Allow me to share a personal story, I think it is the best way to get my point across

I was born in the early 2000s, grew up in small town Nova Scotia. When I used a computer in elementary school it had Open Office, Firefox and a bunch of Tux games. In the rare case that we submitted something online we used Moodle. Without knowing it I was starting my journey into open source software.

When I got to middle school however, things changed. Google was the new name in town. Shiny new Chromebooks where hauled out in carts to every classroom and every student was mandated a Google account. From this point on the majority of school work was written in Google Docs and submitted to Google Classroom.

At the time I was too young to fully grasp what was happening, I didn't understand contracts or the difference between a private American company and community made free open source software.

By the time I was in high school the entire fleet of Chromebooks had been replaced at least twice. The older fleets now fulfilling the role of electronic landfill. Somewhere along the line my school board had fallen for the bait, and once the contracts were signed our technology education was the property of Google.

Then education and technology became the same thing. In 2021 we all had to switch to online "learning", I use quotes because schooling became the equivalent of flash card quizzes over a video call. There was nothing left but Google, they won.

I graduated in 2022 and went to Acadia university. Google was gone, I was now mandated a Microslop account (of course they hadn't earned that title yet). Really it was just trading one giant American company for another.

I didn't last long there, I ended up flunking out of university and coming back home, saving up to go to Nova Scotia Community College.

I am sure you can guess how this story is going. Microslop account, only now they are living up to their name. What was just a few years ago a cloud storage and email provider is now entirely Copilot. The landing page is even an AI chat prompt.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised but it does make me concerned.

We are in a trade war against the United States and these tech companies have proven to time and time again work with Trump's regime.

How are we supposed to trust them with our entire education system?

It wasn't always like this, we had a foundation built upon open source software and it was gutted because of shitty deals with predatory companies.

I want a future where Canadian education is Canadian education, not just another client of the American machine.

Thank you for reading my story. I know I might dox myself by saying the school names but I want to name and shame.