December 12, 2025
DIACC welcomes Canada and the European Union’s commitment to collaborate on digital credentials and trust services, formalized through the December 8 memorandum of understanding. International alignment matters deeply—for Canadian economic competitiveness, for secure cross-border transactions, and for ensuring our citizens can participate fully in the global digital economy.
This announcement comes after more than a decade of DIACC advocacy for precisely this kind of strategic partnership. The urgent question now is how quickly this international momentum can catalyze the domestic coordination needed to put economic growth and Canadian competitiveness at the centre, while ensuring privacy and security are foundational to design.
Canadians and their businesses need interoperable digital public and private infrastructure working for them at home now. Every day of delay costs our economy opportunity, competitiveness, and the trust dividend that secure, privacy-respecting verification systems deliver.
Domestic Coordination Enables International Opportunity
Mutual Recognition at Home
Canadians must experience mutual recognition across our own borders with urgency. A business credential recognized in Ontario must work in British Columbia. A professional verification issued in Quebec must be valid for Alberta workers. A digital credential from Nova Scotia must enable service access in Saskatchewan.
Quebec’s recent adoption of Bill 82 demonstrates provincial leadership in digital identity legislation. British Columbia’s Connected Services initiative, built on the Service Card, demonstrates jurisdictional innovation in action. These achievements are significant, and they underscore the urgent need for interprovincial mutual recognition that respects jurisdictional sovereignty while enabling seamless digital trust across Canada.
Economic Imperative Spans All Sectors
Digital credentials must work seamlessly across both public and private sectors, respecting both jurisdictional authority and market needs. Canadian businesses, especially small and medium enterprises, need trusted digital verification capabilities that reduce friction, prevent fraud, and enable growth regardless of which jurisdiction issues or validates credentials.
Implementation must explicitly address how banking, telecommunications, healthcare, professional credentialing, and supply chain sectors can participate. These are multi-jurisdictional challenges requiring coordinated solutions, not top-down mandates.
Federal Collaboration
The federal government has specific authorities in international trade, border management, federal services, and specific regulatory domains. Within this scope, federal action matters enormously, particularly in negotiating mutual recognition agreements that open international markets for Canadian credentials and businesses.
Equally important: the federal government can convene, facilitate, and invest in tools that enable coordination without dictating implementation. The DIACC’s public and private sector Pan-Canadian Trust Framework offers exactly this approach—a consensus-based framework that provinces, territories, Indigenous governments, and private sector participants can adopt voluntarily now while maintaining their respective authorities.
What Canadians and Their Businesses Need Now
For international alignment to deliver tangible benefits, Canada’s jurisdictions and sectors must demonstrate:
- Interprovincial and sectoral interoperability commitments that make credentials portable across Canadian borders
- Multi-stakeholder governance models where provinces, territories, Indigenous governments, industry sectors, and federal authorities coordinate as partners, not hierarchies
- Standards adoption that leverages existing frameworks like the PCTF to reduce regulatory fragmentation while respecting jurisdictional sovereignty
- Economic impact focus showing how mutual recognition, domestic and international, creates opportunities for Canadian businesses, workers, and communities
- Transparency and concrete implementation timelines with clear accountability distributed across appropriate authorities
Impactful Progress Happens Through Coordination
Since 2012, DIACC has advocated for a digital trust infrastructure that prioritizes economic growth and respects Canada’s federal structure while enabling seamless verification capabilities across jurisdictions and sectors. Progress is happening: Quebec’s new legislation, BC’s service transformation, Ontario’s legal sector achievements with 700,000+ digital verifications, and growing private sector adoption all demonstrate momentum.
What’s needed now is coordination mechanisms that connect these provincial initiatives, enable interprovincial recognition, align with Indigenous data sovereignty principles, and position Canadian credentials for international mutual recognition. The federal government’s international agreements, like this MOU, create valuable opportunities. Domestic coordination makes those opportunities accessible to Canadians everywhere.
This MOU represents progress toward international alignment. The more complex work remains: achieving the domestic interoperability that makes international mutual recognition practically valuable. Every jurisdiction has a role. Every sector has expertise to contribute. Every delay in coordination represents lost economic opportunity and continued inefficiency across both government and commercial services.
Canada has world-class expertise, proven frameworks like the PCTF, provincial leadership in implementation, and strong private-sector innovation in digital trust services. We have the components needed for success. What we need is a sustained, coordinated commitment across jurisdictions and sectors to make these components interoperable and to ensure all Canadians and businesses can benefit.
DIACC stands ready to support coordination, as Canada’s longest-standing, largest, and most diverse forum focused solely on digital trust and verification. We will continue to contribute through our expertise, our membership ecosystem spanning public and private sectors across all regions, and our commitment to advancing digital trust that serves Canadians in all aspects of their lives—public, private, and economic.
Joni Brennan
President, DIACC
