In the digital world, the new colonizers do not come for land. They come for something that’s harder to see but easier to monetize — inference. It took me years of law practice to recognize this pattern, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it. They harvest what we click, watch and create, refine it into predictions and sell it back to us as influence. Canada tills the digital soil, and foreign platforms reap the return.

In the 19th century, railways and charters carried imperial power across continents. In the 21st century, it is cloud contracts, ad stacks and recommendation engines. Canadian culture fills the platforms. Inference — predictions about what people will click, buy or believe next — is the raw material that powers the modern algorithmic economy. Canadian businesses buy the

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