Elevate Festival became Nrth on Tuesday night, but the more consequential change underway at the Toronto technology festival may be visible in its agenda.

Sovereignty (Canadian control over technology, infrastructure, capital, defence capabilities, payments and other strategic systems) has emerged as one of the defining themes of the newly renamed festival.

The organization says the new name is about more than just a rebrand, but direction and mandate expansion. Elevate was created in 2017 to put Canadian innovation in the spotlight; Nrth is intended to help Canadian founders and business leaders figure out where technology and the economy are heading and how to compete there. CEO Lisa Zarzeczny told BetaKit that when she looks across this year’s agenda, sovereignty is now “layered across every single content track,” much as AI is. (Nrth Festival)

The Canadian resonance of the name is hard to miss. Nrth’s stated vision is “a Canada where innovation becomes our greatest competitive advantage,” while its new year-round mandate extends beyond showcasing Canadian companies to helping them find customers, investors and adopters. (Nrth Festival)

That reflects a significant change in the Canadian technology conversation. For much of the last decade, discussions about the country’s innovation economy centred on producing startups, retaining talent and raising enough capital to scale them. The question increasingly being asked now is different: what does Canada actually need to own, control or retain access to?

At Nrth, that question is turning up almost everywhere.

Tech Sovereignty beyond AI

AI maybe the most currently visible focus, but it is far from the only technology focus, and while it’s been something we’ve been exploring as a country for a while, these issues have come into sharper, focus, and base of months for obvious reasons. Wednesday morning opened an entire Sovereign Growth stage with BDC CEO Isabelle Hudon and DMZ executive director Abdullah Snobar asking whether Canada can turn homegrown technology into a competitive advantage. The framing extended explicitly across AI, defence, critical infrastructure, energy and advanced manufacturing. (Nrth Festival)

A defence session examined how Canadian drones, counter-drone systems and autonomous technologies can move from demonstrations into procurement by the Canadian Armed Forces. Another considered whether centralized cloud computing is appropriate for an AI economy, arguing for more distributed and sovereign Canadian compute infrastructure. (Nrth Festival)

“Building a Sovereign Digital Foundation” looked farther down the software stack, at reducing dependence on centralized platforms and giving developers greater control over where and how applications are deployed. (Nrth Festival)

On the main stage, Interac, the Canadian Shield Institute and North Exit Ventures addressed “The Advantage Canada Can’t Afford to Lose,” explicitly connecting homegrown technology and infrastructure with Canada’s economic resilience. At almost exactly the same time, Cohere Canada, Microsoft Canada and the SANS Institute were asking “Who Owns the AI Infrastructure?”, covering compute, data centres, connectivity and cybersecurity as strategic national assets. (Nrth Festival)

Even biomaterials made the sovereignty agenda, with a session examining Canadian ownership of advanced-material manufacturing technology with applications ranging from medical devices to defence. Later Wednesday, the theme moves literally into orbit, with Kepler Communications, NordSpace and Canada Rocket Company discussing the fact that Canada remains dependent on other countries for access to space. (Nrth Festival)

This is considerably broader than the debate about whether Canada needs a domestic large language model. Sovereignty is increasingly being treated as an economic architecture question: which capabilities does a country need to possess itself, which can safely be purchased elsewhere, and what happens when strategically important systems are controlled outside its borders?

The loonie goes digital?

Perhaps the clearest example is money.

Nrth’s fintech program Wednesday morning moved quickly from the evolving role of the Bank of Canada to Wealthsimple’s “The Future of Money, Made in Canada,” focused on real-time payments, open banking and a Canadian stablecoin. That was followed by a panel bluntly titled “Overrated or Necessary? Building the Loonie Stablecoin,” examining whether Canada needs a Canadian-dollar-denominated stablecoin and what it could mean for payments, regulation and the broader digital economy. (Nrth Festival)

The timing is remarkable.

On Tuesday, BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank and TD jointly announced that they are exploring Canadian-dollar digital money, beginning with tokenized bank deposits. The first phase would allow tokenized deposits to move across financial institutions, with a longer-term objective of connecting the system with other emerging digital-asset initiatives. (TD Stories)

There is an important distinction here. The banks have not announced a stablecoin.

A tokenized deposit remains a liability of a bank — essentially an ordinary bank deposit represented digitally on a distributed ledger. A stablecoin can be issued separately and backed by reserves. Canada’s banking regulator, OSFI, clarified on September 10 that tokenized deposits are not legally different from traditional deposits simply because the underlying technology changes. (OSFI)

That clarification created a relatively direct regulatory path for the banks. Canada’s separate Stablecoin Act, meanwhile, establishes a framework for fiat-backed stablecoins, including registration, 1:1 high-quality liquid reserves and Bank of Canada oversight, with the broader framework expected to come into force in 2027. (Canada)

So Canada now has several models developing at once: regulated banks exploring tokenized deposits, independent companies developing Canadian-dollar stablecoins, and policymakers building the rules governing the latter.

The debate is no longer whether money will become more programmable. It is increasingly who will issue Canada’s digital money, on whose infrastructure it will travel, how systems will interoperate, and whether the Canadian dollar retains a meaningful presence as global finance moves onchain.

That makes the stablecoin discussion a sovereignty discussion too.

And it is a useful illustration of what appears to be happening throughout Nrth: questions that only recently looked like narrow technology questions are becoming questions of industrial policy, infrastructure and national economic strategy.

What’s ahead Wednesday

As of Wednesday lunchtime in Toronto, several of the day’s most interesting sessions are still to come:

• 1:25 p.m. — Mistral, “Build Your Own Frontier AI.” A discussion of companies building proprietary AI systems rather than simply consuming general-purpose models. (Nrth Festival)
• 1:35 p.m. — Cohere and Mozilla, “Open Models, Open Future.” The implications of open models for competition and who gets to build on AI infrastructure. (Nrth Festival)
• 2:15 p.m. — “Who Gets to Set the Rules for AI?” CIFAR’s Elissa Strome, ISED associate deputy minister Mark Schaan and Jaxson Khan examine regulation, competitiveness and AI policy. (Nrth Festival)
• 2:55 p.m. — BMO, “Everything Is Remembered.” A look at persistent, continuously adapting AI systems rather than models that begin each interaction largely from scratch. (Nrth Festival)
• 3:05 p.m. — ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski on human-AI interaction, as voice becomes an interface for real-time agents. (Nrth Festival)
• 3:25 p.m. — Zafin, “The Hidden Debt of Agentic AI.” CTO Shahir Daya will focus on authority, workflow governance, what agents are allowed to do and when humans intervene — one of the more concrete enterprise-agent governance sessions on the schedule. (Nrth Festival)
• 3:35 p.m. — “Sovereignty in Orbit.” Kepler, NordSpace and Canada Rocket Company close the day’s sovereignty thread with Canada’s dependence on foreign launch capability and the strategic importance of domestic space infrastructure. (Nrth Festival)

Nrth still has plenty of AI on the program. But the more notable shift is what now surrounds it.

The discussion in Toronto is moving from where can we innovate and how do we compete? toward who owns it, who controls it, where it runs, who can buy it, who sets its rules and how much of its economic value Canada gets to keep.

For a festival that just renamed itself Nrth, that may be the most Canadian theme it could have chosen.