2025 Conference on International Cyber Security | 4-5 November 2025
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Argyri Panezi

Navigating Between the US and the EU: Canada’s Construction of a Technological Sovereignty Narrative

This contribution offers a regulatory and normative analysis of Canada’s recent efforts to articulate a technological sovereignty narrative and agenda, emerging from a historically and geopolitically rooted need to navigate between two distinct yet influential models: those of the United States and the European Union. Canada’s geographical and economic interdependencies with the United States situate it firmly within a North American sphere shaped by security priorities, market integration, and infrastructure interconnection. In the context of a shifting geopolitical landscape, Canada emerges as both ambitious and pragmatic about strengthening its technological capacity, recognizing its direct link to national security and strategic autonomy. Across the Atlantic, Canada engages with a different, more normative framework of technology and cyber governance advanced by the European Union, widely regarded as the key driver of the re-emergence of the technological sovereignty narrative. Does Canada’s positioning between the United States and the European Union reflect an ongoing process of selective adaptation, or the emergence of a distinct and autonomous narrative of technological sovereignty? This paper argues that the dual navigation creates a unique strategic space in which Canada can articulate its own narrative, one that seeks to reconcile interdependence with resilience and strategic control.