An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 18.Leah Millis/Reuters
Dana Cramer is a PhD candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is the founder, president and CEO of the Young Digital Leaders of Canada and co-ordinator of the United Nations-recognized Canada Youth Internet Governance Forum.
My grandfather tried to enlist during the Second World War but was turned away due to his diabetes. Undeterred, he became an army chauffeur. After the war, he and my grandmother took in their Japanese-Canadian relatives who were shuttered from neighbourhoods with well-resourced schools because of lingering prejudice.
The quiet courage of persevering in small ways and standing up against injustice were my grandparents’ Canadian values.
It is in this backdrop of values that I have been shocked by the recent reporting that Hootsuite has taken US$95,000 in contracts to conduct social-media sentiment analysis for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And Hootsuite is seeking more business with ICE.
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I have been deeply reflecting on what Canadian values are, and why it seems as though a digital company in our country is not instilling them as part of its business practices.
Like many Canadians, I am fearful about what feels like the similarities between our current geopolitical context and the period before the Second World War.
Donald Trump has become emboldened in his threats of taking over Greenland after his success in Venezuela; and he continues to look north to our country, including sharing a doctored image of Canada, Greenland, Venezuela and the U.S. all suffocated under the U.S. flag, which he wields to suit his personal desires.
Our Canadian identity is under threat with the consistent taunts of becoming the “51st state.” We as a country have become the canary in the coal mine to U.S. imperialist threats. Against such insults, we forcefully demonstrated throughout 2025 our capacity to come together in small ways and show our quiet courage across the political spectrum.
Nonetheless, it has all been shocking to see, to experience and to feel. Fearful questions still linger in the air, “Will we become colonized?” “Will we be invaded?”
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This brings me back to Hootsuite. After The Globe and Mail reported on its ICE contract, the company said nothing publicly, but privately said to employees that it would continue to service ICE and that “we did nothing wrong here.”
I think of the words of Jim Balsillie, past co-CEO of RIM (the company that produced Blackberry phones), who said in a podcast interview, “For somebody to be colonized, they need local enablers.” In Canada, we are beginning to see these local enablers from our promising tech companies.
Imagine doing business with ICE, which has become a quasi-secret police force in MAGA America and recently killed an American-born woman in Minneapolis.
ICE, which continues to round up those without U.S. citizenship to detainment centres outside of the U.S., including Guantanamo Bay and El Salvadoran prisons. These facilities have become new-found hells in our Western Hemisphere for those trapped inside.
ICE, which would detain Canadian Jasmine Mooney for 11 days, who was lucky not to end up in one of these notorious prisons after her U.S. work visa was abruptly cancelled.
ICE that apparently Hootsuite feels is a good client to have so long as it can pay the bill.
In this digital colonization, a Canadian tech company is associating with ICE, which has exhibited inhumanity. What happens if this comes north of the border?
To pull from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks in Davos, we can see companies forfeiting basic corporate ethics as keeping the sign up in their shop windows.
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I implore them to take the sign down as a show of our Canadian values and our country’s quiet courage against such adversaries. Values which were built by Canadians of past generations like my grandparents.
Those who continue to keep the sign up become the local enablers in our own country.
I am sure that the executives and managers of Canadian tech companies had grandparents who were shaped by the world around them and tried to instill the values they learned from lives well lived onto their grandchildren.
To those with the authority to choose your clientele, I ask you to reflect on the following question: Would your grandparents do business with such customers, or would they practice our Canadian values?