Boycott America? Canadians Are Doing It on an iPhone, Through Google, Over American Wires
Opinion by Jason LaFace, Editor / CEO, Alberta Radio
Saturday, October 3, 2026
Here's a test for every Canadian with a "Boycott USA" sticker on the fridge. Put down your phone. Close Facebook. Don't Google anything. Cancel Netflix. Stay off Microsoft Outlook at work. Make sure your bank, your hospital, and your federal government aren't running on Amazon, Microsoft, or Google servers.
You can't. Nobody in this country can. That doesn't fit the story Ottawa has been selling.
For years, the Liberal government and the media outlets it funds have taught Canadians to treat the United States as the villain. A lot of people bought it. Let's look at what that hatred is built on and who's actually responsible for the mess we're in.
The anger is real. The aim is wrong.
Abacus Data's September 2026 polling found 77% of Canadians say they'll avoid American products completely or buy as few as possible. Morning Consult has 65% actively boycotting, the second-highest rate of the 47 countries it tracks. Léger found 41% of Canadians now call the United States an enemy country, up 15 points in about a year.
An enemy. That's the country that defends our continent, buys most of what we export, and makes the software that runs nearly every Canadian's day.
Here's the part the CBC won't tell you. Americans don't hate us back. Angus Reid found 79% of Americans view Canadians favourably, and Americans oppose tariffs on Canada 59% to 24%. Léger found 64% of Canadians say their view of the U.S. would change if Trump left office. So this isn't a natural feud between two peoples. It's a grudge Canadians were taught to carry.
Where the internet you use actually lives
The cloud. RBC's 2026 Sovereign AI report says three U.S. companies make up about 85% of Canada's cloud infrastructure spending. Those are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Research cited by Policy Options says more than 80% of Canadian cloud services rely on foreign infrastructure.
Ottawa itself. When Shared Services Canada ran its major commercial cloud procurement, the four prequalified bidders were Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Every one of them is American. The government that cheered you on for dumping Kentucky bourbon put its own workloads on American servers.
The software. A 2026 Policy Options analysis of tools used across government found two-thirds were run by companies subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act. That law lets American authorities compel a company to hand over data in its control, wherever the data is stored. Only 17% of those tools were Canadian-owned.
Search and social. Statcounter puts Google at about 86% of Canadian search as of July 2026, with Microsoft's Bing second at about 9%. Environics found 89% of Canadians use social media weekly, led by Facebook (67%), YouTube (53%), and Instagram (41%). All three are owned by American companies.
Your phone. It runs Apple's iOS or Google's Android, and your apps come from Apple's App Store or Google Play. The boycott is mostly organized on Facebook, shared on Instagram, and posted to YouTube.
The wires. A CIRA and Packet Clearing House study of more than 2.2 million network routes found traffic between two places in Canada crossed into the U.S. 64% of the time. University of Toronto researchers call it "boomerang routing." A Toronto-to-Montreal message can run through New York or Chicago because Canadian carriers built bigger links south than east-west.
Canadians aren't digitally independent. We rent our online lives from American companies, and Ottawa knows it.
Ottawa keeps picking fights it can't win
This isn't the first time Ottawa has tried to bully American tech. The Online News Act was supposed to make Meta and Google pay Canadian newsrooms. Meta blocked news for Canadians on Facebook and Instagram in August 2023 instead, and it has stayed blocked. The Liberals' digital services tax was meant to squeeze American tech companies. Ottawa scrapped it in June 2025 the moment Washington pushed back. Both times, Ottawa threatened American tech companies that hold the power, and Canadians paid for it.
Trump didn't write those laws. Trump didn't leave Canada with no domestic cloud worth mentioning, an internet routed through Chicago, and a government running on Microsoft. Those were choices Ottawa made over ten years of Liberal government. Yes, tariffs hurt, and everybody in Alberta feels them. But a country that lets itself become this dependent, then picks fights with its biggest partner for applause back home, has to own the result.
It started in 2022
If you want to know when Ottawa decided its own citizens were the enemy, go back to February 14, 2022. That day, Justin Trudeau's government invoked the Emergencies Act against the trucker convoy for the first time in Canadian history. It froze protesters' bank accounts, banned public assemblies, and sent police in to clear the streets of Ottawa.
The courts have now said twice that it was illegal. In January 2024, Justice Richard Mosley of the Federal Court ruled the invocation was unreasonable and violated the Charter. On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal unanimously agreed. It found the government had no reasonable grounds to believe there was a national emergency, said the protests "fell well short of a threat to national security," and ruled the government acted beyond its legal authority. Ottawa still hasn't accepted the verdict. It asked the Supreme Court to hear the case in March 2026.
That's the pattern of the last four years. Ottawa labels whoever disagrees with it as dangerous, whether that's truckers, Albertans, or now Americans. Canadians are told who to hate, and the people who refuse get treated as suspect.
No vote for Brussels, but lectures for Alberta
Now Mark Carney is talking with Brussels about Canada becoming an "associate member" of the European Union. He calls it a "unique alliance." Nobody voted for that. It wasn't in any campaign Albertans were asked to judge, and no referendum has been promised.
Carney and his supporters spent the last year and a half calling anyone who talked about closer ties with the United States, or about Alberta charting its own course, a traitor to the country. Americans talking about a 51st state was supposedly an assault on Canadian sovereignty. Carney offering Canada to Brussels without a vote is apparently fine.
You can't call one partnership a threat to sovereignty and sell the other as a "unique alliance" because you like the people in Brussels better.
Canadians aren't laughing with them
Many Canadians, especially here in Alberta, have watched the progressive left lurch from one controversy to the next for a decade. Each one came from its own ideology, and each one was pushed with the same certainty and the same contempt for anyone who asked questions. The anti-American crusade is the latest of them, and it may be the most self-defeating. You can't boycott the country you depend on for your phone, your search engine, your cloud, and your internet connection without looking ridiculous. A lot of us are laughing.
Be angry at bad policy in Washington if you want. But look at Ottawa first. The people who froze bank accounts, broke the law to clear protesters, picked tech fights they couldn't win, and are now negotiating with Europe behind your back are Canadian politicians.
Americans aren't our enemy. They're our neighbours, and our wiring runs through their country. The real damage to this country has come from Ottawa.
Jason LaFace, Editor / CEO, Alberta Radio
Sources
Digital dependence
Public opinion
Emergencies Act
Carney and the EU
Wall Street Journal report on "associate member" talks (Sep 13–14, 2026), covered by Reuters, BBC, Globe and Mail; Carney's "unique alliance" remarks (Reuters / BBC). These are the same sources used in the Alberta Radio Carney–EU piece.
