The budget has some money for data centres, and its defence spending envelope mentions cybersecurity alongside submarines. But all of the "major projects" this government is prioritizing are things like mines and container terminals.
The government is certainly enthusiastic about AI adoption, but the document doesn't have much to say about how Canada will thrive in a global economy dominated by algorithms, data and software as a service.
That’s the thing about the intangible economy: it’s inherently invisible. There are no factory towns for cloud computing, no regional champions for online retail infrastructure (but shout out to Quebec for its brief attempt to build its own Amazon, Panier bleu).
The fact that the intangible economy doesn’t have a concentrated economic geography like many of Canada’s other sectors do — Alberta’s energy corridor, Ontario’s auto belt, Quebec’s aerospace cluster, Atlantic Canada’s fisheries — means it doesn’t show up on a map and it’s not championed (or defended) by a vocal constituency.
That has led to digital infrastructure becoming an afterthought, instead of a priority investment, even though this infrastructure is a core aspect of how we experience everyday life.
This federal budget nods to trade diversification and industrial readiness, but it barely touches on the digital foundations on which modern commerce now runs. The closest it got was announcing clarifying regulation for stablecoins, a response to Trump’s GENIUS Act.
It’s as if we’re substituting excitement about emerging technologies like quantum and AI for actual economic modernization.
Most of us primarily engage with the economy online through our phone or computer. It’s how we participate in society. In the absence of updated privacy and competition laws, the digital marketplace has evolved into a surveillant system that is designed to drain our wallets. We all engage with opaque systems of algorithmic pricing, dynamic ranking and behavioural targeting. When you shop, the online environment is thick with subscription traps, dark patterns that nudge you to make a purchase you may not have otherwise, and Buy Now Pay Later schemes that slip through traditional debt reporting frameworks.
But by ignoring the power imbalances of the digital economy, the government risks idealizing e-commerce as “frictionless.” Consider the energy poured into reducing Canada’s interprovincial trade barriers, while digital trade barriers like gatekeeping, self-preferencing and platform tolling continue to hold back independent businesses and inflate consumer prices.
“Affordability” has become the catch-all frame for economic anxiety, but it mostly measures the tangible world: housing, groceries, fuel. The digital costs that shape daily life like subscriptions, junk fees and algorithmic surcharges are treated as minor inconveniences, even though they quietly inflate the cost of living for everyone.
For independent businesses, those same costs show up as the price of competing. Every sale on a marketplace, ad impression and payment-processing fee goes through a foreign platform that sets the terms of trade. The result is an economy where consumers feel squeezed and domestic entrepreneurs struggle to stay visible while paying rent in a digital mall.
The budget does acknowledge the need to protect Canadian intellectual property. In the digital economy, IP is the engine of value creation: it turns ideas, data and algorithms into assets that can be owned, traded and scaled. IP underpins firm valuation, concentrates market power and determines who captures the gains from innovation. Without domestic IP ownership, countries risk becoming users — not beneficiaries — of the technologies that shape their economies. Yet, as others have criticized, the budget does not appear to have a clear framework to capture value from Ottawa’s new investments in R&D and sectors like quantum, though they are newly considering investments in IP as capital spending which could prove to be a productive incentive for firms.
When the Trudeau government initially laid out Canada’s Digital Charter in 2017, the principles of leveling the playing field for businesses, battling hate and violent extremism, and strong regulatory enforcement formed an accountability agenda — albeit one that turned out to be difficult to execute, in part because of provisions in CUSMA’s digital chapter that limit any domestic regulation of U.S. platforms.
Perhaps the budget’s silence is strategic — a decision not to poke the bear in the middle of a trade war. But the result is the same: a Canada that invests in infrastructure while leaving its digital foundations largely governed by large foreign firms.
Another possibility is that Big Tech accountability became too associated with the Trudeau era, and the Carney government wanted to make a clean break from that playbook. The thing is, the challenges the previous government’s Digital Charter identified haven’t dissipated. Declining to engage on these points is a tacit concession to Silicon Valley.
Whether and how we regulate digital markets matters for the control of Canada’s broader economy. As Minister Solomon has said, measures need to be taken to ensure our country is “free from digital coercion.”
But without deliberate policy, Canada’s digital economy will remain reliant on the rules set by foreign intermediaries rather than laws set by public institutions.
To that end, there is a minor and likely underappreciated nod to the digital economy in the Budget where it notes it will "protect workers against improper classification" (165). The paragraph nods at workers in the trucking industry, but can also capture people whose labour is mediated through gig platforms.
As Ottawa pushes a “One Canadian Economy” approach, it must insist that the infrastructure of online trade (like payments, data flows, discovery systems and adtech) be as accountable, interoperable and governable as the analog world we can see and touch.
In the coming weeks, we will be applying our economic sovereignty framework through the SHIELD Score to contextualize many of the major announcements in the Budget.
Until next time,
Vass Bednar
