Canada’s cloud market is 85% American and new report says that’s a problem

A new report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project is calling Canada’s cloud computing market broken, and the argument goes deeper than simply pointing at American dominance. According to the report, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft together control roughly 85 percent of the Canadian cloud market. The concern, however, is not just concentration. It is what happens when customers try to leave.

Curtis McCord, policy analyst and co-author of the report, put it plainly. Adding Canadian cloud providers to the mix does not fix anything meaningful if customers cannot realistically switch between them. The cost of moving workloads from one provider to another is high enough that most organizations stay put regardless of alternatives. Without compatibility standards forcing providers to work together, new domestic options risk creating what the report calls “maplewashed dependencies,” Canadian branding wrapped around the same fundamental lock-in problem.

Joel Blit, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo, framed the stakes in terms of market power. Whenever a handful of companies control a piece of critical infrastructure, those companies gain leverage over pricing, access, and terms that customers cannot easily push back against. Cloud computing, he noted, now underpins government services, banking, healthcare, and most of the digital economy. As AI becomes more central to how organizations operate, that leverage extends further. Whoever controls the cloud increasingly influences who can access AI at scale.

Google and Amazon have both moved to eliminate some data transfer fees for departing customers, and Microsoft points to portability commitments in its public statements. Those steps, though, followed sustained pressure from European and UK regulators rather than voluntary initiative. Canadian regulators, by contrast, have not launched comparable scrutiny. The federal Competition Bureau confirmed it is not currently running any studies on cloud concentration in Canada.

Canada’s draft national AI strategy, a version of which was obtained by CBC News, does mention working toward shared standards with international partners and reducing reliance on foreign cloud providers. How far that language carries into actual policy remains to be seen.

McCord and Blit both argue that interoperability standards offer the most direct path to real competition. Blit acknowledged the trade-off, noting that locking in standards too early can freeze the wrong technology in place. Getting that timing right is the harder part of the problem.