world has, in effect, allowed for U.S. sovereignty to penetrate deep into countries outside of its borders, including Canada. Canadian government websites are hosted on U.S-owned cloud servers subject to U.S. law. Strategically important Canadian companies use U.S.-owned communications systems and Canadians build their understanding of the world on U.S. run social media algorithms. The digital sphere—absolutely central to life in the 21st century—operates under the near-exclusive sovereignty of Uncle Sam. The only other country that could be said to exercise digital sovereignty, other than the United States, is China, which effectively banned U.S. tech firms and developed its own digital infrastructure.
The digital sphere, then, is one of the most key components of sovereignty in the 21st century.
Previous Canadian governments asserted sovereignty by building and nationalizing physical infrastructure, like railroads and hydroelectric power plants. Digital infrastructure, today, plays a similarly crucial structural role.
We will, of course, not get to re-live the 1988 election. But we can learn from it—and possibly undo some of its mistakes.
