*Avery Pennarun is the co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, a secure connectivity platform. *
Canada has an advantage we don’t say out loud often enough: most of the world still wants to work with us.
That sounds soft, so it’s easy to underrate. It isn’t. Infrastructure runs on trust. If customers in Toronto, Frankfurt, Tokyo, London, or Chicago can make a purchase without feeling like they’re choosing sides in someone else’s political argument, that trust becomes market access.
“We don’t need to become American to sell to Americans.”
The U.S. is still an enormous technology market. But it isn’t the whole market, and treating it as such is a habit Canadian tech needs to unlearn. The rest of the world is still buying technology, building infrastructure, and trying not to depend on a single country’s output.
This is Canada’s opening to become the trusted base for infrastructure companies selling to a world that wants options. That includes sovereign AI. Canada fits that conversation differently: trusted, technically serious, and good at connecting markets that don’t fully trust each other.
PointClickCare is the latest example in the other direction. According to The Globe and Mail, the healthtech company has a contingency plan to move to the United States if the trade war gets bad enough. It reportedly gets 97 percent of its revenue from the US and described the move as a worst-case scenario it would choose if staying put would risk the business.
But PointClickCare shouldn’t become the template for every Canadian technology company. It’s one company, in one regulated sector, with one very specific customer concentration problem. Most software companies don’t have to choose between being Canadian and being global.
At Tailscale, we see the same trade tension, yet we have come to a different conclusion. We don’t need to become American to sell to Americans. This is software. It crosses borders for a living.
Tailscale is Canadian by design. That says something about the kind of company we want to build: globally useful, trusted, and interoperable, without trying to turn Canadian technology into another closed national silo. We think the world needs more serious infrastructure companies that aren’t automatically American. Customers should be able to buy Canadian technology because it is good, not because they are choosing sides in a geopolitical argument.
Buying the products we want to exist
Being Canadian doesn’t mean being Canada-only. Tailscale has US employees, US customers, US investors, and a US entity. That’s to be expected. The question is whether operating in the US requires making the US the company’s centre of gravity. It doesn’t.
Our product works the same way. Tailscale lets people, devices, and services access infrastructure securely from Toronto, Virginia, Frankfurt, a factory, an airport, even a satellite beyond the Kármán line—the conventional edge of space. Authenticate the right person or machine. Encrypt the traffic. Done.
The old network assumed the office was trusted. Then work moved to homes, clouds, vendors, contractors, and machines that don’t care where the org chart says they live. Trust moved from place to identity. The same thing is happening to companies. Geography is a bad proxy for trust or ambition.
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Canada has the ingredients to build global software infrastructure companies: strong engineers, serious universities, credible customers, and a useful perspective from not being the centre of the universe.
The practical place to start is buying the products we want to exist. Canadian governments, banks, hospitals, telecoms, and insurers often say they want Canadian innovation. Then they require a young Canadian software company to prove it has already sold to everyone except them.
This creates American case studies; it doesn’t build Canadian suppliers. There’s something backwards about a Canadian enterprise discovering a Canadian technology company only after it has incorporated in the US, sold to US customers, raised from US investors, and come back wearing a US flag around its shoulders. At that point, Canada isn’t supporting its tech ecosystem, it’s buying the export model back at a markup.
Making it easy for Canadian buyers
The goal shouldn’t be to force Canadian companies to buy Canadian software because it’s Canadian. That’s how you get worse software and better lobbying. The goal is to make it easy for Canadian buyers to buy from serious Canadian companies when the product is good enough.
That means procurement paths that test capability without requiring a decade of foreign reference customers first. Use pilots. Use risk-based security reviews. Let Canadian companies prove themselves against real requirements, not paperwork designed around incumbents with the largest compliance departments.
Buying locally, when the product is good, builds Canadian assets and independence. It gives companies revenue, references, feedback and operating scars. It also gives the country domestic capacity in identity, cybersecurity, networking, payments, AI infrastructure, health systems and developer tools.
This matters even more now that Canada has moved from talking about AI sovereignty to implementing an AI strategy. AI for All includes sovereign infrastructure, scaling Canadian companies, and using the government as a key customer so Canadian AI companies can grow here. That is the right direction. The test is whether it changes buying behaviour.
Sovereign AI can’t just mean “the GPUs are nearby.” The AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program is meant to expand Canadian compute capacity, support Canadian businesses, integrate Canadian technologies, and reduce reliance on foreign supply chains. Sovereignty also has to mean Canadian institutions can buy from Canadian infrastructure companies, and those companies can stay Canadian while scaling. Otherwise, we’ve built a very expensive dependency with a better press release.
Canada doesn’t need to be almost as good as America. That’s the wrong standard. Canada can be the country global customers trust, the country that connects markets instead of forcing them into camps, and the country where serious companies build for the world without explaining why they haven’t left yet.
Don’t ask companies to stay because it’d be nice. Make staying make sense. Make that the standard.
The opinions and analysis expressed in the above article are those of its author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of BetaKit or its editorial staff. It has been edited for clarity, length, and style.
Feature image courtesy Web Summit Vancouver. Photo by Sam Barnes via Sportsfile.