The Right Move On Fibre Optic Internet Access

Last week, the federal government upheld a ruling by the CRTC that existing fibre optic infrastructure must be shared with resellers in much the same way as cable and phone lines have for many years. The big telecom companies are mad, and I hope we make them a whole lot madder still. It is time for our telecommunications companies to work in the public interest — or face the prospect of nationalisation.

In the riding I represented in the 42nd Parliament, the councils of nearly all of the 43 municipalities had one major request in common: fix rural Internet service. I took it back to our Rural Caucus where we found that the problem was similar in most of rural Canada, and we pushed for the government to solve the issue.

That first spring, the CRTC held hearings they called the Review of Basic Telecommunications Services. Will Amos, the MP for the neighbouring riding of Pontiac, and I decided to present together to urge more rapid and comprehensive action on Internet access by the agency. In my opening remarks, I stated:

Chair, in 2016, high speed internet is an essential service to participate in the modern economy, in modern culture, and in modern democracy. In 2016, proper internet access is a rite of passage into the information society.

It must, therefore, be considered a right and, as a baseline, anyone who has access to electricity must have access to high speed internet.

I took a similar approach and message inside caucus, toward ministry staff and the Minister, and anyone else who would listen.

In the first Bill Morneau budget, $500 million was announced to create a program called “Connect to Innovate.” Though we achieved some moderate funding for a program to begin to solve rural Internet access — a problem department officials told us would take closer to $40 billion to completely solve — what we did not have was a lot of shovel-ready projects.

In the geographically largest and economically poorest county in my riding, the MRC of Antoine-Labelle, county officials initially told my team that there was no way for them to get in on the money and solve the problem they had asked us to solve, giving up before starting. We had extensive discussions with local leaders and we created a task force with the county government and the provincial MNA. We’d taken the horse to water, but now we’d need to make them drink.

I saw building out rural Internet as much as a technical as it was a political problem. I had no interest in participating in another gift to big telecom to once again nationalise investment and privatise profit, and I was eager to call their bluffs on why what we wanted could not be done. There are myriad publicly-funded Internet access projects, but almost all stay in private hands once complete. For me, we had to build out fibre-optic Internet to all the residents possible in the 17 municipalities in the county, and we had to ensure that the infrastructure built on public funds remained in public hands.

Within a few short months, the county had put together a plan to build out the fibre optic lines as municipal infrastructure. Under the vision of Chute-St-Phillipe mayor Normand St-Amour, the plan included the addition of a line item on municipal bills tax bills. Every household that had access to the municipal fibre, once available to them, would be billed about $100 per year whether or not they used it, making Internet access core municipal infrastructure. The plan created a separate low-cost subscription-based co-operative to provide service to the community’s households, detaching service delivery from infrastructure maintenance.

The project received the maximum funding available under Connect to Innovate and was among the largest in the country under the program, along with a nearly-matching financial contribution from the municipality itself. By the time the details were sorted out, the total public investment came out to over $55 million, with over $13 million from each of the federal and provincial government, that would give fibre optic access to some 19,000 rural and small town households.

Under the program, ours was the only project accepted not to include a private partner. Our dream of public infrastructure in public hands would come to be.

The lines had to be strung across some 46,000 utility poles owned by Bell Canada, each requiring its own engineering study and permit to handle the lines, each permit for each pole having an extensive process with each stage offering its own challenges and potential delays.

After the funding was announced and engineering contracts were already under way to sort out those details, but before all were completed, I learned that the federal bureaucracy had killed the project, notifying the provincial government but not advising me. It was killed on the basis that a small grant under the previous Connecting Canadians program had been committed to a satellite and wireless Internet provider, in just one of the 17 municipalities for a few hundred households, voiding the entire grant and project on the basis of a ban on funding competing projects, even though the provider had not yet completed their years-old grant or provided the promised service, having faced no competition or urgency to do so.

I was notified, not by any government department or official, but by our provincial MNA who was a member of the Parti Québécois and was more than happy to share the news that the federal government had killed the project — and that the province would pursue it on its own. After rapid and intense lobbying directly to the Minister and the department, the project was saved. The first clients were connected right around when those people who’d asked me to fight for their access to the Internet voted me out of office for reasons far beyond my control in 2019.

The obstacles to overcome were far more about the telecom industry protecting their monopoly than about any technical problems we might have faced in implementing such a system.

The CRTC’s decision to force big telecom to share fibre optic Internet as a basic infrastructure and force access to it is in a very real sense a vindication of all the work we put into creating the public Internet system in Antoine-Labelle. It is a critical step toward declaring Internet access to be an essential service, forcing competition in high speed Internet and moving away from the telecommunications duopolies that have dominated Canada’s landscape for generations, often using public funds to build private communications infrastructure.

When the CRTC first issued its ruling on sharing fibre optic Internet, they deferred their final decision following pressure from the telecom industry. The CRTC’s decision was the right one, its reconsideration through deferral a tepid apology to the telecom industry for stepping on their toes.

With the arrival of the Carney government, and last week’s decision to uphold the CRTC’s ruling, we are finally seeing a government willing to put the public interest first on this critical issue, and it is a sign of good things to come on telecommunication infrastructure.

Now we just need to finish building serious rural Internet out to the rest of the country. Using a public-ownership model as we did in Antoine-Labelle, we can solve it as a technical infrastructure problem rather than as a business problem and then, perhaps, rural Canada will finally embark on the road to digital equality.