09/09/2026
Ontario has told its public sector to buy Ontario and buy Canadian since April. We wondered whether that includes the technology that runs the government, so we checked the public DNS records of 12 provincial government and agency domains.
Every domain that accepts email sends it through a US-owned provider. Eight of the twelve are on Microsoft 365. The Ontario Made program, which exists to promote Ontario-made products, runs its email on a company in Arizona.
We are a Canadian email host, so we have a stake in this and the article says so in its second paragraph. It also explains why "the data is in a Toronto data centre" is only half an answer, gives the honest case for staying on Microsoft, and looks at what France, Switzerland and Germany are doing instead.