Team Canada has an information problem

The collapse of Canada-United States trade negotiations marks more than another escalation in a tariff dispute. It confirms that the assumptions underpinning Canada’s economic relationship with the U.S. have fundamentally changed.

The U.S. has imposed 50-per-cent tariffs on roughly $28-billion of Canadian goods. Canada will match them dollar for dollar on Sept. 8, targeting steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Prime Minister Mark Carney has suspended negotiations, committed $25-billion to protect affected workers and businesses, and promised that Budget 2026 will go further to make Canada one of the best places in the world to invest and build.

Canadians across the country want a strong Team Canada approach. But there is an overlooked prerequisite: we need to become far better at connecting ourselves. 

Consider a Canadian manufacturer suddenly forced to replace a U.S. supplier, or a pulp mill about to lose its American market. The questions are immediate. Who else can supply the input? Which transportation routes have capacity? Which Canadian firms have the necessary capabilities? Which workers have the required skills? Which programs can help? And how quickly can policymakers identify the firms, communities, and workers most exposed?

Much of the necessary information already exists. It is simply distributed across federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and private-sector organizations using different systems, standards, definitions, and governance arrangements.

One of us spent a career at Statistics Canada helping build the country’s national statistical infrastructure. The other, a public policy expert, helped to implement it. From our experience as “bridge builders,” the gap is unmistakable. 

Canada can measure its economy in aggregate with real precision, and still be unable to assemble, within a few short weeks of a trade shock, an operational picture of which supplier, which route, and which worker is exposed. That costs Canada time, precisely when speed matters most.

This is not an argument for one giant federal database. 

It is an urgent call to first ministers to establish a sustainable federal-provincial-territorial (FPT) governance framework for public sector data interoperability as a Team Canada strategic public asset for the common good. This is the same logic that let competing Canadian banks build Interac, a shared national network none of them controls alone but all of them rely on. It is not only doable, but also urgent, given where we find ourselves. It should come before the budget.

Our research at CIRANO has proposed such a federated approach, including an FPT interoperability agreement and a perennial mechanism for public sector data and AI governance.

The capacity built to absorb a shock is the same capacity that makes the domestic market work in ordinary times. Shared standards, discoverable data, and trusted governance are infrastructure in their own right; they lower the cost of finding a supplier, hiring a worker, entering another province’s market, or scaling a firm nationally. 

They belong alongside national strategic infrastructure, not on the margins of a digital agenda. Artificial intelligence sharpens the point. AI cannot compensate for fragmented information, and this country cannot build sovereign AI capacity on fragmented data.

The federal government is already removing internal trade barriers and building what the prime minister calls “one Canadian economy.” But a genuinely integrated economy requires more than deleting regulations. It requires the ability to connect the information that lets governments and businesses see the economy as a whole.

Team Canada needs to select critical high-value national priorities—such as supply-chain resilience, internal trade, labour mobility, emergency preparedness, and economic adjustment—and quickly agree on common standards and identifiers; build secure mechanisms for exchanging data; and set clear rules for privacy, accountability, and trustworthy AI.

Much of the policy architecture already exists. What is missing is sustained FPT collaboration—including municipalities and Indigenous governments—in implementation. Team Canada faces an imperative to bring existing initiatives into a coherent federated architecture.

A tariff cannot be stopped by better data. The ability to securely connect and use reliable and timely information will help Team Canada identify vulnerabilities faster, redirect supply chains, support workers, and find new markets before the next shock becomes a crisis. External diversification requires internal data interoperability.

Tony Labillois is an independent consultant and former senior executive at Statistics Canada. His current work focuses on data interoperability, trustworthy AI and public-sector governance. Alain Dudoit is a CIRANO Fellow and strategic advisor in Ottawa. He is a former public servant who held senior positions in the Privy Council Office, and the Departments of Finance, Foreign Affairs, and International Trade, as well as diplomatic postings abroad. He has extensive experience in supply-chain resilience, common data spaces, public sector data interoperability, and digital sovereignty.

The Hill Times