Shared Digital Infrastructure for Local Governments in Canada

Across Canada, hundreds of municipalities are independently building websites, permit management systems, service request platforms, payment gateways, and digital identity verification. Each one is spending staff time, procurement budget, and implementation effort on capabilities that are fundamentally the same from one municipality to the next.

This is an enormous waste of public money. And it is almost entirely unnecessary.

The case for shared digital infrastructure for local governments is not complicated. The barriers to it are not primarily technical. They are organizational, political, and cultural. Understanding those barriers is the first step to overcoming them.

What Shared Infrastructure Means

Shared digital infrastructure means that multiple government organizations use common platforms, services, and standards rather than each building and maintaining their own.

This is not a new idea. Provinces have been providing shared infrastructure services to municipalities for decades, in areas like financial systems, HR platforms, and GIS data. What is relatively new is the opportunity to extend shared infrastructure to the full stack of digital service delivery, from resident-facing interfaces to backend processing to data management.

In practice, shared digital infrastructure for local governments can take several forms.

Shared platforms are the most straightforward. A province or regional body operates a permit management system, a recreation registration platform, or a service request system that any municipality in the jurisdiction can use on a cost-shared basis. Each municipality configures the platform for their specific services and branding, but the underlying technology is shared.

Shared services go further. Rather than each municipality operating its own instance of a platform, a shared service model has one organization operating the platform on behalf of all participants, with a service level agreement governing performance and support.

Shared standards are the most flexible form. Rather than requiring municipalities to use the same platform, shared standards ensure that different platforms can interoperate, that data can flow between systems, and that residents can have consistent experiences across different municipal digital services.

What Already Exists in Canada

Several provinces have made meaningful progress on shared digital infrastructure for municipalities.

British Columbia has one of the most developed shared service ecosystems for local governments in Canada. The Province provides a range of shared platforms through organizations like CITZ and through programs like the BC Data Catalogue and the Common Components library. The Local Government program within the Ministry of Municipal Affairs has historically supported technology sharing between municipalities.

Ontario has the Municipal Information Systems Association and various regional IT shared service arrangements, particularly in the GTA and other urban regions where neighbouring municipalities have formalized technology cooperation.

Alberta has made investments in shared municipal services through Alberta Municipal Affairs and through regional service commissions.

But these initiatives are partial, uneven, and often underutilized. The gap between what exists and what could exist is substantial.

Why It Is Not Happening at Scale

The barriers to shared digital infrastructure are real, even when the case for it is obvious.

Governance is hard. Shared infrastructure requires shared governance. When ten municipalities are sharing a platform, decisions about updates, features, and priorities need to be made collectively. Designing governance structures that give all participants meaningful voice while still allowing decisions to be made efficiently is genuinely difficult.

Different municipalities have different needs. A permit management system that works for a municipality of five thousand people may not work for one of five hundred thousand. Shared platforms need to be flexible enough to accommodate real differences in service design and local context, which adds complexity.

Political autonomy matters to elected officials. Sharing infrastructure with other municipalities can feel like ceding control, even when the shared platform gives individual municipalities more capability than they could build alone. Elected officials who are accountable to their residents for service quality are understandably cautious about depending on shared systems they do not directly control.

Procurement and legal frameworks are not designed for it. Intergovernmental agreements for shared technology services require legal frameworks that most municipalities do not have ready to use. The transaction costs of setting up a shared service arrangement can be high enough to deter participation even when the long-term economics are clearly favorable.

Vendors actively work against it. The vendor market for municipal technology is profitable precisely because each municipality is making independent purchasing decisions. Vendors that benefit from this fragmentation have little incentive to support shared infrastructure initiatives and some incentive to undermine them.

What Would Need to Change

Accelerating shared digital infrastructure for Canadian local governments requires action at multiple levels.

Provinces need to invest more deliberately in shared infrastructure for municipalities and make it easier to participate. This means adequate operating funding for shared service organizations, streamlined legal and procurement frameworks for intergovernmental technology agreements, and active outreach to municipalities that are not yet participating in available shared services.

Municipalities need to prioritize participation in shared infrastructure over independent procurement. This requires elected officials and senior staff who understand the long-term economics of shared versus independent technology and who are willing to accept some reduction in local control in exchange for significantly better capability and lower cost.

The federal government has a role in funding shared digital infrastructure as part of its municipal support programs. Infrastructure funding that can be used for shared digital platforms would go further than equivalent funding for independent municipal technology projects.

Standards bodies need to develop and promote interoperability standards for municipal digital services. Even where full platform sharing is not practical, common standards for data formats, APIs, and identity verification would significantly reduce the cost of integration between different systems.

Nation Code Canada's Position

We build tools and platforms with shared infrastructure principles in mind from the start. The work we do for one municipality is designed to be reusable by others. The open-source components we develop are available for any Canadian government organization to use and build on.

We actively support regional and provincial shared service initiatives and work with municipalities to participate in existing shared infrastructure where it is available and appropriate.

Canada's local governments spend too much money independently building the same capabilities. The technology to do this differently exists. The will to do it differently is what needs to develop.