The early 1900s were the height of the progressive movements in North America — a broad democratic reaction against the Gilded Age and its robber barons who had used concentrated private control of industry to extract wealth from workers and farmers. In the electricity sector, for instance, the 1905 Ontario provincial election turned on whether the province should have its own electricity company, establishing what would become Ontario Hydro in 1906. At the same time, a parallel struggle over telephone service was unfolding across the Prairie Provinces.

Bell Canada had extended its network westward past its home base of Ontario and Québec, but the service in the newly created Prairie Provinces was focused on businesses in the cities. Manitoba farmers and residents organized and forced the question of public ownership to a referendum in 1906, and the following year the provincial government purchased Bell’s Manitoba operations to create what would become Manitoba Telephones System (MTS).

Following that example, the Saskatchewan and Alberta provincial governments also bought out Bell’s operations in 1908 and 1909, creating what would become SaskTel and Alberta Government Telephones (AGT). During the same period, municipalities such as Edmonton, Alberta (EdTel), and Thunder Bay, Ontario, set up their own municipal telephone carriers.

In just a few years, sustained political advocacy led to publicly owned telephone companies that would serve one in six Canadians. By 1953, public carriers at all levels of government accounted for roughly 16 percent of total Canadian telecom revenues, as shown in Figure 1, though private carriers still held most of the market. Bell Canada dominated the private sector early on, serving Ontario and Québec; BC Tel served British Columbia and a series of province-based private companies served each of the Atlantic provinces.

On the public side were the three Prairie provincial carriers, AGT, MTS, and SaskTel, as well as a series of municipal carriers including EdTel. Federal crown corporations such as Teleglobe, CNCP Telecoms (a fifty-fifty jointly owned public-private venture), Northwestel, TerraNova Telephones, and Telesat, would grow to become some of the largest publicly owned entities, providing telecom services to remote rural communities in the North, satellite, and overseas services. This balance of private and public provision was highly successful in delivering service and innovation for all Canadians. In spite of the vast distances and relatively low population density, by 1960 Canada had the highest number of phones per inhabitant in the world, surpassing the United States, which built its sector almost entirely on private capital.

Under a wave of neoliberalism that swept the world and began to crest over Canada, the federal Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney began the privatization of public telecoms in 1987, selling the federal telecom crown corporations over six years, as presented in Table 1. Alberta Progressive Conservative Premier Don Getty sold AGT in 1990 — which would go on to become TELUS, merge with BC Tel, and acquire EdTel with the agreement of a conservative-aligned City of Edmonton mayor and council. By the time Progressive Conservative Premier Gary Filmon sold MTS in Manitoba in 1996, within ten years, conservative governments had privatized 20 percent of the telecoms sector for CAD $8.8 billion in 2025 dollars.

These privatizations were driven by the belief in the supremacy of private ownership as a matter of political conviction. This was a direct repudiation of the political tradition the Prairie Province reformers had built. But ideology and fiscal interest ran together: the $8.8 billion in proceeds over ten years allowed these governments to reduce deficits, cut taxes, and improve their electoral fiscal position.

Figure 2 tells a stark story. Public carriers that accounted for about 25 percent of Canadian telecom revenues in 1980 had fallen to below 3 percent by 2000 and have remained at the bottom of that crater ever since. At the same time, many OECD countries also undertook telecom privatizations in the 1990s. Some, however, kept a public hand in their communications infrastructure — and as Table 2 shows, that choice has produced measurably different outcomes.

The advantages of public ownership in a capital-intensive network industry are well understood: lower borrowing costs, no profit extraction, patient capital that plans for generations rather than quarterly returns, and investment decisions aligned with democratic needs rather than corporate ones. Table 2 shows what those advantages produce in practice.

Table 2 shows eight OECD countries that, unlike Canada and the United States, maintained or rebuilt a balance of private and public ownership as a deliberate policy choice. The data is built from OECD and CRTC data and primary sources. All eight have done so in today’s fully competitive, multi-carrier environment spanning fixed telephones, mobile, and internet. In that environment, public equity stakes account for an average of 21 percent of revenues across these eight countries, against less than 3 percent in Canada.

Looking specifically at fiber deployment, the eight countries average 22 connections per 100 inhabitants, well above Canada’s 14 per 100, and above the OECD average of 17 per 100. The clear difference is public ownership: the eight countries with a bigger public hand in the market add 10 public fiber connections per 100 to a base of 12 private connections. Canada’s private carriers deliver 14, comparable to the private sector performance of these peers. The gap is not explained by private underperformance but rather by the absence of a public fiber mandate.

Table 2 also includes the United States, where public ownership has historically been very low — currently less than 1 percent of sector revenues, consisting primarily of traditional rural co-ops and municipal carriers, and a newer generation of municipal internet service providers (ISPs). It is unlikely to grow substantially. After lobbying by private ISPs who would prefer not to compete with the public sector, roughly half of US states have laws prohibiting or restricting municipalities from forming or expanding public broadband networks. Fiber reaches just 10 connections per 100 inhabitants. Canada and the United States sit together at the bottom of Table 2: one dismantled its public system while the other never allowed one to form.

The proof is not only international. Saskatchewan still maintains a public carrier while most of Canada does not. SaskTel’s fiber penetration is 17 per 100 inhabitants, above the Canadian average. By deploying fiber as a public mandate across a vast territory with a low and dispersed population, SaskTel has out-fibered the Canadian private sector that has focused mostly on urban and suburban markets to date. Where Canada kept a public carrier with a mandate to build, it built. Where Canada privatized, it fell behind — not just behind the OECD average, but behind lower-density Saskatchewan which kept its publicly owned carrier.

SaskTel and Thunder Bay Tel are living proof that the “public option” can operate successfully today in a competitive market, delivering service, employing union workers, and returning revenues to public coffers rather than private shareholders. Rebuilding public ownership means setting up new public enterprises where coverage or competitive gaps exist and targeted acquisitions where opportunities arise.

The Manitoba farmers who forced a referendum in 1906 understood that communications infrastructure was not a private luxury, but a public necessity, and that ownership was a political question before it was an economic one. They had conviction and organizing power. Now there is evidence to match. The question Avi Lewis is re-contesting today has been answered. It is time to act on it.