It almost certainly goes through the US no matter what you do. Traffic going anywhere out of my city first drops down to a big peer exchange in the US, then back up into Canada.
That's odd. I know traceroutes don't always show the truth, but when I was there I could route between Victoria and Vancouver without going through the US, at least. No idea about Vancouver to Montreal.
IT Manager in the Canadian Government here. There is indeed a requirement stating that data must not cross the border. This requirement though depends on the department and level of information security.
Whether or not AWS, Azure, etc. can meet this...I honestly don't know.
Yes, for government entities, but the rest of the comments here are talking about businesses, which are going to be the primary consumers of AWS in Canada. There's probably many more requirements that would be needed to be met for any cloud provider to be used for governments.
I don't believe any provinces have requirements on border crossing, and there's no federal requirement on data sovereignty at all for private corporations.
It would be virtually impossible to comply with the never crossing the border as part of a fast link even if you hosted your own data unless you controlled every part of the link.
I was in a territory (not a province) and we owned every meter of fiber in two territories.
I can assure you the data we were sending around didn't even leave our territory, let alone the country, seeings we owned every single scrap of networking hardware in a ~10,000km radius.
The only mitigation is to make sure you encrypt everything in transit and ensure that the private keys never leave Canada.