Ontario announced this week that it will begin consultations on optional digital ID cards in late 2026, starting with a digital photo card for non-drivers — a first step positioned as a test case for future digital driver's licences and health cards.
Two design choices in the plan deserve attention. The credentials will be optional, and they will not be stored in a central database. Privacy recommendations around the program call for strict limits on data collection and retention. In other words, the province is treating trust as an engineering requirement, not a communications exercise.
That is the right instinct, because digital ID is never really about the card. It is about everything behind it: verifying a person's identity once and reusing that verification safely, connecting services built in different decades by different vendors, and being able to prove — to auditors and to the public — exactly who accessed what, and why.
A digital service earns trust in the parts the user never sees: the identity check, the audit trail, the integration that doesn't leak.
Every government that digitizes a service creates the same downstream work. Forms become workflows. Workflows need case management, notifications, payments and records that talk to the systems already running. Canadian companies that build and integrate enterprise software should read programs like this one as a map of where public-sector demand is heading: identity, interoperability, and privacy engineered in from the start — not patched in after a headline.
If your organization serves the public sector, or wants to, build the unglamorous parts now: strong identity practices, clean integrations, and privacy limits written into the design. When consultations become procurements, that plumbing is what gets evaluated.