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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Section 1201 - the "anti-circumvention clause" - of the DMCA establishes a new felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for anyone who bypasses an "access control" while modifying a digital system.
These penalties apply irrespective of *why* you're making that modification, and they apply even if the device you're modifying is *your own property*.
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Which means that if the manufacturer decides you shouldn't be able to do something with your digital device, well, you can't do it. Even if it's yours. Even if the thing you want to do is perfectly legal.
Right from the start, it was clear that this law was a bad idea. It was an enshittifier's charter. Once you ban users from modifying their own property, you leave them defenceless.
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The manufacturer can sell you a gadget and then push an over-the-air update that degrades its functionality, and then demand that you pay a monthly "subscription" fee to get that functionality back.
This is a law purpose-built for anyone who aspires to graduate from the Darth Vader MBA, where the first and only lesson is, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
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Immediately upon the passage of this bill, two things happened: first, American tech companies started to rip off the American public, taking advantage of the fact that it was now a crime to disenshittify your own property; and second, the US Trade Representative went around the world in search of biddable public officials who could be flattered or bullied into bringing an anti-circumvention law onto their own country's lawbooks.
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The US *had* to get all its trading partners to pass these laws, otherwise those countries' own tech companies would go into business selling tools to disenshittify America's defective tech exports: privacy blockers, jailbreaks, alternative clients, generic consumables, diagnostic tools, compatible parts and spares.
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But if America could arm-twist its trading partners into passing anti-circumvention laws, then those countries would shut down any tech entrepreneurs who posed a competitive threat to America's metastasizing, inbred tech giants, and the people in those countries would be easy pickings for America's tech giants as they plundered the world's cash and data.
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Right from the start, the US Trade Rep targeted Canada for these demands. The only problem was that Canadians *hated* anti-circumvention law. We'd had a front row seat to all the ways that our American cousins were getting fleeced by their tech companies, and we had no desire to share their plight.
Plus, we've got some smart nerds here who could easily see themselves exporting very lucrative tools of technological liberation across the southern border.
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Hell, if we can supply America with reasonably priced pharmaceuticals through the mails, then we can surely sell them excellent anti-ripoff mods over the internet.
Paul Martin's Liberals took two runs at passing anti-circumvention law but failed hard. The architect of this project, a Toronto MP named Sam Bulte lost her seat over it, and the Liberal brand became so toxic in Parkdale-High Park that the seat flipped to the NDP for a generation.
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Then it was Stephen Harper's turn. First, he tasked Jim Prentice with getting an anti-circumvention law through Parliament, and when Prentice failed, Harper turned to Industry Minister Tony Clement and Heritage Minister James Moore with getting the ball over the line. Clement and Moore tried to rehabilitate the idea of anti-circumvention with a public consultation: "See? We're listening!"
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Boy, did *that* backfire. 6,138 of us wrote into the consultation to condemn the proposal. 53 Vichy nerds wrote in to support it.
Moore was clearly stung. Shortly after the consultation, he gave a keynote to the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Toronto, where he dismissed all 6,138 of us as "babyish...radical extremists."
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Then Harper whipped his caucus and passed Bill C-11, The Copyright Modernization Act, in 2012, pasting America's anti-circumvention law into our lawbooks. Now, I don't think that Moore and Clement were particularly motivated by their love of digital locks. Nor was Stephen Harper. Rather, they were under threat from the US Trade Representative, who told them that America would whack us with tariffs if we failed to arrange a hospitable environment for America's tech companies.
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I don't know if you've heard, but Trump whacked us with tariffs *anyway*. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep taking their orders. Indeed, you're a sucker if you do.
In the 15 years since we capitulated to US policy demands, US Big Tech has grown too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.
To Canada's credit, we've tried a bunch of things to rein in Big Tech:
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* We tried to get them to pay to link to the news (instead, they just blocked all Canadian news);
* We tried to get them to include Canadian content in their streaming libraries (they lobbied, sued and bullied their way out of it);
* We tried to make them pay a 3% tax, despite the fiction that all their profits are floating in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea (and they got Trump to terrify Carney into walking it back).
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This is the "too big to jail" part. When a company is a couple orders of magnitude larger than your government, what hope do you have of regulating it? Back a couple years ago, when America's antitrust regulators were also riding Big Tech's ass, there was a chance that we could make a rule and they would help us make it stick.
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But now that the CEOs of all the Big Tech companies personally gave the Trump campaign a million bucks each for a seat on the inauguration dais, and now that all the tech giants have donated millions to Trump's new Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the White House, and now that Apple CEO Tim Cook has assembled a gilded participation trophy for Trump on camera, we've got no hope of getting Big Tech to colour inside the lines.
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So what are we to do?
Well, we could continue with our current response to the Trump tariffs. You know: retaliatory tariffs, where we make everything Canadians buy *more* expensive, because Canadians are famous for just loving it when their prices go up. This is a great way to punish Trump. It's like punching ourselves in the face as hard as we can, and hoping the downstairs neighbour says "ouch."
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But there's another way: now that we're living with the tariffs we were promised we could avoid by passing an anti-circumvention law, why don't we get rid of that law? There is *so much money* waiting for us if we go into business disenshittifying America's defective tech products.
Take just one example: app stores. Apple takes 30 cents out of every dollar that an Apple user spends in an app.
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If your app tries to use another payment method, they'll turf it out of the App Store. And of course, iPhone owners can't replace Apple's app store with another one, because the iPhone has an "access control," so it's a crime to change your app store.
30% is an *insane* transaction rake. I mean, here in Canada, we make person-to-person payments for *free*. Visa - an enshittified monopolist if ever there was one - charges 3-5%. Apple charges Thirty. Percent.
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Do you have any idea how lucrative this is? It is literally the most lucrative line of business Apple is in. It makes Apple more pure profit than any other line of business, even more than the $20b cash bribe Google pays them every year not to make a competing search engine. $20b is chump-change. Apple makes *one hundred billion dollars a year* on this racket.
They impose a 30% tax on the whole digital economy, and they get to self-preference.
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So if you want to sell ebooks or videos on an app, Apple charges you 30%, but when Apple sells ebooks and videos on its own apps, it doesn't charge itself 30%. And they get to structure the market. They can exclude any app they want, for any reason, and then no Apple customer in the world can have that app.
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Last fall, Apple banned an app called "ICE Block." That's an app that warns you if there are ICE thugs nearby, so you can avoid getting kidnapped and sent to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp or shot in the face by a guy with a Waffen SS tattoo under his plate carrier and a mask over his nose. Apple classed ICE murderers as a "protected class" and yanked the app.
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So imagine for a sec that Canada repealed C-11, belatedly heeding the advice of the 6,132 people who wrote into Moore and Clement's consultation to warn them, that this was going to happen. When that happens, some smart Waterloo grads, backed by some RIM money, can go into business making jailbreaking kits and app store infrastructure for iPhones, and they can sell these to everyone in the world who wants to operate their own app store, who wants to compete with Apple.
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Offer the world a 90% discount on Apple's app tax, and you're talking about a ten billion dollar/year business. Maybe Canada will never have another RIM, but RIM had a tough business. They had to make hardware, which is risky and capital intensive. Legalize jailbreaking and we can let *Apple* make the hardware, and then we can cream off the hundred billion dollars in rents they book *every year*. That's a *much* better business to be in.
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You know what Jeff Bezos said to a roomful of publishers when he started Amazon? "Your margin is my opportunity." But these guys are such crybabies. When they do it to us it's progress; when we do it to them, it's piracy.
I mean, come on. Elbows up, right? Move fast and break *their* things. Move fast and break *kings*.
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You know all that stuff we failed to get Big Tech to do? Pay for news, put cancon in their streaming lineups? This is how we get it. We can't make Apple or Google or Netflix change their software. We can fine 'em, sure, but Trump will just order his judges not to issue court orders when we try to collect, and ban his banks from transferring the money.
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In any game, the ref has to be more powerful than the players on the field. Otherwise, they'll do exactly what Big Tech has done to us: ignore our rulings and keep on cheating.
We don't have any hope of controlling what Big Tech does, but there is one thing we have total, absolute control over: what *we* do. We don't have to let American companies make use of our courts to shut down Canadian companies that disenshittify their defective products.
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The laws of Canada are under total and final Canadian control. Repeal Bill C-11, legalize jailbreaking, and we'll unshackle our technologists and entrepreneurs, and sic 'em on those subpar American products.
Meta takes the news out of its apps? Let 'em! We'll just start selling a multiprotocol alt-client, one that merges your Facebook, Insta, Twitter, Linkedin, Bluesky, and Mastodon feeds, blocks all the ads, blocks all the tracking, *and* puts the news back in your feed.
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Netflix won't put Canadian media in their library? Fine! We'll start selling an alt client that lets Canadians search and stream from *all* the services they subscribe to, and adds in a PVR so you can record your favourite shows to watch later, or archive against the day that the streaming company ditches them.
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A video recorder would handily delete Amazon Prime's grinchiest scam, where all the Christmas specials move from the free tier to $3.99 rentals in November, and go back into the free tier in March. Just record the kids' most beloved Christmas specials in July and bring 'em out in December.
Think about this for a second: we *uninvented* the VCR. The VCR, one of the most popular, transformative technologies in modern history. A wildly profitable technology, too.
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Once all the video went digital, and once all the digital video threw in an "access control" that blocked recording, it became a crime to record digital cable, satellite, or streaming, unless you used the service's own PVR, which won't let you tape some shows, or skip ads, and which deletes your stored shows when the broadcaster decides you don't deserve to have them anymore.
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It's not illegal to record a video stream, no more than it was illegal to record a TV show off your analog cable or broadcast receiver. The same fair dealing exemptions apply. But because it's illegal to bypass an access control, and the access control blocks recording, we uninvented the VCR. We made the VCR illegal.
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Not because Parliament ever passed a law banning VCRs, but because our anti-circumvention law allows dominant corporations to simply decide that certain conduct that they disprefer should no longer occur.
With Bill C-11, we've created "felony contempt of business model." In living memory, video recording changed the world and made billions of dollars. Today, we've all lost our video recorders.
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