Throughout the twentieth century, Canada built a world-leading telecommunications system through a productive balance of private and public carriers. But within a generation, conservative governments at all levels across the country privatized almost all of the public side of that balance. Today, the federal New Democratic Party’s new leader Avi Lewis’s “public option” platform is re-contesting the question that Prairie Province telecoms pioneers first fought for 120 years ago.

Canada has fallen behind countries around the world in building out fiber telecom infrastructure for faster internet speeds. Many of these countries have maintained public ownership in their markets while Canada’s public telecom shrinks. However, SaskTel — Saskatchewan’s publicly owned telecom provider and one of the last holdouts of public telecom in Canada — outperforms the national average on fiber deployment. To continue to invest in the twenty-first century economy, Canada has to rebuild public ownership of telecoms.

The following analysis presents the first comprehensive compilation of Canadian telecoms revenues by ownership type spanning seven decades, from 1953 to the present, built from Statistics Canada, CRTC and ISED data, GMICP database, and primary sources. It also compiles ownership and fiber deployment data for eight OECD countries that, unlike Canada and the United States, maintained or rebuilt a productive mix of public and private ownership. Of the many modern telecoms metrics, fiber deployment is an indicator that defies the logic of privatization: it is the fastest and most future-proof of fixed technologies, but also capital intensive, making it less attractive in commercial terms in lower-density markets. These economic realities, high infrastructure costs and weak profit incentives in low-density markets, are the same conditions that drove farmer and labor movements to push governments to buy out privately owned Bell Canada’s Prairie Province operations between 1906 and 1908.