Yesterday, I gave the keynote address at the 2026 Digital Government Leaders Summit in Ottawa, Canada - an invitation only for CIOs, CTOs and senior technical personnel at Canadian federal ministries.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/29/post-american-canada/#ottawa
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@pluralistic thanks for sharing. The not so soft power of one country at work to manage the world according to the will of a bunch of billionaires. Wondering if the EU is in the same state of denial.
@pluralistic I would love to have seen this life with the people reacting to it.
CIOs and TIOs are Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers?
Did you or will you speak to member of parliament (elected officials)?
It was an honour to give this talk, and the organizers at the office of the CIO of the Government of Canada were kind enough to give me permission to post the transcript:
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Like all the best Americans, I am a Canadian, and while I have lived abroad for more than two decades, I flatter myself that I am still steeped in our folkways, and so as is traditional at events like this, I would like to begin by apologising.
I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry.
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I know that at a tech event, you expect to hear from a speaker who will come up and tell you how to lose hundreds of billions of dollars building data-centres for the money-losingest technology in human history, a technology so wildly defective that we've had to come up with new, exotic words to describe its defects, like "hallucination."
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A technology that will never recoup the capex already firehosed on - let alone the trillions committed to it - and whose only possible path to glory is to somehow get so good that it makes millions of people unemployed.
But don't worry: you can't make the word-guessing program into a "superintelligence" by shoveling more words into it. That's like betting that if you keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will eventually give birth to a locomotive.
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So I don't have any suggestions for you today for ways to lose billions of dollars. I don't have any ideas for how to destroy as many Canadian jobs as possible, I don't even have any ideas to make Canada *more* dependent on US tech giants.
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No, all I have for you today is a plan to make Canada *tens of billions* of dollars, by offering products and services that people want and will pay for, while securing the country's resiliency and digital sovereignty, *and* winning the trade war, *and* setting the American people free, *and* launching our tech sector into a stable orbit for decades.
So once again, I'm sorry. So, so sorry.
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I want to start by telling you a tariff story. It's not the story that started last year. It's a story that goes all the way back to the early 2000s. Indeed, the very start of this story dates back to 1998.
It starts in Washington, in October, 1998, when Bill Clinton signed a big, gnarly bill called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA) into law.
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