Ottawa to help finance nationwide sovereign internet network, Carney says

The federal government will help to finance a new internet network to provide nationwide sovereign internet connectivity, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Tuesday morning.

“We will reinvest the tens of billions of dollars of capital we raise into the infrastructure that Canada needs for the next generation,” Mr. Carney said as part of opening remarks in front of hundreds of guests representing the world’s top investors.

That will mean “helping to finance new nation-building infrastructure, including a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast, with more direct and secure links to Europe and Asia,” he said.

A “broadband backbone” is the high-capacity core of the internet network that carries traffic between cities and countries.

Mr. Carney did not immediately provide further details about the project.

The federal government previously signalled in its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, released in June, that it planned to expand high-capacity fibre lines and satellite connectivity to improve network resilience and limit the effects of disruptions.

Doing so would improve capacity for new projects, such as AI data centres, which Ottawa has championed. The infrastructure underlying these facilities must be operated under Canadian control and Canadian law, the AI strategy says, “not dependent on platforms that can be restricted or withdrawn at the discretion of a foreign government.”

As Mr. Carney’s government continues to seek alternatives to reduce dependence on the United States, calls have grown to develop more networking infrastructure that would avoid routing Canadian data through U.S. internet exchanges, thereby exposing that data to potential surveillance.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and York University studying the journey taken by data between two Canadian points have found that, among their data sets, about a quarter of those journeys routed through American interchanges, exposing that information to access by the U.S. National Security Agency.