As the president of Torstar, an independent and wholly Canadian-owned news company, we employ over 300 journalists at the Toronto Star and a range of local news outlets across Ontario. In many communities, our reporters are the only ones left covering city halls, courts, and school boards.

Our reporting – and nearly all Canadian journalism from a large outlet down to an individual journalist – must pass through U.S. giants’ tech stack on its way to reach local audiences.

We are all dangerously dependent on technologies owned by Silicon Valley billionaires and under the ultimate control of the Trump administration, who are increasingly willing to weaponize our dependence.

As the Carney government works to decouple our country from the United States, they appear to understand our peril. The Prime Minister said at Davos, “Canada should not be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.” [KM1] [GM2] 

On this, I firmly agree. The signs of danger are mounting: 

• the White House shut off judges and prosecutors at the Hague from email, cloud storage, and payments, severely disrupting their operations
• Meta’s ongoing block on Canadians’ access to news on its platforms, Mark Zuckerberg working with Trump to “defeat foreign laws” that try to regulate them
• Trump holding USMCA and our economy hostage until we surrendered a modest tax on U.S. tech giants, since repealed in exchange for nothing, and followed by demands that we concede the Online News and Online Streaming Acts

But the government’s actions are falling far short in the face of our greatest vulnerabilities. 

Instead of bolstering our defences against foreign interference and information manipulation, the federal government is conceding regulation, cutting programs, and leaving our free press – already undermined by U.S. tech giants’ gatekeeper platforms – to be ripped out and fed into AI models. A first-of-its-kind study by McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy found that Google Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude have all ingested Canadian journalism at scale, while creating substitutes for the original source that still get the facts wrong.

Imagine that tomorrow we face an emergency, and our government needs to communicate urgently with us. Nearly every channel for communication – from YouTube to news and government websites - is subject to U.S. jurisdiction and could be throttled or shut off. France and Germany are already swapping out U.S. tech that falls under American jurisdiction and control.

Instead of minimizing our dependence, Ottawa is leaning into it. The federal public sector spends over $100 million a year advertising on U.S. tech giants like Google. This figure will no doubt increase with Budget 2025’s $345 million injection into the government’s ad budget.  The federal government also shows no desire to close off the loophole in the Income Tax Act that gives U.S. tech giants a $1.4 billion subsidy on their digital ads.

U.S. courts have ruled Google has an illegal monopoly over digital advertising, which has deprived information producers and publishers of billions of dollars in revenue worldwide. 

Google’s latest trick is to use its search bots to scrape data for its AI Overviews. Their bots’ dual purpose means we have no way to stop them from creating substitutes for our journalism and depriving us of traffic.

We are losing our ability to engage from a place of shared truth with Canadian news and information at the whim of foreign tech giants. Journalism is being replaced by AI slop, while mis- and disinformation is thriving. The recent revelation of a foreign ‘slopaganda’ YouTube channel promoting Alberta separatism is only the latest example of many.

This is why I told Parliamentarians: any digital or AI policy proposal that ignores or even accepts U.S. tech dominance is now fundamentally inconsistent with Canada’s interests. 

Our country is one of the most highly literate, educated, tech-savvy and online populations in the world, with many promising tech and AI start-ups and scale-ups. We still have hundreds of independent and wholly Canadian-owned and controlled media outlets, including the Toronto Star and our national public media service, CBC/Radio-Canada.

While we do compete for Canadians’ attention, we increasingly must work together in defence of our information and digital sovereignty. 

We must act in defence of our free press, our prosperity and security, and our ability as Canadians to debate and decide our future together. 

Angus Frame, President, Torstar Corporation