Canada Is Measuring Digital Government Against the Wrong Model

Canada has a digital government paradox. It has mature public institutions, substantial digital assets, capable technology leaders, and years of policy work behind service modernisation. Yet recent Canadian service evidence tells a different story. The Institute for Citizen-Centred Service’s Citizens First 2023 findings indicate that Canadians are significantly less satisfied with public services across all levels of government, with ICCS describing the decline as an urgent call to action for government service providers. They reflect what happens when people and businesses move through service pathways marked by friction, unresolved questions, long waits, and handoffs across departments, programs, and jurisdictions.

A Federation, Not a Single System

The problem is not that Canada has failed to put services online. The deeper problem is that Canada is a federation trying to deliver digital government through institutions that were not designed to operate as one system. International rankings can make Canada’s performance gap visible, but they often measure the wrong model. They assess national online services, infrastructure, and policy foundations. They do not tell us whether federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and partner systems can work coherently when a person’s actual service journey crosses institutional boundaries.

This matters not only for service delivery, but for Canada’s ability to govern digital infrastructure, data, identity, and artificial intelligence in a world increasingly shaped by platform power and cross-border technology dependence.

Where Services Actually Break Down

Digital government is no longer only about websites, forms, and portals. It is about whether people can complete real tasks without having to understand how the government is structured. The federal government’s own address-change page tells Canadians they must notify each department or agency separately because “government systems aren’t connected.” A family moving between provinces must then separately update health coverage, driver licensing, benefits, and school enrolment across systems with different credentials and service standards. BizPaL helps entrepreneurs identify which permits and licences may apply across orders of government, but it also illustrates the underlying problem: information can be made easier to find without the service pathway being fully connected. These are not edge cases. They are the ordinary experience of a distributed service environment that has not been designed around the user.

What the Rankings Show and What They Miss

Canada’s international rankings capture part of this story but not all of it. Canada ranks among the top ten performers in the 2023 OECD Digital Government Index,  even as its position in the UN E-Government Development Index, which assesses national digital government performance, has declined sharply. Canada’s ranking in the UN E-Government Development Index fell to 47th in 2024 after ranking 32nd in 2022 and sixth in 2003.

That decline appears to be driven mainly by the Online Services Index, one of the three components of the UN measure, alongside telecommunications infrastructure and human capital. The decline reflects real shortfalls in online service delivery at the national level. But those shortfalls are being measured at the level of national systems, while the failures Canadians experience occur across systems. The EGDI cannot disaggregate that picture: it does not identify whether those shortfalls are concentrated in federal services, cross-jurisdictional handoffs, subnational access gaps, or the integration points between them.

The Online Services Index is closest to the service-delivery question at the centre of this article. But even it does not answer the federation-specific question: whether federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and partner systems can work coherently when a person’s actual service journey crosses institutional boundaries.

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) acknowledges that the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) “may not fully capture the diverse digital advancements occurring at the State level in large countries with federal systems.” Its national index remains useful, but it has no subnational dimension and no framework for evaluating whether services work across jurisdictional lines. Canada is therefore being assessed through instruments that capture national digital government performance more readily than the cross-jurisdictional conditions that shape service delivery in a federation.

The issue is not federalism itself. It is that Canada’s decentralised service responsibilities are not yet supported by the shared digital infrastructure, integration mechanisms, and governance arrangements needed to make services work across jurisdictions. Provinces and territories hold health care, education, social services, and most licensing and regulatory functions. The federal government controls taxation, immigration, employment insurance, and national benefits. Municipalities, Indigenous governments, and Crown agencies sit between them.

Residents do not navigate this structure consciously. They think in terms of what they need done, and they expect government to absorb the complexity on their behalf.

Westminster administrative traditions that favour hierarchy and information control over cross-boundary collaboration compound the problem. The institutional instinct to protect departmental boundaries and manage information vertically runs against the cross-boundary design that effective digital government requires.

The same structural problem that makes cross-jurisdictional service delivery difficult now shapes how Canada governs its most consequential digital decisions.

From Service Delivery to Digital Governance

Digital government no longer stops at service delivery. Governments are now making consequential decisions about AI oversight, platform regulation, digital identity, and children’s online safety, all of which cross ministerial, jurisdictional, and market boundaries simultaneously. The structural problem is the same; the stakes are higher. AI makes this harder to ignore because it depends on the same foundations digital government has struggled to coordinate: data quality, lawful data access, procurement discipline, institutional expertise, and clear accountability.

Manitoba’s proposed restrictions on youth access to social media and AI chatbots make the point concretely. Premier Wab Kinew announced in April 2026 that the province would move to ban young people aged sixteen and under from social media platforms and AI chatbots, directing enforcement at technology companies. Age verification touches privacy law, platform enforcement engages federal regulation and international companies, and restrictions on AI chatbots implicate education, mental health, and data governance. The point is not that Manitoba lacks authority to act. It is that digital harms increasingly require provincial initiative and intergovernmental coordination at the same time. Provincial policy ambition and federal jurisdiction arrive at the same table without a shared framework for resolving what comes next.

Canada often treats coordination as something to negotiate after policy choices are made. In digital government, it has to be designed from the start because identity, data exchange, service standards, privacy, and public accountability are the foundations that determine whether any of it works.

Interoperability Without Uniformity

The solution is not to centralise Canadian digital government. That would be constitutionally unrealistic and, in many areas, undesirable. Québec’s legal and linguistic context is not the same as Alberta’s. The territories face infrastructure and capacity challenges that large provinces do not. Indigenous data sovereignty requires more than standard federal-provincial-territorial alignment.

The better goal is interoperability without uniformity. Canada does not need every jurisdiction to use the same systems. It needs enough shared rules, standards, and governance arrangements for services to work across boundaries when people, data, and responsibilities move across them.

The Forum of Federations, working across more than twenty federal and multilevel systems worldwide, has examined this directly. Research published by the Forum identifies leadership, clear roles, and intergovernmental coordination as essential conditions for this kind of digital transformation. In Canada, those conditions remain underdeveloped: persistent silos, fragmented data governance, and closed intergovernmental decision-making habits continue to limit pan-Canadian progress despite federal leadership through bodies such as the Joint Councils.

Three conditions determine whether that goal is achievable. The first is common digital infrastructure: interoperable capabilities for identity, data exchange, payments, and reusable platforms. Where these are absent, integration must be rebuilt program by program, compounding duplication.

The second is governance alignment: clear decision rights, enforceable standards, and accountability mechanisms that make coordination durable rather than aspirational. This applies equally to AI oversight and platform regulation, where the same absence of shared frameworks that produces fragmented service delivery also produces unresolved jurisdictional collisions of the kind Manitoba illustrates.

A 2025 CIRANO analysis found that federal digital and AI ambitions outpace the shared rules for data exchange needed to support data sharing across levels of government. Where no single institution is responsible for the full user journey, governance must fill that space. The problem is not the absence of digital strategies, standards, or governance bodies. It is that standards defined at the centre are often not enforced where delivery actually happens.

The third is capacity and control: the skills, funding, and sourcing arrangements needed to sustain common infrastructure over time. Heavy vendor reliance can accelerate individual projects while weakening the institutional knowledge governments need to govern, adapt, and improve digital systems. Capability grows when delivery knowledge stays inside public institutions. It erodes when that knowledge sits mainly in contracts, temporary projects, or people who eventually leave.

All three conditions interact: weak infrastructure increases the burden on governance; fragmented governance prevents capability from producing integration.

Canada already has relevant institutions, frameworks, and policy tools. The Institute for Citizen-Centred Service and the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework provide pan-Canadian anchors for service delivery and digital identity respectively. A 2024 audit by the Auditor General found Canada’s digital identity ecosystem evolving without a national approach and without digital identity legislation, while comparable digital governments have moved further toward unified access and reusable credentials. The gap is not missing pieces. It is the connective tissue between them.

The variation across Canadian jurisdictions illustrates the challenge. British Columbia has invested in reusable identity infrastructure through the BC Services Card and service design standards. Québec has built a distinct model anchored in a dedicated Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital Technology and privacy modernisation under Law 25, with data sovereignty considerations that shape how common infrastructure must be negotiated legally and institutionally, not only technically. The territories face a different problem: connectivity, geography, and the cost of remote service delivery shape what digital architecture can realistically achieve. Pan-Canadian improvement requires alignment where common foundations are necessary and genuine flexibility where local conditions must prevail.

Measuring What Matters

This also means Canada needs better measurement. Existing rankings are useful but insufficient for a federation: they capture national digital government performance more readily than the cross-jurisdictional conditions that determine whether services actually work for people. Canada should measure whether people can complete high-value service journeys across jurisdictions without repeated data entry, fragmented identity requirements, unresolved handoffs, or inconsistent access points. It should also assess the conditions that make those journeys possible: service integration, access and identity, governance and coordination, and the funding, workforce, and sourcing arrangements needed to sustain common digital services over time. Current public evidence is enough to indicate why this question matters, but it does not provide a complete national picture of where cross-boundary delivery is strongest, weakest, or most exposed to future risk.

The stakes are practical and extend well beyond service delivery. Measuring digital government as though Canada were a single national system means missing the points where delivery actually breaks. Treating every jurisdiction as wholly separate means missing the common infrastructure needed for coherent services, trusted AI, and effective platform governance. Fragmented digital governance ultimately limits Canada’s ability to govern digital infrastructure, data, identity, artificial intelligence, and platform power on its own terms.

Canada does not need one digital government. It needs a federated digital government that works where people, data, systems, and responsibilities cross boundaries.

That is the real test. Not whether a service is online. Not whether a strategy exists. Not whether Canada performs well on one international index and poorly on another. The test is whether the federation can make digital government work for people whose lives do not fit neatly within one department, one program, or one jurisdiction.