Kanada muss die öffentliche Telekommunikation neu aufbauen
https://jacobin.com/2026/06/canada-telecoms-infrastructure-public-ownership
Kanada muss die öffentliche Telekommunikation neu aufbauen
https://jacobin.com/2026/06/canada-telecoms-infrastructure-public-ownership
5 Kommentare
I’m not sure I agree with that.
Compared to many other countries around the world, Canada cellphone services is one of the most expensive because of many governmental restrictions on competition in the telecom business.
Telecommunications is a field which changes super fast and public infrastructures wouldn’t be able to keep up. In a world of Internet and smartphones, we need more competition to lower the price offered to customers.
Before starting a discussion on having services transferred to the public realm, we should first make sure that public processes are efficient…which based, on technology procurements of the last 20 years or so, has demonstrated that we’re very bad at it.
Canada actually used to have mostly public telecoms at one point. The government privatized them in the 80s, and ended up with the worst of both worlds: less public capacity to build infrastructure *and* a highly concentrated private market.
In rural areas, the problem is that private companies don’t have much incentive to build where returns are weak. In cities, the problem is that a handful of incumbents face limited competitive pressure, so prices, service quality and accountability suffer.
Telecom is critical infrastructure. Relying entirely on a small group of profit-driven firms means society only gets what aligns with their business incentives. A public option isn’t about replacing the market. It’s about having a builder and competitor whose job is to serve the public interest rather than maximize shareholder returns.
Saskatchewan has more fibre deployment than the Canadian average, and lower prices for consumers, despite being a large and sparsely populated province. Why? Because they have Sasktel, one of the few major public telecom companies left in Canada.
Thanks to privatization, we didn’t just get an oligopoly that charges higher prices. We lost much of our ability to shape our own digital infrastructure.
How soon we forget. We already tried this. The governments in Manitoba and Alberta had nearly a century to figure out how to run a telco in a monopoly and they ***still*** fucked it so badly they had to be bailed out. At the time it was privatized, MTS was so far behind in infrastructure upgrades that Internet adoption would have been hampered if they had stayed public.
Who remembers Northern Telecom? We had it, got sold off to the Americans like everything else we had public. We had public oil too! Then we sold that off to the Americans lol… I hope you are seeing the pattern.
People that advocate for public telecoms as the main solution to Canada’s inflated telecom prices are largely missing the point and ignoring the examples both in Canada and the rest of the world where overall prices actually declined etc. This isn’t to say that there is no merit to a public telecom company, but generally it’s a small supplement to the problems effecting Canada’s telecom sector rather than the solution.
Looking exclusively at Canada, the problem with this argument is that we did have (and partially still do) have public telco companies that had varying degrees of success. (SaskTel was successful, MTS was heavily mismanaged and was debt ridden with heavily outdated infrastructure while AGT was was in-between the highs and lows of SaskTel and MTS in the sense that it had decent infrastructure and services, but had very high debt levels etc.) Even though Canada’s telecom prices are the highest among peer countries, we still saw significant reductions in prices since the early 80s-90s during the period when public telecom companies were being privatized due to increased market competition. (though our rate of liberalization is much less significant than peers in the EU or Southeast Asia etc.) This generally points to market oriented competition being the most integral solution rather than nationalization or public telecom utilities etc.
For international examples, most other countries have achieved lower prices than Canada due to significantly more comprehensive liberalization initiatives. Europe privatized its much larger public telecom monopolies yet it had a significantly more affordable and competitive telecom market than Canada or the U.S etc. Even comparing SaskTel prices to the U.S (which also has high telecom prices relative to peer countries) SaskTel is generally still more expensive than equivalent American services.
So while it’s a popular talking point on this sub and among left leaning voters, it’s generally not the long-term solution that people present it as being.