Joshua van Es is the founder of Upper Harbour — a technology sovereignty research platform mapping who controls the software Canadian organizations depend on. His work spans corporate law, policy research, and data sovereignty, and has been published in The Logic, Maclean's, OpenCanada, and BetaKit.
Joshua holds a J.D. from the University of British Columbia and degrees in psychology and history, including a master's in Canadian history. His career spans law, academic research, policy, and entrepreneurship — drawn to projects that help build Canada's institutional foundations for a digital era.
Before law, Joshua contributed to Landscapes of Injustice — a seven-year SSHRC-funded research collaboration across Canadian universities examining the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. He wrote the project's public-facing narrative website and contributed a chapter published by McGill-Queen's University Press.
Joshua's writing on technology policy, data sovereignty, and Canadian digital infrastructure has appeared in national newspapers, magazines, think tanks, and academic presses.
Most Canadian organizations have no structured visibility into where their data actually flows — across SaaS platforms, integration layers, and foreign jurisdictions. Upper Harbour was built to turn that structural problem into operational tools, starting with HarbourScan: a compliance assessment framework that maps SaaS data exposure across Canadian organizations.
The project sits at the intersection of Joshua's work in law, policy, and technology — applying a structured, evidence-based approach to a problem that increasingly affects procurement, governance, and national security.
Joshua welcomes conversations about data sovereignty, Canadian technology policy, compliance infrastructure, or collaboration opportunities.