Some of them were broken because of bad forecasting - or they were implemented, but they missed a deadline, or one of the evaluation metrics.
The 25,000 Syrian refugee promise, for instance, was broken because that number was reached two months after the stated deadline. Six billion in green infrastructure over four years turned into five billion over five years. The revenue-neutral tax changes (lowered taxes for the poor, raised taxes for the rich) resulted in a small net decrease in taxes (The Tories, who hated that tax policy should be cheering for this - but instead, they are complaining that he didn't raise taxes for the rich enough!)
On the other hand, things like 'end subsidies for the fossil fuel industry' had zero work done on them.
I wouldn't grouse too much about the first category of promises - especially when the CPC didn't want to take any action on any of those items. A half-assed implementation that gets most of the way to the finish-line is one thing.
I would grouse quite heavily about the second category of promises. And about the mountain of corruption scandals that the Liberals are finding themselves in.
All things considered, though, I would not expect this particular pledge to be carried out successfully. Expect an avalanche of money to be dumped into the laps of Telus, Bell, and Shaw.
I've never been to Canada but I've heard tons of stories about low data caps and high overage fees.
I'm on a cheap cell phone plan that toutes that it includes 5G access for no extra charge. It so cool that I can blow through my monthly data allocation in 30 seconds :D
In Canada, there are some 'value providers' (that are just subsidiaries of the incumbents, no real MVNO competition here) that sell 3G plans. But it would be stupid to restrict them to 3G spectrum because that's a waste of spectrum, so they get rate-limited to "3G-speeds", which they consider 6mbps.
Funny thing is, I'm on the same network, and if I disable 4G and go on 3G, I get ~16mbps on my speed tests...
Like, 5G and 4G save telecoms money by being more efficient with their spectrum, requiring less tower/leases and less power. Their equipment needs regular refreshment anyway, upgraded or not. But in Canada they still sell it as a more premium service.
Final regulatory approval happened on Friday. Previously Elon had tweeted that was the only thing holding up the beta, so hopefully it rolls out this week.
The constellation is designed to be cycled out, so they'll continually be launching more and/or newer satellites over time. The next generation ones will likely be able to support more bandwidth.
It already has started doing so. The OP's 20Gibps number comes from the 2016 FCC filing which has 10Gibps full duplex. An Elon tweet now says 50Gibps half duplex.
All good stuff but you can only reuse the spectrum marginally from LEO even with the sharpest directional pattern spot beams. With physical transmission line you get the entire spectrum for every single run.
Just curious, why not for LEO? If Echostar can draw patterns like this from geosync, shouldn't the same be possible with an LEO? Or are the satellites spinning/bouncing around too much?
I wonder whether we'll see the day when the satellites themselves can contain say, Netflix/Amazon/Disney cache servers to cut down on back haul traffic?
I think it's safe to assume that someone at Starlink has crunched the numbers and thinks they can make a profit from fully-utilized satellites. I doubt "what if there's too many customers?" is a problem Starlink is worried about; if that happens, they're raking in money hand over fist and they can afford to launch more satellites.
I doubt they're public, but I'd really like to see graphical models of that.
"Hrmmmmm, if we put 100 satellite into this orbital plane, we'll cover 74m people, 25m of which have shit internet, 5m pissed off Canadians, and with an average monthly spend on data of _____, and on average using Xgb/s in peak hours, etc." But if we shift the plane a bit to the left we'll get....
I also wonder how they'll price discriminate it all. Flat rate really doesn't make sense if they're constrained for capacity.
I don't think they were ever planning on hundreds of millions of customers. The price makes it a nonstarter for 75% of the worlds population. Between Canada and the US the number of people with no other options likely numbers in the 10s of millions, not hundreds.
> Each starlink satellite can only handle ~20Gibps
Just running the math, as 2 people that uses ~250gb/m total, that's 2000gib / 2.7m seconds in a month, we're using on average .0007Gibps.
(Badly) assuming perfect distribution of demand, each 20Gibps could support 30k connections like us.
While there are 10k of these satellites in space, I'm not sure how many (if any) are overlapping the same area. They're probably hovering over an ocean half the time.
Canada infamously has some of the most corrupt and expensive telecom in the entire world. I seriously doubt this article is accurate. It looks like Trudeau is preparing for an election with empty promises.
Canadians don't seem to "vote" people out but rather vote them to another part of the government until they can come back again. At least in America when a politician is out, they're out.
Forget about electoral reform. It looks like they are going to completely botch pharmacare.
EDIT: I am getting downvoted, which is fair. I did not provide any context and assumed it was common knowledge. In his throne speech, Trudeau had this to say about pharmacare:
> The Government remains committed to a national, universal pharmacare program and will accelerate steps to achieve this system including:
- Through a rare-disease strategy to help Canadian families save money on high-cost drugs;
-Establishing a national formulary to keep drug prices low;
-And working with provinces and territories willing to move forward without delay.
Essentially, the government will try to make drugs a tiny bit cheaper for consumers. It does not look the Pharmacare program is going to be universal and free, like the Medicare is. But perhaps your 2000$ per month drug price would come down to 1500$ per month, if you are below a certain income threshold, etc, etc. This is not nowhere near enough after Liberals promising Pharmacare for decades.
EDIT 2: The price of insulin in Canada is an order of magnitude lower than the US. Despite this, many Canadians are still forced to forego or ration their insulin and other drugs and supplies [0][1]. Reducing prices does not work nearly as well as one might think. Making them free does.
> At T1International, we found that 19 per cent of Canadians with type 1 diabetes had rationed insulin in the last year; 3 per cent were rationing at least once per week.
> Yes, Canada has less insulin rationing than the US (25 per cent) and at lesser intensity for sure; Americans who rationed often skip doses daily whereas rationing once per week or month was more common here. But Canada is a far cry from countries like the United Kingdom, where there was essentially no insulin rationing reported.
> In the U.K., all diabetes supplies, including insulin, are covered by the National Health Service. Such is also the case in many other high income countries. Even many middle income countries, like Morocco, cover the cost of insulin for their diabetic population.
Even medical care is strictly withing provincial jurisdiction. But the only reason we have universal coverage in the form of Medicare is that the federal government forced provinces to offer a minimum set of services through the power of funding. I am glad they did it, and I hope they expand it to Pharmacare, but I am not holding my breath.
You know how the US forced all states to increase drinking age to 21? That's how Canada forced all provinces to adopt universal healthcare. Essentially, there is a minimum set of requirements the provincial healthcare plans must offer. They are free to not adhere to it, but then the amount of funds they get through Canada Health Transfer (money from the federal government given to provincial governments to spend on healthcare) will get reduced or completely removed. Canada Health Transfer accounts for approximately 10% of all provincial government revenues, at least in Alberta and Ontario that I checked. It's a serious bit of change and a strong incentive to follow federal guidelines.
As a side note, the fact that the federal government can use its spending powers to enforce policy that is not within its jurisdiction is very unpopular in Quebec and one of the changes Quebec wants made to the constitution.
> As a side note, the fact that the federal government can use its spending powers to enforce policy that is not within its jurisdiction is very unpopular in Quebec and one of the changes Quebec wants made to the constitution.
Especially since the fact that the federal government has money to spend for these means that it's collecting too much and for purposes not under it's jurisdiction.
Quebec is very wise to want to put an end to this.
The downside is that without federal pressure, we may never have gotten universality, reciprocity, and transferability for programs like Medicare and CPP/QPP. I'm sure provincial governments would love it. But we the citizens would have been worse off.
It's up to the citizens of each province to vote for the laws that serves them better, not some overarching central bureaucracy desperately trying to illegally acquire more powers.
1) It is legal. The whole point of Quebec wanting to change the constitution is to make it illegal. If it were already illegal, there would be no point in making it illegal again.
2) It is up to the citizens of Canada to vote for laws that serves them better, and they have voted for federal politicians who created, expanded and maintained laws such as Canada Health Act (CHA). The democratic voice in federal election is no less democratic than the provincial election.
2) I don't think any provinces would have created reciprocal systems. Case in point:
CHA mandates reciprocity for the services provided under CHA. That is to say, if you are an Ontario resident and you get into an accident in BC and have to go to the hospital, you would not have to pay for the stay. Most provinces offer extra services that are not mandated by CHA. For example, prescription drug coverage and ambulance services. Since these services are not under CHA, there is no obligation for their reciprocity. Lo and behold, none of the provinces reciprocate these services. It is strongly recommended to purchase travel insurance for out of province travels for this very reason—a call in another province may cost you 1000's or 10's of thousands of dollars. Considering that the provinces are doing the very bare minimum they are legally obligated to do by the federal government in terms of reciprocity, I do not believe we would have gotten any reciprocity at all without the federal mandate. Also, Alberta would most probably have US-style healthcare system with US-level prices.
I figure he is probably trying to take credit for Starlink making decent Internet available to the Rural population of Canada. It was interesting how he let Rogers, Bell and Telus hide under the Umbrella of "Canadian Media Companies" to insure they had no competition from US Carriers under NAFTA 2.0.
I was surprised they even allowed Starlink since it could threaten the potential business Rogers, Bell and Telus could have sometime during the next century.
Just taking a guess: There's not much variability in Canadian ISPs, they're all pretty bad. You can move across the country and your experience will be the same.
The US has a lot more variability. Lots of big players and a million tiny ones. Usually you'll have 1 or 2 choices, but sometimes they're both worse than the usual suspect Canadian providers.
The costs are high, but the quality of service is really good. I have a fibre connection and receive 1 Gbps (speed test occasionally returns 1.1 Gbps) with 1 ms latency and Unlimited bandwidth. Previously I had cable and received 600 Mbps with 6 ms latency also with unlimited bandwidth.
Are you implying Canadian traffic isn't vacuumed up voluntarily by the Canadian government for use by US intelligence? Because that's false. Canada is a card-carrying member of Five Eyes.
Trudeau is supporting Canadian company Telesat who will begin launching LEO satellites late next year. I don't expect Starlink to cover northern Canada but I expect Telesat will.
I don't think Telesat is Canadian but I do know that Bell and Shaw are in bed with them. So hence the connection to funnel more money into their pockets.
The issue with Canada is that Big Telco owns the Government. So when it comes to competition there is none and they make sure nothing threatens their Oligarchy. Trudeau like others, promises to go after them every time there is an election and then does shit like everyone before him. I'm sure there is a payoff somewhere in there for him and the others.
Any money he throws at this will be tax payer money and it's just a different way of separating the masses from their wealth and funneling more of it to Big Telco. He will never offer any kind of support to companies like SpaceX since they are not part of the club.
Just good old corruption in plain sight of the masses. He knows they won't do anything about it and there are millions in favors he has coming when he decides to leave Government.
I guess you're just committed to being incredibly hyperbolic then. Thinking that Canada and Lebanon are on the same level of corruption is such willful blindness that I'm guessing your statements are simply ideologically motivated.
Well its more id believe that a telecoms agency operated by Hezbollah is probably more interested in providing service for the sake of service than a Canadian telecoms company.
Yes and no. I worked for Northwestel (division of Bell) which serves Internet (and phone, and TV) for ALL of Yukon, NWT, Nunavut and some of Northern BC.
It has the largest operating area of any Telco on the planet.
In virtually all communities they are the one and only provider.
Yes, it's expensive. Yes, the CRTC is corrupt, and the whole setup is just guaranteed profits to the big telcos. But, you need to think about how hard it is to serve internet to communities of 20-100 people in the Canadian Arctic that don't have roads. There are hundreds of such communities served.
There are weekly outages because of everything from ice build up on the towers at -50C, wind storms blowing down towers, Caribou eating through cables, etc. etc. Most outages require chartering a helicopter and going to the top of mountains 300km from a road or town of noteworthy size.
There is no "grid". Virtually all the sites (and the communities) are run on diesel (which has to be flown in).. and in recent years they're running more on solar/battery, but the weather makes that severely difficult.
Recently Musk/Starlink got approval to operate in direct competition with Telesat. Trudeau who is a strong Crony Politician clearly handing a bunch of money out. Trudeau who will very probably be facing an election shortly and hasn't issued their budget all year.
The federal budget should have been out in March, that got delayed because of covid. They announced it should be out in June. That didn't happen. They announced it would be out in July. That didn't happen. It's now November and there's not even a possible announcement date right now.
The reason the budget isn't out is because it's going to be very bad. The problem with cronyism is that special groups will spend lots of money to get their slice of the pie but the pie isn't going to be big this year. Those special interest groups are going to be angry they didnt get a slice.
Sure, the company I'm with is Xplornet. I'm not happy with them but they're the only option until Starlink.
Bandwidth is around 2-5 mbps on a perfect day. Will frequently drop to 500kbps depending on the time of day, weather, etc. Several times per month I'll lose internet completely, and particularly bad storms have knocked out my internet for several days before.
I can sometimes watch YouTube on 240p, streaming music isn't too bad, and browsing text-based website (ie HN) are slow but palatable. Once the monthly cap is hit, the speed drops to 128kbps which is pretty much unusable (even for text websites).
Latency is also pretty bad. Real time conversations aren't really possible, but thankfully Zoom has a phone dial-in option. Here's an example:
PING 1.1 (1.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=635.123 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=839.064 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=661.220 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=584.197 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=58 time=629.539 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 6
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=58 time=733.270 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=58 time=658.290 ms
64 bytes from 1.0.0.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=58 time=590.062 ms
^C
--- 1.1 ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 27.3% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 584.197/666.346/839.064/78.501 ms
I'm in the process of setting up a console-based laptop just to see what I can accomplish.
You might want to check out the command-line based reddit client 'rtv'. It even supports opening up links/images in your browser of choice. Supports login/comments/upvotes/downvotes.
I've found lynx to be quite useful for reading The Star, The Globe and Mail and The Economist as a clean wall of text without any annoying paywalls.
Even found some radio streams (okay, bassdrive.com) that sound pretty good at 32kbps on AAC.
Xplornet is famous for overpromising and underprovisioning. Your experience is a perfect example of the scam here. Presumably Xplornet will be filing requests for this new funding. They will then in return provide lots of new service that in theory can meet the criteria but in practice never will.
Yup. Even in North GTA. Outside town on concession roads? Still expensive LTE or small companies with P2P mobile equivalents that’s junk compared to line broadband.
>Trudeau today announced his government's plan to launch a $1.75-billion universal broadband fund to build infrastructure across the country, mainly in rural and remote communities
how is this going to be distributed? if this is given to the incumbent telecom, what safeguards are there to prevent them from pocketing the money and not delivering?
The difference being road construction is likely (presumably) overseen by a Gov agency that will hold the contractor accountable - whereas internet providers enjoy regulatory capture thru writing their own telecom laws, along with lobbying purchased legislators to place handpicked people into top regulator positions.
As an outsider I'm not completely sure I understand Canada's vision for it's tech sector.
The plan seems to be to heavily subsidize (and try to extract political credit for) StarLink and SpaceX so that existing rent seeking monopolies can price gouge customers even more. What's interesting is that with regulations around aerospace SpaceX can't and won't hire Canadians. The country effectively went 180 degree backward from the Nortel years when it seemed interested in being a pioneer in network tech to simply being a consumer. Seeing how Nortel didn't protect it's IP again foreign nations, that's probably a good thing that SpaceX doesn't hire Canadians.
This pattern also extends to the rest of what remains of the Canadian aerospace sector. When Trump slapped tariffs later judged to be illegal on the Bombardier CSeries the Trudeau government simply... looked away and did nothing, allowing Airbus to swoop in and grab the plane and it's IP. Again, Canada will handle some assembly while engineering moves to Europe.
Are these measures... popular with the Canadian public? Help me understand here.
God no, we Canadians all know we are being gouged on telecom prices. Both internet and mobility. We have the CRTC (Canadian radio-television telecom commission) which is supposed to protect the public interest, however they do a piss poor job of even trying to cast themselves in that light.
There are like 3 companies that control the internet oligarchy. They used the government backed fibre expansion subsidies to build out infrastructure, then claim that magically made everything more expensive.
Our telecom is required to be all Canadian companies, but all their customer service is farmed out to India or other similar region call center's.
We pay through the nose of asymmetric internet speeds. I hope starlink and other factors push for a price revolt.
> We pay through the nose of asymmetric internet speeds. I hope starlink and other factors push for a price revolt.
But StarLink still has to talk to a ground station. I doubt they will let a Canadian customer just connect to an AT&T station or T-Mobile even if they are in range. Could the local operators even segment the territory into exclusive zones by placing the ground stations a certain way?
There's apparently been a massive upsurge in interest in more remote and rural property since the pandemic. As companies become comfortable with WFH due to being forced to try it out, connecting these places will go a long way to allowing Canadians to live in more remote places part and full time and still be connected to work.
There's a lot of struggling 'ghost' towns out there formerly based around resource industries that are no longer viable. This could have a big positive impact in distributing more wealth to more parts of the country instead of having it all centred on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Forgive my ignorance, what speed internet do 98% of Canadians have currently?
Is this a speed bump or a no internet vs internet scenario?
Those are two very different propositions.
If it's access to the internet, that's a great idea. If it's a speed bump - I'm not interested in paying for someone else's luxury. If you want luxury - go ahead and purchase it.
Also, if we're going to government sponsor access to High-speed internet, we should convert internet service providers to a government service as well.
How does it make sense for tax payers to pay for internet service hardware and have corporations come in and make profit off of it?
I can't find my sources for this but I wrote a paper about it in University. The last time something like this was promised (by the previous Harper government), they made most of their progress by redefining "high speed" to be a barely usable speed, something like 3mbps if I remember correctly.
Looks like the CRTC has updated the definition again to be 50mbps down/10mbps up. Not ambitious at all compared to eg. South Korea and some European countries. But it is enough to eg. do video conferencing. So hopefully we can see some real progress. Northern communities experience a horrific digital divide due to their unusable internet speeds.
1) Canada's "most expensive telecom in the world" comes up a lot.
While this is somewhat true, internet/cell phones are expensive here, what people seem to forget is the number of customers and the land mass. You cant take Phone costs in Ontario (Population 14.57 million, area 1.076 million km²) and compare that to California (Population 39.51 million, area 423,970 km²) and think you will pay the same rates.
Yes, most of Ontario is close to the border, and in cities, but your cell phone works over a massive area and you pay for this.
2) Canadian government pledges to connect 98% of Canadians via High-Speed Internet
This is the liberals, and probably gettiing ready for elections so they promise the world but history shows they also wont deliver on it.
- Ontario Wynne pledges to lower insurance rates (this becomes a "stretch goal")
- Trudeua pledges electoral reform (nope, never took place).
- Ontario Liberals move to ban two-tier health care (2003)
How long do you think Trudeau's wife waited for her COVID treatment? Do you think she was she treated in a hallway like other Canadians?
I always see these numbers thrown around and I assume they fit the narrative that most lobbyist want to push but here's what's pulled under the rug is: Density distribution, ie, how many square miles to cover 50%, 75% or 99% of the population.
Sure, maybe Ontario has twice the size, roughly, of California. But I doubt the northern parts get any cell coverage.
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Political discourse can be difficult enough without hyperbole making things worse.
The 25,000 Syrian refugee promise, for instance, was broken because that number was reached two months after the stated deadline. Six billion in green infrastructure over four years turned into five billion over five years. The revenue-neutral tax changes (lowered taxes for the poor, raised taxes for the rich) resulted in a small net decrease in taxes (The Tories, who hated that tax policy should be cheering for this - but instead, they are complaining that he didn't raise taxes for the rich enough!)
On the other hand, things like 'end subsidies for the fossil fuel industry' had zero work done on them.
I wouldn't grouse too much about the first category of promises - especially when the CPC didn't want to take any action on any of those items. A half-assed implementation that gets most of the way to the finish-line is one thing.
I would grouse quite heavily about the second category of promises. And about the mountain of corruption scandals that the Liberals are finding themselves in.
All things considered, though, I would not expect this particular pledge to be carried out successfully. Expect an avalanche of money to be dumped into the laps of Telus, Bell, and Shaw.
Promises that help established big corporate businesses: Kept
Promises that don't: Broken
One of two that has over 1,000+ comments. It was only reason I originally voted for him.
Giving telecoms money for infrastructure with no strings attached seems like a bad idea.
I'm on a cheap cell phone plan that toutes that it includes 5G access for no extra charge. It so cool that I can blow through my monthly data allocation in 30 seconds :D
Funny thing is, I'm on the same network, and if I disable 4G and go on 3G, I get ~16mbps on my speed tests...
Like, 5G and 4G save telecoms money by being more efficient with their spectrum, requiring less tower/leases and less power. Their equipment needs regular refreshment anyway, upgraded or not. But in Canada they still sell it as a more premium service.
US is loaded with lessons like this that no one wants to learn from.
eg: Bell's (later Verizon's) broken 1993 promise to deploy fiber @ 45Mbps across Pennsylvania, that netted the corp billions in subsidies
eg: Anything at all with the words Frontier & West Virginia
https://www.telesat.com/press/press-releases/telesat-and-the...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/elon-musk-s-spacex-closer-to...
Say there's 10,000 of these in space, that's 200,000Gibps or 195Tibps.
I don't think that's enough bandwidth for high speed internet for hundreds of millions of customers.
However I suspect it'll be cheaper and faster for sparsley populated areas. With Urban areas still leveraging physical wires.
https://rvseniormoments.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/07_ka-ba...
Starlink isn't for people who hate their Big3 ISP. It's for people who wish they had a Big3 ISP to hate.
"Hrmmmmm, if we put 100 satellite into this orbital plane, we'll cover 74m people, 25m of which have shit internet, 5m pissed off Canadians, and with an average monthly spend on data of _____, and on average using Xgb/s in peak hours, etc." But if we shift the plane a bit to the left we'll get....
I also wonder how they'll price discriminate it all. Flat rate really doesn't make sense if they're constrained for capacity.
Just running the math, as 2 people that uses ~250gb/m total, that's 2000gib / 2.7m seconds in a month, we're using on average .0007Gibps.
(Badly) assuming perfect distribution of demand, each 20Gibps could support 30k connections like us.
While there are 10k of these satellites in space, I'm not sure how many (if any) are overlapping the same area. They're probably hovering over an ocean half the time.
EDIT: I am getting downvoted, which is fair. I did not provide any context and assumed it was common knowledge. In his throne speech, Trudeau had this to say about pharmacare:
> The Government remains committed to a national, universal pharmacare program and will accelerate steps to achieve this system including:
- Through a rare-disease strategy to help Canadian families save money on high-cost drugs;
-Establishing a national formulary to keep drug prices low;
-And working with provinces and territories willing to move forward without delay.
Essentially, the government will try to make drugs a tiny bit cheaper for consumers. It does not look the Pharmacare program is going to be universal and free, like the Medicare is. But perhaps your 2000$ per month drug price would come down to 1500$ per month, if you are below a certain income threshold, etc, etc. This is not nowhere near enough after Liberals promising Pharmacare for decades.
EDIT 2: The price of insulin in Canada is an order of magnitude lower than the US. Despite this, many Canadians are still forced to forego or ration their insulin and other drugs and supplies [0][1]. Reducing prices does not work nearly as well as one might think. Making them free does.
> At T1International, we found that 19 per cent of Canadians with type 1 diabetes had rationed insulin in the last year; 3 per cent were rationing at least once per week.
> Yes, Canada has less insulin rationing than the US (25 per cent) and at lesser intensity for sure; Americans who rationed often skip doses daily whereas rationing once per week or month was more common here. But Canada is a far cry from countries like the United Kingdom, where there was essentially no insulin rationing reported.
> In the U.K., all diabetes supplies, including insulin, are covered by the National Health Service. Such is also the case in many other high income countries. Even many middle income countries, like Morocco, cover the cost of insulin for their diabetic population.
[0] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/07/29/cana...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/blog/the-soaring-cost-of-...
As a side note, the fact that the federal government can use its spending powers to enforce policy that is not within its jurisdiction is very unpopular in Quebec and one of the changes Quebec wants made to the constitution.
https://budget.ontario.ca/2019/chapter-3.html#section-6
https://globalnews.ca/news/3496355/quebec-canada-constitutio...
https://ualawccsprod.srv.ualberta.ca/2019/07/federal-spendin...
Especially since the fact that the federal government has money to spend for these means that it's collecting too much and for purposes not under it's jurisdiction.
Quebec is very wise to want to put an end to this.
It's up to the citizens of each province to vote for the laws that serves them better, not some overarching central bureaucracy desperately trying to illegally acquire more powers.
2) It is up to the citizens of Canada to vote for laws that serves them better, and they have voted for federal politicians who created, expanded and maintained laws such as Canada Health Act (CHA). The democratic voice in federal election is no less democratic than the provincial election.
2) I don't think any provinces would have created reciprocal systems. Case in point:
CHA mandates reciprocity for the services provided under CHA. That is to say, if you are an Ontario resident and you get into an accident in BC and have to go to the hospital, you would not have to pay for the stay. Most provinces offer extra services that are not mandated by CHA. For example, prescription drug coverage and ambulance services. Since these services are not under CHA, there is no obligation for their reciprocity. Lo and behold, none of the provinces reciprocate these services. It is strongly recommended to purchase travel insurance for out of province travels for this very reason—a call in another province may cost you 1000's or 10's of thousands of dollars. Considering that the provinces are doing the very bare minimum they are legally obligated to do by the federal government in terms of reciprocity, I do not believe we would have gotten any reciprocity at all without the federal mandate. Also, Alberta would most probably have US-style healthcare system with US-level prices.
I was surprised they even allowed Starlink since it could threaten the potential business Rogers, Bell and Telus could have sometime during the next century.
The US has a lot more variability. Lots of big players and a million tiny ones. Usually you'll have 1 or 2 choices, but sometimes they're both worse than the usual suspect Canadian providers.
These statements only apply to DSL/Cable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesat
Is Canada involved at all in the tech behind Starlink? It looks to me it's 100% funded and developed by SpaceX here in the US.
The issue with Canada is that Big Telco owns the Government. So when it comes to competition there is none and they make sure nothing threatens their Oligarchy. Trudeau like others, promises to go after them every time there is an election and then does shit like everyone before him. I'm sure there is a payoff somewhere in there for him and the others.
Any money he throws at this will be tax payer money and it's just a different way of separating the masses from their wealth and funneling more of it to Big Telco. He will never offer any kind of support to companies like SpaceX since they are not part of the club.
Just good old corruption in plain sight of the masses. He knows they won't do anything about it and there are millions in favors he has coming when he decides to leave Government.
Or monitoring the transmissions of its factional enemies?
You don't seem to understand the true extent of what corruption can mean.
It has the largest operating area of any Telco on the planet.
In virtually all communities they are the one and only provider.
Yes, it's expensive. Yes, the CRTC is corrupt, and the whole setup is just guaranteed profits to the big telcos. But, you need to think about how hard it is to serve internet to communities of 20-100 people in the Canadian Arctic that don't have roads. There are hundreds of such communities served.
There are weekly outages because of everything from ice build up on the towers at -50C, wind storms blowing down towers, Caribou eating through cables, etc. etc. Most outages require chartering a helicopter and going to the top of mountains 300km from a road or town of noteworthy size.
Canada is BIG and the Arctic is REMOTE.
The federal budget should have been out in March, that got delayed because of covid. They announced it should be out in June. That didn't happen. They announced it would be out in July. That didn't happen. It's now November and there's not even a possible announcement date right now.
The reason the budget isn't out is because it's going to be very bad. The problem with cronyism is that special groups will spend lots of money to get their slice of the pie but the pie isn't going to be big this year. Those special interest groups are going to be angry they didnt get a slice.
I'm less than 5 minutes to a city with fibre, yet my geography makes it impossible to get anything other than satellite internet ($100/40gb).
Bandwidth is around 2-5 mbps on a perfect day. Will frequently drop to 500kbps depending on the time of day, weather, etc. Several times per month I'll lose internet completely, and particularly bad storms have knocked out my internet for several days before.
I can sometimes watch YouTube on 240p, streaming music isn't too bad, and browsing text-based website (ie HN) are slow but palatable. Once the monthly cap is hit, the speed drops to 128kbps which is pretty much unusable (even for text websites).
Latency is also pretty bad. Real time conversations aren't really possible, but thankfully Zoom has a phone dial-in option. Here's an example:
You might want to check out the command-line based reddit client 'rtv'. It even supports opening up links/images in your browser of choice. Supports login/comments/upvotes/downvotes.
I've found lynx to be quite useful for reading The Star, The Globe and Mail and The Economist as a clean wall of text without any annoying paywalls.
Even found some radio streams (okay, bassdrive.com) that sound pretty good at 32kbps on AAC.
I'm sure they already have them filled out. After all, they designed them.
You just need to make friends with the landowners at the tops of the mountains.
how is this going to be distributed? if this is given to the incumbent telecom, what safeguards are there to prevent them from pocketing the money and not delivering?
The plan seems to be to heavily subsidize (and try to extract political credit for) StarLink and SpaceX so that existing rent seeking monopolies can price gouge customers even more. What's interesting is that with regulations around aerospace SpaceX can't and won't hire Canadians. The country effectively went 180 degree backward from the Nortel years when it seemed interested in being a pioneer in network tech to simply being a consumer. Seeing how Nortel didn't protect it's IP again foreign nations, that's probably a good thing that SpaceX doesn't hire Canadians.
This pattern also extends to the rest of what remains of the Canadian aerospace sector. When Trump slapped tariffs later judged to be illegal on the Bombardier CSeries the Trudeau government simply... looked away and did nothing, allowing Airbus to swoop in and grab the plane and it's IP. Again, Canada will handle some assembly while engineering moves to Europe.
Are these measures... popular with the Canadian public? Help me understand here.
There are like 3 companies that control the internet oligarchy. They used the government backed fibre expansion subsidies to build out infrastructure, then claim that magically made everything more expensive.
Our telecom is required to be all Canadian companies, but all their customer service is farmed out to India or other similar region call center's.
We pay through the nose of asymmetric internet speeds. I hope starlink and other factors push for a price revolt.
But StarLink still has to talk to a ground station. I doubt they will let a Canadian customer just connect to an AT&T station or T-Mobile even if they are in range. Could the local operators even segment the territory into exclusive zones by placing the ground stations a certain way?
There's a lot of struggling 'ghost' towns out there formerly based around resource industries that are no longer viable. This could have a big positive impact in distributing more wealth to more parts of the country instead of having it all centred on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Fast promises on slow internet in the North (August 31, 2015) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fast-promises-on-slow-i...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/red-tape-slowing-sprea...
Is this a speed bump or a no internet vs internet scenario?
Those are two very different propositions.
If it's access to the internet, that's a great idea. If it's a speed bump - I'm not interested in paying for someone else's luxury. If you want luxury - go ahead and purchase it.
Also, if we're going to government sponsor access to High-speed internet, we should convert internet service providers to a government service as well.
How does it make sense for tax payers to pay for internet service hardware and have corporations come in and make profit off of it?
1) Canada's "most expensive telecom in the world" comes up a lot.
While this is somewhat true, internet/cell phones are expensive here, what people seem to forget is the number of customers and the land mass. You cant take Phone costs in Ontario (Population 14.57 million, area 1.076 million km²) and compare that to California (Population 39.51 million, area 423,970 km²) and think you will pay the same rates.
Yes, most of Ontario is close to the border, and in cities, but your cell phone works over a massive area and you pay for this.
2) Canadian government pledges to connect 98% of Canadians via High-Speed Internet
This is the liberals, and probably gettiing ready for elections so they promise the world but history shows they also wont deliver on it.
- Ontario Wynne pledges to lower insurance rates (this becomes a "stretch goal") - Trudeua pledges electoral reform (nope, never took place).
- Ontario Liberals move to ban two-tier health care (2003) How long do you think Trudeau's wife waited for her COVID treatment? Do you think she was she treated in a hallway like other Canadians?
Sure, maybe Ontario has twice the size, roughly, of California. But I doubt the northern parts get any cell coverage.