Peter Wall
Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Communications
Office of the Honourable Evan Solomon
Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada
Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Communications
Office of the Honourable Evan Solomon
Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada
theFlux.ca
June 15, 2026
Peter Wall
Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Communications
Office of the Honourable Evan Solomon
Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada
Re: The infrastructure layer Canada's Sovereign AI Strategy is missing
Mr. Wall,
I am writing to introduce theFlux.ca and to share a body of policy and technical analysis directly relevant to two active priorities in Minister Solomon's portfolio: the design of the SCIP National Service Layer, and the data governance framework being advanced through the new Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act.
Canada's Sovereign AI Compute Strategy represents the most significant public infrastructure commitment in a generation. I have been tracking and analyzing it closely through theFlux.ca — a Canadian technology policy publication — and I believe it contains a structural gap that, if unaddressed, will reproduce at domestic scale the same access inequality that currently characterizes foreign cloud compute: geographic concentration, personal information security, single points of failure, and systematic exclusion of rural and remote communities from the AI economy the government is trying to build.
The layer that is missing is the telecommunications stack. Canada has more than 42,000 licensed cell towers already carrying the nation's most time-sensitive data. With O-RAN disaggregation and embedded inference hardware, that existing infrastructure becomes a distributed sovereign AI substrate — one that functions in degraded network conditions, that Canadian carriers already own and operate. The government partnered with TELUS to build a data centre. The argument I am making is that the more valuable asset was already in TELUS's existing tower network.
I attach a long-form policy piece — "The Hospital at the Edge of the Tower," published in theFlux.ca — which makes this argument through the lens of rural health AI and the AI Compute Access Fund's stated life sciences priority. The article draws on first-person testimony from two prior publications at icarusflyby.ca: a 1984 workplace injury on Quadra Island in which inadequate rural diagnostic infrastructure compounded a WCB dispute, and a documented experience of statin-related cognitive deterioration following a cardiac event — both of which illustrate the human cost of centralized infrastructure applied to decentralized geography.
The argument is technical, political, and personal. I believe it belongs in the policy conversation around the National Service Layer before that procurement is defined, and in the data governance conversation around the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act before the public consultation period opens.
I am available for a briefing conversation at Minister Solomon's office's convenience, and would welcome the opportunity to submit a formal policy brief. theFlux.ca can be reached directly through the publication, and I am also reachable by return email.
Respectfully,
JohnArgast@gmail.com aka Icarus Flyby
Publisher, theFlux.ca | icarusflyby.ca
Attachment: "The Hospital at the Edge of the Tower," theFlux.ca
Contact: peter.wall@ised-isde.gc.ca | media@ised-isde.gc.ca