Putting the ‘public’ back in public utilities: internet access in northern and rural Canada

If asked to say something about social inequality and infrastructure, a topic that most Canadians would mention is the lack of drinking water in many Indigenous communities. Blame for the lengthy boil-water advisories in Indigenous communities belongs in large part to the enduring legacy of the 1875 Indian Act, which tried to isolate and confine Indigenous Peoples to reserves, often in remote areas with unproductive land. Even in reserves near urbanized settler municipalities, however, there is little or no incentive for the municipal drinking water routinely provided to urban Canadians to be extended to these communities. Unlike in many other countries, drinking water in Canada is generally a public utility, usually municipally owned, but you would not know that from the experience of many reserves. And yet, this country has a long legacy of ‘public works’, which ought to be remembered when thinking about today’s equivalent of the water, electricity and telephone networks of earlier days—namely reliable and affordable internet access. Because internet access was from the beginning handed over to for-profit companies like Bell and Rogers, instead of being treated as a key public utility, access to broadband has been plagued by geographic inequities with a distinct demographic dimension, since Indigenous Peoples are far more likely to live in the North and in rural remote areas than settler Canadians. Today, Starlink, Elon Musk’s collection of low-orbit satellites (over 3,500 as of February 2023), is starting to provide better internet access in the Canadian Far North than was provided by the firm Xplorenet, which provided expensive, slow and unreliable internet access in Nunavut and other northern areas for years via conventional satellites. It now seems that populated areas in Yukon and the Northwest Territories may come to depend on Musk for their internet access. They will likely pay a lot for the privilege: the Wikipedia entry on Musk’s SpaceX tells us that Musk wants to use revenue from his huge pile of space junk to fund his much-publicized future plans to help (some) humans escape to Mars. The government of Nunavut, on its part, is betting on a more conventional solution: laying an undersea fibre-optic cable going from Newfoundland to Nunavut. It is too early to know how that will work out, but skepticism is in order; Newfoundland is not exactly Silicon Valley North, for one thing. Becoming dependent on Musk’s authoritarian capitalism for the daily necessity that is reliable internet access is a risky move. So is making the whole of Nunavut dependent on an undersea cable from Newfoundland (or from Greenland, an option considered earlier). Transantlantic and transpacific fibre-optic cables are generally tied—literally—to older telephone and telegraph cables. That doubling up makes their maintenance easier than it is likely to be in the extremely cold waters between Nunavut and Newfoundland. Either way, forcing cash-strapped northern and rural governments and municipalities to go it alone and end up wholly dependent on a single provider or a single undersea cable is hardly an adequate solution. Over 100 years ago, Canada pioneered publicly owned utilities—famously, Hydro Quebec and Ontario Hydro—but also the prairie provinces’ telephone networks, which were set up as public works in the 1920s. Public ownership, or at least strong public regulation of service coverage and of prices, would be a good and a very Canadian solution to the great inequities and profit-gouging that are likely to result from outfits like SpaceX, especially if (as is likely) such providers are likely to have an effective monopoly. This country used to spend public money on public works well before the term ‘infrastructure’ came into fashion. Of course not all projects were or are worthwhile in the long run. But public works—or in their absence public regulatory bodies governing privately-owned utilities—are far more likely to be subject to accountability for their services and their prices than anything coming of out Musk’s brain. Mariana Valverde is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. Her latest book is Infrastructure: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2022).