A new government white paper on digital sovereignty says Ottawa can’t maintain full control over its data if its data storage supplier is subject to the laws of another country.
Oh, I know as well. But I wouldn’t say it’s stopped with Trudeau’s exit, and I’m not sure about the start point. I’m currently watching a slow moving train wreck in the financial industry, as most of Canada’s Credit Unions move to outsource their online banking to an Indian company – with Regulators offering absolutely no hesitation / road blocks. Canada’s Credit Unions had data center colosites across the country, but now its all in US cloud providers. Like, they literally moved all the cheque processing into Microsoft Azure this year – so even after shit hits the fan and the gov starts faking alarm over US aggression, the gov is still rubber stamping critical industries moving more shit out of Canadian control. Hell, the CEO of Central1 received Business In Vancouver Awards for abandoning a Canadian stack, and pushing it all off-shore – she literally got awards for presiding over the FAILURE of 1/3 of the services her organisation offers to its ‘customers’. Add to that, that the Board of Central1, which is made up largely of “big Credit Union” people like Vancity, and which presided over this strategic failure for the industry, voted to boost their salaries a ton and to consolidate more power with fewer board members (so they can fail more efficiently, with fewer roadblocks! they get like >$100k per year now, for what’s essentially a part time job that they do on the side of their regular jobs). Go figure.
Carney has previously, and is currently in my view, still in favour of this sort of shift. When he was at the BoC, he started the process of killing Canada’s local / smaller financial institutions, and selling out to American big tech. People like Carolyn Rogers, then regulator of BC’s provincial system now #2 at the BoC, helped to enact his vision – she basically set about to kill off the small/medium sized Credit Unions in the province, a process that’s seen the count of CUs drop to like 25 or so (the counts basically halved in the past decade). She’s the one whining about Canadian’s lack of productivity, even though while acting as BC’s financial regulator, she outsourced all her departments audit work to international audit firms. Her screwing that up so badly, is likely the reason she failed upwards out of the BC system – she got skewered by MLAs for her mismanagement of her department and outsourcing contracts a short time prior her “promotion”. She’s also been ‘promoted on’ from numerous positions between then and becoming the #2 at the BoC, moving quickly enough that her impact on the orgs she worked for would be minimized.
Anyhow, those smaller FIs that govs been killing off were also really important for financing things like riskier personal businesses / small businesses – in the past, they’d take those sorts of risks with far fewer hurdles than the banks required, helping to bolster the small business sector which employed a huge number of Canadians. Of course, the government is now trying to figure out why it seems harder for small businesses to get financing… it’s like the gov is too dense to realise that it’s because of the gov’s actions. The solution will almost definitely be “open banking” paired with “let foreigners / fintech conglomerates control the financing!”.
Oh, I know as well. But I wouldn’t say it’s stopped with Trudeau’s exit, and I’m not sure about the start point. I’m currently watching a slow moving train wreck in the financial industry, as most of Canada’s Credit Unions move to outsource their online banking to an Indian company – with Regulators offering absolutely no hesitation / road blocks. Canada’s Credit Unions had data center colosites across the country, but now its all in US cloud providers. Like, they literally moved all the cheque processing into Microsoft Azure this year – so even after shit hits the fan and the gov starts faking alarm over US aggression, the gov is still rubber stamping critical industries moving more shit out of Canadian control. Hell, the CEO of Central1 received Business In Vancouver Awards for abandoning a Canadian stack, and pushing it all off-shore – she literally got awards for presiding over the FAILURE of 1/3 of the services her organisation offers to its ‘customers’. Add to that, that the Board of Central1, which is made up largely of “big Credit Union” people like Vancity, and which presided over this strategic failure for the industry, voted to boost their salaries a ton and to consolidate more power with fewer board members (so they can fail more efficiently, with fewer roadblocks! they get like >$100k per year now, for what’s essentially a part time job that they do on the side of their regular jobs). Go figure.
Carney has previously, and is currently in my view, still in favour of this sort of shift. When he was at the BoC, he started the process of killing Canada’s local / smaller financial institutions, and selling out to American big tech. People like Carolyn Rogers, then regulator of BC’s provincial system now #2 at the BoC, helped to enact his vision – she basically set about to kill off the small/medium sized Credit Unions in the province, a process that’s seen the count of CUs drop to like 25 or so (the counts basically halved in the past decade). She’s the one whining about Canadian’s lack of productivity, even though while acting as BC’s financial regulator, she outsourced all her departments audit work to international audit firms. Her screwing that up so badly, is likely the reason she failed upwards out of the BC system – she got skewered by MLAs for her mismanagement of her department and outsourcing contracts a short time prior her “promotion”. She’s also been ‘promoted on’ from numerous positions between then and becoming the #2 at the BoC, moving quickly enough that her impact on the orgs she worked for would be minimized.
Anyhow, those smaller FIs that govs been killing off were also really important for financing things like riskier personal businesses / small businesses – in the past, they’d take those sorts of risks with far fewer hurdles than the banks required, helping to bolster the small business sector which employed a huge number of Canadians. Of course, the government is now trying to figure out why it seems harder for small businesses to get financing… it’s like the gov is too dense to realise that it’s because of the gov’s actions. The solution will almost definitely be “open banking” paired with “let foreigners / fintech conglomerates control the financing!”.