Last Monday, the Canadian government and the federal states were reminded of the objectives of the telecommunications network development strategy by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. Less than half of Inuit households have access to the Internet.
Last week the Auditor General’s report to the Parliament of Canada on rural and remote connectivity revealed that Canada’s national strategy for full Internet access is behind schedule.
Radio Canada details the difficulties northern communities have in reaching Internet services. The former mayor of Iqaluit – Nunavut’s largest city with a population of 7,429 (2021) – describes the daily hardships created by cuts in the telecommunications network, whether it’s buying gas, running errands or looking for work. So much so that one day she had to go to the fire station herself to get the firemen for a house fire. “It’s a daily frustration. We deserve better, especially at the price we pay,” she told Radio Canada.
In 2019, federal and provincial ministers responsible for innovation and economic development in Canada set in motion, High Speed for All: Canada’s Strategy for Connectivity. Among the measures, the installation of a fiber network of more than 20,000 kilometers providing the needs of 380 thousand households and 1,100 public institutions. The budget, projected in 2018, is 8 billion, with 6 billion in state investments.
The strategy includes $100 million in funding for low-earth orbit satellites to provide connection in the most inaccessible areas. To improve the terrestrial network of telecommunication antennas 750 million dollars have been put on the table. A special fund for improving rural and northern connectivity pools $2 billion. The Canada Infrastructure Bank is adding $1 billion. The government has expressed a desire to implement incentives to encourage suppliers to invest throughout the country. Only the results still seem insufficient.
“There continues to be a numerical gap between people living in urban areas and those living in rural and remote areas, including First Nations reserves,” the Auditor General says in her latest report. The administration points to a lack of knowledge about telephone and Internet accessibility and reminds the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that subscription prices are not a sufficient marker of progress, and that revenues must be taken into account in order to reach the goal of 100% by 2030. “Unaffordable or poor quality connectivity does not improve the lives of Canadians any more than no connectivity at all,” says the Office of the Auditor General of Canada.
According to the latest results, the state has continued to work as planned and improve connectivity across the board with 90% of households connected at the minimum download speed of 50 Mbps by 2021. But the remaining percentages are the most difficult. “Only 42.9% of households on First Nations reserves and 59.5% of households in rural and remote areas have access to these speeds,” says the report, which also notes that only 40% of the national strategy’s 2022-2023 budget has been used to date.
Minister Gudie Hutchings responded in a release, “We all know that the Internet is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. I am proud to say that, thanks to our government’s efforts, 93.5% of Canadian households now have access to high-speed Internet, up from just 79% in 2014. We are well on our way to surpassing our goal of providing high-speed Internet access to 98% of Canadians by 2026, and to all Canadians by 2030. As Minister, I will continue to ensure that rural Canadians have the access they need to affordable high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity.” The Minister also announced that she is working on pricing for communications services, as well as measures to accelerate the technical implementation of the project such as access to previously unused wavelengths in rural and remote areas.
In 2018, the previous report of the Auditor General to the Parliament of Canada, already pointed to a lack of access to spectrum for small Internet service providers to deploy. Smaller providers could advance the connectivity process in remote areas of Canada. The former mayor of Iqaluit is involved in a 5,000-kilometre undersea fibre project across the Canadian Arctic, but she says medium-sized projects like hers or Lyle Fabian’s in Yellowknife are not getting the funding they require. Small suppliers do not have the same power to build cases as large suppliers who can spend $50,000 to respond to RFPs.
Digital technology in the Arctic is a major issue for the digital sovereignty of the Arctic Circle countries and its inhabitants. The project to run undersea cables through the Arctic sea passages would allow 70% of the world’s Internet users to be connected. From this point of view, the lack of strategic vision in Canada was formulated by sociologist Michael Delaunay in his thesis in 2021: Internet in the Canadian Arctic, a soft power issue for the federal state and the Inuit. He reminds us that leaving these territories without a telecommunication network means leaving China or Russia free to develop in the Arctic. At the same time, they could master thisempowerment tool in the fields of economy, culture and politics.
Camille Lin, PolarJournal
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