On Sovereignty and Control
Thoughts on the federal government's sovereign policy push
Today, I want to explore the concept of sovereignty and how it is being used. The term has obviously been having a moment. Whether it is Sovereign AI, data and cloud sovereignty, Arctic sovereignty, sovereign critical minerals, or the idea of nation-building major resource extraction and infrastructure projects — there has been a strong push towards reestablishing and reasserting Canadian sovereignty.
I find this kind of use of the term sovereignty concerning on a number of fronts. The ease and speed that this has been accepted as an urgent imperative for Canadian policymaking has glossed over the extent to which the very concept of sovereignty is a contested term, with a messy, and bloody, history.
For the federal government, data sovereignty, is defined as “Canada’s right to control access to and disclosure of its digital information subject only to Canadian laws.” This is close to how some others define it, with the Canadian Shield Institute, for example, framing sovereignty as “retaining control over the systems and platforms that shape our economy and our society.”
The question of “control” is central to both definitions. Yet to frame sovereignty in these ways dodges crucial questions around who is sovereign, who has the power to exercise their sovereignty, and by what means sovereignty is maintained.
These are not clear cut questions. Just consider the actual word sovereignty. Its roots are in the power to rule over - to be the supreme lawmaking authority in the land. In the Western tradition, this power ultimately rested with God, with sovereign monarchs as its earthly embodiment. “L’État, c’est moi” as Louis XIV apocryphally said emphasizing the absolute divine right of kings.
Yet even during the reign of Louis XIV, this was a contested notion. The English chopped off the head of their monarch shortly after Louis took the throne, and a few decades later, the English again deposed another monarch. In the process of that so-called “Glorious Revolution,” they established the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty, a concept that remains central to Canada’s constitution through to the present day.
This reflected the trend towards conceiving sovereignty as residing in a political community rather than an individual sovereign ruler. But once again, there were strict dividing lines about who was able to be a part of that political community, and thus exercise sovereignty. Membership of the British political community was restricted to men of property for centuries afterwards, denying women membership of the sovereign body politic. Similarly, while the US Declaration of Independence stated that “all men are created equal,” the nascent US political community was one built on Black slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the systemic exclusion of women.
These might seem historical debates, but they are very much alive. It should not be forgotten that the US only enfranchised African Americans in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act — well within the lifetimes of many readers of this newsletter. Yet even despite that, racial gerrymandering as well as state and judicial rollbacks of the VRA are still restricting who gets to be included in America’s body politic. As I write this, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the constitutionality of ending birthright citizenship, a question fundamentally about who gets to be included and who is excluded from the sovereign American political community.
Similar trends are present in Canada. Whether past colour bars on immigration or the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry, the idea of who gets to participate in Canada’s sovereign political community has had strict limits on it that exist to the present day. This can be seen in the gendered, ableist, and racialized divisions inherent in Canada’s immigration policy. While certain “high skilled” workers have had clear paths to permanent residency and citizenship, other workers, such as agricultural and domestic workers, have until very recently been denied that path regardless of how long they lived in Canada. And even recent gains, where they exist, are very much conditional. This can be seen with the passage last week of Bill C-12, which grants the immigration minister sweeping powers to cancel permits and status without due process.
Even more fundamentally, the very idea of Canadian sovereignty has been built on the colonization of sovereign indigenous nations. In theory, Canada has nation-to-nation treaty relationships with Indigenous communities. However, in practice these have rarely been respected, as the peoples of Onihcikiskwapiwin last year argued in a challenge to the governments of Canada and Alberta to uphold their binding treaty obligations.
Danielle Smith’s and Mark Carney’s MoU and the One Canadian Economy initiatives that override Indigenous sovereignty, typify what Harsha Walia describes as “expansionist frontier colonialism.” For her, this manifests as “genocidal violence, dispossession, infrastructure development, and resource extraction —from railroads to pipelines—[all] justified in the name of ‘national interest.’” This is an exercise of sovereignty in ways that deny it to others.
Sovereignty is always contested and who gets it is rooted in who has power. As Hannah Arendt once argued, “the famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical means.”
And all of this isn’t even to get into how the idea of any political community exercising any kind of absolute sovereignty is increasingly absurd in an interconnected and interdependent world. It doesn’t explore how the idea of nations as a “unified legal spaces,” as Quinn Slobodian argues, overlooks how special economic zones and the like create one set of laws for some and different sets for others. Nor is it to get into what sovereignty means when large corporations and their obscenely wealthy owners exercise ever more powers that used to be the exclusive purview of sovereign states.
To quote Arendt again, “sovereignty is possible only in imagination, paid for by the price of reality.”
So what, then, does it really mean to reassert Canadian sovereignty and design a vast array of policies around the idea? It certainly does not seem to be about in any substantive way enhancing the freedom and power of an expansive view of the Canadian body politic.
Instead, to go back to the government’s own definitions, it is about control, and a narrow conception of who gets to exercise that control. Digital sovereignty and other such efforts are, as Blair Attard-Frost has argued, “a policy frame that has more to do with legitimizing nationalist narratives of technocratic control and securitization.”
With Bill C-22 also proposing unprecedented surveillance and monitoring powers for the federal government in ways that challenge constitutional and human rights risks, this push securitization agenda is deeply disturbing.
We should not accept lightly the use of sovereignty as a cloak for ever greater control.