275: Who Are Canada’s Tech Giants Aligned With?

January 26, 2026

The Canadian Companies Inside America’s Intelligence Stack

Hootsuite did not expect to become a political object.

For years it occupied a comfortable place in the Canadian imagination: a successful Vancouver tech firm, globally relevant, publicly neutral. That neutrality collapsed the moment its work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE became visible.

Now there is a protest planned outside Hootsuite’s Vancouver offices, and a question the company can no longer avoid is being asked out loud: aligned with whom?

Hootsuite’s tools do not arrest people. They do not deport families. What they do is far subtler and far more modern. Social listening, analytics, and narrative monitoring transform public discourse into a dataset. They make sentiment measurable, coordination legible, and dissent predictable. In contemporary governance, that is core infrastructure. Enforcement no longer begins with force; it begins with visibility.

That is why the protest is significant. Not because Hootsuite is uniquely culpable, but because it reveals a broader and far more consequential pattern.

Canadian companies are not standing outside American power. They are embedded within it.

Consider Thomson Reuters, anchored by the Thomson family, one of the wealthiest families in Canada. Through legal, financial, compliance, and investigative platforms, Thomson Reuters sits at the centre of global information flows that define how modern states see and act. Products like CLEAR do not merely assist investigations; they structure them. They determine who becomes a lead, how quickly systems move, and which lives become administratively actionable.

This is what intelligence looks like now. Not clandestine agencies alone, but databases, workflows, and risk models supplied by private firms. Intelligence has become an ecosystem and the Thomson empire is one of its pillars.

That influence extends beyond software. The Thomson family also owns The Globe and Mail, Canada’s most influential newspaper. That combination, shaping both the information infrastructure used by enforcement and the media narratives through which Canadians understand power, should give us pause. It is not that this ownership is conspiratorial. It is that it is consequential. When the same elite interests mediate both how power operates and how it is discussed, silence and restraint become forms of alignment.

And alignment is the central issue here.

Shopify is often defended as “just a platform,” but platforms govern by default. Payments, hosting, moderation, and access to livelihoods are enforcement mechanisms in everything but name. Shopify’s leadership has been explicit about its politics, its affinities, and its worldview. When Canadian platforms internalize American ideological battles and assumptions, they quietly import those conflicts into Canada’s economic and civic life.

Add to this constellation companies like OpenText, Magnet Forensics, BlackBerry, CAE, and L3Harris WESCAM. Some manage records. Some extract digital evidence. Some train military and border personnel. Some provide airborne surveillance systems. None of them issue commands. All of them make commands executable.

This is the vulnerability Canada faces.

Canada’s sovereignty problem is not just legal. It is infrastructural. The country remains nominally independent, yet many of the systems that enable authority: data aggregation, surveillance, communications, enforcement logistics, and narrative control, are supplied by firms economically and culturally aligned with the United States. When pressure increases, those systems do not answer to Ottawa. They answer to contracts, markets, and political centres south of the border.

That matters now that the U.S. is no longer a benign or predictable partner. It is not enough for Canadian companies to claim neutrality. Neutrality is not insulation. It is exposure.

Which brings us to the Thomsons, and to a question that deserves to be asked plainly: what would it look like if Canada’s most powerful corporate families chose Canada?

They could refuse certain categories of enforcement work. They could draw public red lines around the use of commercial data against civilians. They could invest in Canadian civic infrastructure rather than deeper integration into American security markets. They could use their media power to surface these debates rather than quietly managing them. None of this requires radicalism. It requires commitment.

The same is true for Hootsuite. The protest outside its offices is not just about ICE. It is about whether Canadian firms understand themselves as passive vendors or as political actors with agency. Once a company becomes part of the intelligence stack of a foreign power, opting out of politics is no longer an option.

Canada does not need to be invaded to be constrained. It only needs to be dependent.

The protest at Hootsuite is a crack in the façade. It makes visible what has long been taken for granted: that authority now moves through infrastructure, and infrastructure answers to those who build and own it. The question is no longer whether Canadian companies are inside America’s intelligence stack. They are.

The question is whether any of them are prepared to stand openly with Canada before alignment hardens into submission and obedience.