The Ben Mulroney Show - Is Canada too reliant on Foreign Tech?

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Is Canada too reliant on Foreign Tech? -The Global Push for Digital Sovereignty? Guest: Mohit Rajhans Mediologist and Consultant, ThinkStart.ca If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. It is Tuesday and we got a lot to get to. I remember last week we were having a conversation on this show about a school board in Canada that had a data breach and they had been using an American company to protect their data. There was a data breach and that company then had to pay the ransom and the data was never returned. And it sparked a conversation on data sovereignty that maybe what we should be doing in Canada is finding companies that reside in Canada, making it easier to keep our control, keep dominion over that information. That's one small example.

That's one school board versus all of these other, I mean, think about all the different industries. Think about the data breaches that could happen in the oil and gas industry, in IT, in the service industry. I mean, you name it, even small businesses, right? And so there are conversations happening around the world over what nations should do to protect its citizens and its industries data from encroachment

from foreign leaders and from foreign players rather. And so there are a growing number of countries that are pursuing data sovereignty policies and procedures foreign players rather. And so there are a growing number of countries that are pursuing data sovereignty policies and procedures. And to talk about this is Mohit Rajan's great friend of the show, great friend of mine, meteorologist, he works with thinkstart.ca. Welcome to the show, Mohit.

Ben, Ben, Ben, how are you? Good, okay, so look, the global trend is clear. Digital sovereignty is not optional. It is a national imperative. But it sounds good, but walk me through how it would happen because I know the big companies are the Amazons and the Googles of the world,

and those are American companies. Do we have Canadian analogs that can take over so that we can, so what is ours can stay ours? No, you make a good point. This isn't a flick of the switch situation. In fact, following this for such a long time, I've realized that countries have been doing this to protect their own data for a very long time. And Canada might be a little bit late to this party. You know, I think you might remember certain times when we went on to YouTube early and a video was banned in our region. And we were like,

wait a minute, this is the whole purpose of this, the idea that we're supposed to be able to watch videos anywhere. So what we're seeing happening in real time, Ben is just we're being exposed to the fact that Canada is a little bit behind when it comes down to understanding this. Why is Canada behind? I mean, I know it's a very Canadian thing that we like to make bold pronouncements at the beginning of the race, and then we just don't even run the race. Well, there's a few things that both Europe, China and Russia, I would say, have done. And

that's sort of mandated how these digital products can be architected within their countries. So it's built within the architecture. The protection is you can't use the software in other countries without them complying. Canada never did that. I think the second part of it, Ben, though, is that we're heavily dependent on the American cloud infrastructure right now. When it comes down to the way we are built,

we've leaned on them. This localization happens through Canada and through the US as well. And I think it matters right now for us to consider how much we're giving up in that process. Okay, so I talked about an example off the top of a school board that was affected by this. But give me a sense of how this could affect the everyday Canadian.

If you're a small business owner, you know what it's like to actually have something found by your your customer in a local area. What's happened as a result of these big conglomerates in play is that they've been able to sort of market themselves and target themselves to potential customers as a result of finding information. So if the data is not protected, small businesses for example will never stand a chance to sell to their local market. And there's also the idea of how you find people for news and information. We've seen so much of this happen in Canada where we don't necessarily know if news and

info is coming from better organizations. And what we can see is that it's because the data is being used by malicious organizations. They're able to retarget and re, you know, reskin what you think is a local Toronto newspaper. And it gets out there. All of this is a part of what we need to protect against and understand why data sovereignty is at play here. Yeah, so, because I remember, I mean, I remember when the cloud started becoming the thing, right? I remember it says, oh, you don't need to keep anything locally on your computer anymore.

It'll exist in the cloud. And everybody thought this is a brilliant and wonderful thing. But if the cloud is not a Canadian cloud, then it's essentially like you're handing over all of your data to somebody else somewhere else and trusting that they are going to be good faith players, good actors and responsible enough with it that if there is a bad faith player that comes in, they will know what to do to protect your data. And that's a whole lot of trust for an entire nation to place on a whole bunch of people and companies that we don't

necessarily know. Excellent point. In fact, it gets to the point of what is innovation at that point, who owns that, you know, if you're making all of these products on the back of our data, then technically isn't it a Canadian product as well. And then there's the economics involved in the way, you know, Canada has to get to a place right now where we can't show leadership in one area of innovation and not the other. We have to at least come to this place for understanding that

there is trade-offs associated with this. We don't want to get to a state where we can't necessarily access the world's best tools as a result of companies not being able to work with our citizens and use our data, etc. But we need it mandated at a federal level of what the companies are allowed to do here, because otherwise we say a big Canadian company, and they've had a cloud, cloud computing relationship with AWS with Amazon, right? Is it is about is the quickest solution to to rewrite that contract that says that all the data that you have has to reside physically in Canada, like that cloud infrastructure has to reside in Canada. Is that what it would take or is it more complex than that? Well, I think it's a little bit more complex only because I don't think all the countries of the world

consider the internet borderless. And that's the premise that the North American, you know, idea is the worldwide web. Other countries haven't created that for themselves. And so while we can probably create a solution that's a little bit more adept to our, our future needs, we have to understand that our actual basic architecture is still heavily dependent on this American system. And I'm not saying that one's better than the other. We've, we've flourished because of that

as well. We need to get into partnerships on the private sector and public sector to make sure we're getting the most benefit out of the data we've been sharing. Is there something that either the government could do or that industry could do on their own immediate, like one step that could at least take us significantly down the route of securing this data and giving us the data sovereignty that we need and deserve?

I'm gonna be honest with you, Ben. I feel like once again, the train has left the station. And instead, what we're going to have to do is go back and clean up what's already been happening at a mass scale. It's the most Canadian thing, man. Like, if we had just had our ducks in a row at the beginning of this thing, if we'd had our eyes open, if we'd acted responsibly, instead of just hoping

for the best, and anybody who's heard those commercials, hope is not a strategy. We have built way too much in this country on hope and not on planning and not on foresight and not on research and not on data. This is just, it's such a Canadian failing that it's almost part of our national identity. It's sad also because we've got the talent in this country to be able to tackle these sorts of solutions right now. And so if we don't expedite the use of infusing into some of this

talent that can help us really create a robust plan here, then there's no point in us even talking about it. It's not going to happen. Mohe, in the last minute that we have, I wanna talk about these videos that are popping up on everybody's social media feed from Google VEO3, this newest AI that just with a few text prompts can give you some visuals that are absolutely insane. Some video I've never seen before. And I'm wondering, we are getting to the point where we are not gonna be able to tell the difference.

And part of me was wondering, I just have a quick question for you on it. Is the solution to determine what is real and not, to give people the ability to look at the metadata of a video so that they can see whether or not it's real or not? Would it be beneficial if we all had a tool where you could press a button

and it could tell you whether it was AI or not? I think that's gonna have to happen. Unfortunately, the actual video creators and the VO3 Google people aren't putting the synthetic label that they had promised on each video. And it's getting out of hand, but also extremely entertaining. We will eventually, in browsers, have indicators

that'll flag synthetic video. I'm sure that's what's coming next. I really hope so, man, because these are entertaining, but you're right. We're going to get to a point where we're going to see something that is going to be complete fabrication and it will be on something serious, not on the fun stuff that we're seeing right now. Mohit really appreciates you on this subject. I hope to talk to you again soon. Take care, man. The best high-concept sci-fi rig of her all in the universe is back.

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