The Top Developments at Canada’s Newly Branded Tech Conference Show a Nation Gaining Sovereign Momentum

Image: Nrth

Some things are defined by the absence of something else and in CANADA’s case our national identity gain momentum faster by US absence than anything else. that’s one take away from Nrth, previously known as Elevate, which took place this week in Toronto.

For Canadian technology, the centre of gravity has traditionally been south. an LV was a good example of that. It was a concert that brought the industry together, but had no real defined identity of its own was always a bit of an odd duck in the Canadian conference landscape. It wasn’t specifically for startups, although startups had a very visible presence, it wasn’t exclusively technology, although structured around technology, it was a Canadian business tech startup industry gathering that typically featured non-Canadian speakers as its biggest straws and beside global conferences like Collision and Web Summit and vertical conferences like PDAC, struggle to find its place. THIS week, the newly branded NRTH started to come into its own, a metaphor for the growing reality that Canada is doing the same.

In the past, Canadian tech companies has been built in Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver or Waterloo, but the capital was often American, the customers were American, the comparisons were to American competitors and the ultimate validation came from Silicon Valley.

At the first festival under its new Nrth name this week, something different was happening. Not independence from the United States. Not technological autarky. Something subtler and potentially more important: coherence.

Over three days in Toronto, conversations about AI infrastructure connected to conversations about payments, which connected to defence, space, critical minerals, capital, cloud infrastructure and procurement. Again and again, the question underneath them was essentially the same:

What does Canada need to control for itself? That makes the decision to rename Elevate unusually well timed.

Nrth says its new name is about “direction.” Elevate was created in 2017 because Canadian innovation needed greater visibility; Nrth says visibility is no longer enough. Its expanded, year-round role will be to connect Canadian builders with customers, capital, technology adopters and one another. (Nrth Festival)

That may be more consequential than the branding suggests. Canada has long had a cultural anxiety about whether it possesses enough of a distinct identity of its own, living alongside an enormous American cultural and economic engine. Technology has had its own version of the problem. A Canadian startup ecosystem existed, certainly, but its trajectories repeatedly pointed outward, particularly toward the Valley.

Nrth felt like an industry beginning to turn toward itself. Not to close itself off, but to decide what it wants to keep.

Three sessions captured that change particularly well.

1. Who owns the AI infrastructure?

“Who Owns the AI Infrastructure?” could almost have served as the title of the festival.

The session brought together Cohere Canada country manager Michael Pelosi, Microsoft Canada national technology officer John Weigelt and SANS Institute’s Rushmi Hasham to discuss the infrastructure beneath AI: compute, connectivity, cybersecurity, data centres and the global supply chains that support them.

What made the conversation useful was that it moved past the simplistic version of sovereignty in which everything must somehow be Canadian.

Weigelt pointed out that helium extracted in Alberta and Saskatchewan may be refined in Texas, while advanced chip manufacturing itself depends on technology distributed across the Netherlands, Germany, France and elsewhere.

“The concept is not that this all needs to be Canadian,” Weigelt said. “The concept is let’s pick those spots where we need those elements.” (Digital Journal)

That may be the most mature definition of sovereignty to emerge from the week.

A modern economy cannot reproduce every layer of the global technology stack domestically. The strategic task is identifying the places where dependency becomes vulnerability — and determining which capabilities, assets or relationships Canada cannot afford to lose.

That same logic appeared throughout Nrth. The festival devoted an entire Sovereign Growth stage to AI, defence, critical infrastructure, advanced manufacturing and related industries. (Attractions Ontario)

Sovereignty, in other words, was becoming less of a slogan and more of a systems map.

2. Does Canada need a digital loonie of its own?

The fintech discussions made the same question remarkably tangible. Nrth hosted a session explicitly asking whether Canada needs a Canadian-dollar stablecoin, alongside broader discussions about real-time payments, open banking and the future of Canadian financial infrastructure.

The timing could hardly have been better.

On the festival’s opening day, 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 is intended to allow those deposits to move between Canadian financial institutions, with eventual connections to other digital-asset systems. (National Bank)

Tokenized deposits are not stablecoins. OSFI has explicitly said that putting a bank deposit onto new technological infrastructure does not change its underlying legal nature: it remains a deposit. (OSFI)

But put the two conversations beside one another and the larger issue becomes obvious. Money is infrastructure. If commerce increasingly moves onto programmable, always-on digital rails, there is a sovereignty question about which currency travels across them, who issues it, what institutions guarantee it and who owns the systems underneath it.

Wealthsimple has already tested stablecoin settlement with Visa Canada using USDC, demonstrating that transactions that normally wait for conventional banking settlement can instead move over 24/7 infrastructure. Wealthsimple has also argued publicly that viable Canadian-dollar stablecoins matter to Canadian monetary sovereignty. (Visa)

That puts the country in an interesting position. The banks are exploring tokenized deposits. Fintech companies are exploring stablecoins. Regulators are defining the boundaries. And Nrth put the unresolved question directly onstage. Who builds the Canadian rails?

3. Sovereignty is also knowing where you are

Perhaps the most revealing session came late in the festival precisely because it had almost nothing to do with generative AI.

“Sovereign Signals: Canada’s Future in Positioning, Navigation, and Timing” examined the country’s reliance on foreign satellite navigation infrastructure.

GPS does considerably more than tell a driver which exit to take. Precise positioning and timing signals underpin telecommunications networks, power grids, financial systems and other critical infrastructure.

And the satellites providing those signals are not Canadian. The Nrth panel brought together Xona Space Systems CTO Tyler Reid, Coherent Systems founder Martin Rutter and York University satellite-navigation specialist Sunil Bisnath to examine what a more resilient Canadian positioning, navigation and timing capability could look like. (Gire)

That session matters because it demonstrates just how far the sovereignty conversation has travelled. No longer simply: Should Canada have its own AI model? It is: What happens if the technology underneath an economy belongs to someone else?

That same question applies to cloud infrastructure. To defence systems. To payment rails. To launch capacity. To semiconductors. To critical minerals. To data centres. To capital.

Cleantech founders at Nrth made the connection explicitly, arguing that circular domestic supplies of critical minerals can simultaneously support economic growth, material sovereignty, national security and resilience. (BetaKit)

4. It’s time for Canadian home field advantage

Then there was Clio. Founder Jack Newton used Nrth’s final afternoon to discuss how a Canadian startup became a global legal-technology company while continuing to make large investments in Canada. (LinkedIn)

In a related conversation during the festival week, Newton described something Canada has historically lacked as a “home-field advantage.”

When Clio was raising money, he said, some Canadian investors expected a hometown discount. Newton argued the opposite should happen: Canadian investors should understand their own ecosystem well enough to offer Canadian companies an advantage relative to outside capital.

Clio’s $900-million US Series F in 2024, notably, was funded entirely by American investors. (BetaKit) That gets very close to the cultural issue underneath Nrth. An industry becomes an industry when its pieces begin reinforcing one another.

Founders produce companies. Domestic businesses become customers. Banks finance them. Investors fund their growth. Universities produce talent and research. Governments purchase strategically important technologies. Infrastructure exists to support them. Successful founders recycle capital and experience back into the ecosystem.

Eventually, an industry develops not merely companies but institutions, habits, language and culture.

For decades, many Canadian technology companies plugged into an ecosystem that already possessed all of those things. It was in California. There is no reason Canada should try to reproduce Silicon Valley. In fact, that would miss what was interesting about Nrth entirely. The emerging Canadian conversation is now beginning to sound different. The old conversation has always been about how do we retain talent? Why can’t Canadian companies grow? What are the barriers holding us back complaints about procurement, support, legislation.

With a fixed goal now in place, decoupling from the US economy, that conversation is changing. It is about sovereign infrastructure as much as than growth at any cost. At a certain point as well, those two goals, converge. Conversations about domestic customers as are about venture capital. Look at the announcements. The banks have made recently about supporting the expansion of the Canadian economy. our banks are the envy of the world and they have a critical role to play here in an emerging national identity that has to be founded in economics, geopolitics, and culture. free trade builder economy, but it also reached away some of our sovereignty and some of our national identity and the moment has come for that to now re-emerge on its own. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the reaction to Trump’s rhetoric has been so forceful because we in our hearts knew as Canadians that it was time, that a certain point leaning on a stronger bigger neighbour doesn’t stay a prop, it becomes a crutch. and the conversation shifts to one focussed on sovereignty, on sovereign defence procurement and critical minerals alongside software. About stablecoins and banking rails. About space infrastructure. About the practical boundary between participating in global supply chains and being dependent on them. Trade is critical globalization is not in vogue right now, but it is not going away. But it must be balanced, and our reliance was unhealthy.

A conversation is beginning among Canadian banks, founders, investors, policymakers, researchers and technology companies that increasingly appear to be talking to one another, rather than separately addressing an American market.

Nrth said Canada does not have an innovation problem; it has a navigation problem. (Nrth Festival) After three days in Toronto, the name feels less like branding than it did on opening night. Canadian technology and industry in general may finally be trying to decide where north actually is. And perhaps, for the first time in a while, tech doesn’t automatically point south.