Canada’s “Build-Partner-Buy” strategy seeks to strengthen economic and strategic autonomy by substituting US supply chain and ownership control of Canadian industry with domestic and trusted foreign alternatives. Digital sovereignty is the most challenging of all sectors, but also the most promising, in cooperation with foreign partners that are aligned on standards and interoperable data.
This presentation sets out the context of US-China geopolitical competition, the sources of US economic nationalism, outlines Canada’s domestic responses and partnerships with Europe and East Asia, and explains why Canada-EU partnerships are more aligned, secure and resilient than either stand-alone or Canada-East Asian collaboration. It briefly reviews Canada’s approach to aerospace sovereignty to derive lessons, before moving on to the more challenging dossier of digital sovereignty, covering both hardware (chips, data centres, super and quantum computers), and software (data, cloud, software, encryption and cybersecurity). It concludes with a pathway forward that reduces Canadian vulnerabilities.
About the Speaker
Shawn Donnelly specializes in global governance and European political economy, with a focus on how countries, individually and collectively, navigate through existential crises. His international work stresses the role of domestic politics in making cooperation between countries difficult, and the role of power politics in establishing international outcomes when countries disagree on how to respond to crisis. His current work as a Balsillie Scholar asks how Canada, Europe and East Asia respond individually and collectively to American aggression in trade, defence and digital services policy.
