NRCan’s national consultations bring long-standing gaps in governance, infrastructure, and coordination into focus, revealing a system with depth but without consistent alignment.

Canada is finally starting to ask some long-overdue questions about its geospatial future. Over the past year, Natural Resources Canada has been in conversation with stakeholders across government, industry, academia, and Indigenous organizations as it begins to shape a Collaborative Geospatial Strategy for Canada.

As part of that process, a series of national roundtables were held to gather input across governance, technology, workforce, public safety, and infrastructure. The “What We Heard” reports, along with the CGDI baseline assessment, capture those perspectives and provide a snapshot of how the system is currently functioning.

What they reveal is not a new set of challenges. And confirm something the sector, and conversations across the geospatial and geomatics communities across the country, have been pointing to for years. Canada has built significant geospatial capability, but never organized it into a coherent national system.

As I highlighted last year in GoGeomatics, the absence of a coherent national geospatial strategy has broader implications. Across the G7 and beyond, countries have begun treating geospatial as strategic infrastructure and embedding it into national policy frameworks. In Canada, the capability exists across institutions, but without a coordinated approach, it does not consistently translate into alignment or system-level performance. That gap shapes how infrastructure is planned, how systems connect, and how decisions are made across the economy. Housing, energy, transportation, and resource development all depend on accurate spatial data, while positioning, navigation, and timing systems underpin everything from financial transactions to logistics and communications.

A System Without Alignment

Read across the reports and a consistent picture emerges. Canada is not short on geospatial capability. It has strong federal programs, provincial initiatives, municipal applications, private sector innovation, and a growing academic base.

What it does not have is a system that operates as a coordinated whole. Responsibility is spread across multiple layers of government, each building its own datasets, platforms, and programs. This has created depth, but not alignment. Similar work is often carried out in parallel, with limited visibility across jurisdictions.

Coordination happens, but it is not consistently structured. It depends on relationships, working groups, and individual initiatives. Where those connections are strong, the system performs well. Where they are not, gaps appear.

The reports describe this as fragmentation and coordination challenges. In practice, it is a system that has evolved piece by piece, without a shared architecture guiding how those pieces connect.

Governance Without Structure

The governance discussion reflects this directly. Participants pointed to unclear roles across federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Responsibilities overlap in some areas and remain undefined in others. There is no consistently applied framework guiding how geospatial data is managed or shared nationally.

Data sharing reflects this structure. It moves efficiently within established partnerships and slows when policies, standards, or ownership expectations differ.

There is a clear call for defined leadership, stronger accountability, and consistent policies that allow data to move more predictably across jurisdictions. There is also a need to align standards so that organizations are not solving similar problems in isolation.

Canada has shown that it can move quickly when there is clear direction. The Pan Canadian AI Strategy is one example. Once priority was established, investment, coordination, and institutional alignment followed.

Geospatial has followed a different path. The reports capture what that looks like in practice.

Technology Without Integration

The reports describe a technology landscape that is moving forward, unevenly. Cloud infrastructure, automation, and AI are being integrated across parts of the system. Legacy systems continue to shape how data is stored, accessed, and shared in others. This creates friction when systems need to connect across organizations.

Interoperability remains a central issue. Systems do not easily communicate, even when the underlying data exists. Differences in formats, standards, and system design continue to slow integration.

This becomes more significant as geospatial data moves into operational use. Discussions at GeoIgnite 2025 and across the broader industry point to a shift toward consistency, timeliness, and usability within decision workflows. Fragmentation at the system level translates into friction at the point of use.

Accessibility also comes through clearly. Data exists, but it is not always easy to discover or use beyond the organization that holds it. Technology adoption is happening within institutional boundaries but shared standards and coordinated implementation remain uneven across the system.

This fragmentation is particularly evident in our digital infrastructure. The round tables identified a significant “reliance on foreign data platforms” as a strategic vulnerability, echoing the “sovereign illusion” we have previously discussed. Participants noted that while hyperscale cloud providers offer efficiency, they do not inherently guarantee Canadian data sovereignty or jurisdictional control. There was a direct call in the reports for the development of “Canadian-owned cloud infrastructure” and a greater shift toward open-source geospatial solutions to ensure that the data defining our geography—and our safety—remains under Canadian control.

A Workforce Under Strain

The workforce discussion reflects pressures that extend across the sector. Demand for geospatial, data science, and AI skills continues to grow. Organizations report ongoing challenges in attracting and retaining people with the right mix of expertise. Capacity varies across regions, with smaller organizations facing greater constraints.

At the same time, there is a lack of clearly defined pathways into the sector. Professionals entering from related disciplines do not always see a structured route into geospatial roles.

Last year I highlighted that this challenge is compounded by how the geospatial workforce is understood within government and policy frameworks. Roles that span geomatics, data, engineering, and software often fall between classifications, making it difficult to define, track, and plan for the workforce at a national level. The result is a sector that is active and growing, but not always visible in the way it is measured or supported.

That pressure is already visible, and industry leaders have been pointing to it for some time. As infrastructure investment accelerates, the workforce responsible for measuring, mapping, and modeling those projects is being squeezed from multiple directions. Training pipelines are narrowing as some programs close or shrink. Experienced surveyors are retiring with too few replacements coming behind them. Specialists in CAD, BIM, remote sensing, and GIS remain difficult to recruit, and many graduates still arrive underprepared for the digital and AI-driven tools now standard in practice.

The result is a growing capacity constraint that could slow delivery across the very infrastructure ambitions Canada is now trying to accelerate.

Where the System is Tested

Public safety provides a clear view of how the system performs under pressure. Geospatial data is already central to emergency response, disaster management, and situational awareness. That role is well established.

The reports highlight what happens when multiple agencies, jurisdictions, and systems need to work together in real time. Data sharing becomes inconsistent. Access to current information varies. Coordination requires aligning both systems and decision-making processes.

This is where system-level gaps become visible. In time-sensitive environments, delays in access, inconsistencies in data, and lack of integration translate directly into operational challenges. Fragmentation creates additional pressure when decisions depend on speed and coordination.

These issues surface during events where timing matters. They point to how data moves across the system, not just how it is generated.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty

The positioning of Indigenous data sovereignty in the reports reflects a clear shift. Participants emphasized control over how data is collected, managed, and used, particularly in relation to land, resources, and communities. There is also a clear expectation that engagement is structured through co-development and long-term partnership.

The reports move this issue to the core of governance and infrastructure discussions, but they also highlight a critical gap: the lack of sustained, long-term funding required for communities to lead their own geospatial initiatives.

Currently, implementation varies across jurisdictions, and these capacity gaps—often tied to inconsistent resource allocation – directly affect how communities can participate and lead. The next step is ensuring the financial and structural support is applied consistently across programs and systems.

Infrastructure as the backbone

Infrastructure sits beneath every issue identified in the reports. Data coverage remains uneven across the country. Some regions operate with detailed, up-to-date datasets, while others face gaps in basic information. Platform capability also varies, affecting storage, processing, and access.

Integration remains a persistent challenge. Combining datasets across sources requires navigating differences in standards, formats, and system design.

This extends beyond what is explicitly captured in the reports, into positioning, navigation, and timing systems, which underpin transportation, logistics, financial systems, and communications. Canada’s heavy reliance on external GNSS systems highlights how critical this layer has become, with disruptions carrying direct consequences across transportation, finance, and communications.

These dependencies are rarely framed within geospatial strategy discussions, but they sit within the same infrastructure layer the reports are pointing toward.

Canada has invested in geospatial capability over time. The reports point out that those investments have not always been aligned within a coordinated infrastructure framework. The result is a system with strong components, but uneven performance depending on where and how it is used.

The Baseline Confirms It

The CGDI Stock-Take Baseline Summary provides a system-wide view based on internal interviews, inventories, and third-party assessment.

At one level, it documents what already shows up across the roundtables. Variation in maturity across departments. Standards applied unevenly. Persistent interoperability gaps. Overlap in some areas, gaps in others.

But the baseline also makes something else clear. Canada already has a national geospatial framework in place through the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. What the baseline points to is a system where that framework is applied unevenly across departments. Implementation remains distributed across departments, shaped by individual mandates rather than a shared operating model.

That shows up in how data is discovered, accessed, and used. The assessment highlights a significant gap between “findability” and “integration.” While data may be increasingly discoverable, it is rarely ready to be integrated across jurisdictional lines without significant manual effort. Users still navigate multiple systems. Integration depends on effort. Coordination exists, but it is not embedded.

The baseline establishes where the system stands today. It also shows how it has evolved. Progress is visible in parts of the system, while others move more slowly. The result is uneven capability across what is meant to function as a national infrastructure.

From Diagnosis to Decisions

The roundtables show a high level of alignment across the community. Governance needs clarity. Systems need to connect. Infrastructure needs to be treated as a national asset. Workforce pathways need structure. Indigenous data governance needs to be embedded across the system. These observations are now formally documented through a national process.

Many countries have used similar assessments to move quickly into national strategies, linking geospatial capability to digital infrastructure, economic planning, and security frameworks. Canada is now at that same point.

One thread runs through all of this. Responsibility exists across government, but there is no clearly defined national lead driving alignment across the system. Coordination depends on initiative rather than structure, and progress varies as a result.

The next step is the strategy itself. That is where long-standing alignment across the community will need to translate into structure, ownership, and sustained direction.