Ontario tells public bodies to Buy Ontario. I checked the DNS records of 12 of them. All 11 with email route it through US-owned providers

Disclosure up front: I run Thexyz, a Canadian email host, so I would benefit if the province acted on any of this. Judge the records, not me.

The Buy Ontario Procurement Directive took effect April 13, 2026 and tells public-sector organizations to prioritize Ontario and Canadian goods and services. So I looked at the one supply chain nobody talks about: the technology running the government itself. DNS records are public, so anyone can repeat this.

What 12 Ontario government and agency domains show:

• 11 of 11 domains that publish an MX record send inbound email to a US-owned provider (8 Microsoft 365, plus Namecheap, Amazon and Proofpoint).
• 10 of 12 websites sit on foreign-owned infrastructure.
• 7 of 12 keep their authoritative DNS under Canadian control, which is the one bright spot.

The one that stings: SupportOntarioMade.ca, the program that exists to get you to buy Ontario-made products, has its email on Namecheap Private Email. Namecheap is headquartered in Phoenix and documents that its Private Email servers are in its Phoenix datacentre.

The post also covers why "Microsoft has a Toronto region" is only half an answer (the US CLOUD Act reaches data held in Canada by US companies, and Microsoft France told the French Senate under oath last year that it cannot guarantee otherwise), and what France, Switzerland and Germany's Schleswig-Holstein are doing instead. There is also a section making the honest case for the status quo, because a lot of it is reasonable.

Not asking Ontario to rip out Microsoft. Asking why Buy Ontario stops at the server room door.

Link: https://www.thexyz.com/blog/buy-ontario-so-why-isnt-ontario-buying-canadian-technology/