Why Are Tories Giving up on Canadian Innovation?
We could lead in mobile communications and other tech, but Harper doesn't seem to agree.
Slowing a new era of connectedness.
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How Next Billion Users Will Reshape the Internet
It's an open source future.
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Canada Needs a Serious Agenda for Media Innovation
Support an open Internet, and the creative efforts it allows.
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How Next Billion Users Will Reshape the Internet
It's an open source future.
There is something uniquely powerful about everyday people having access to the Internet from tiny devices in their pocket. That ubiquitous access to each other creates possibilities that are worth fighting for and saving. The mobile- and wireless-accessed Internet, combined with emerging open web and open-data applications, has the potential to usher in a new era of connectedness and, with it, dramatic changes to social practices and institutions. If we get digital public policy right, Canada could become a leader in mobile communications, leading to empowerment, job creation and new forms of entrepreneurialism, expression and social change.
To harness this opportunity, politicians and policy makers will need to develop a digital strategy for Canada with a central focus on mobile communications and Canada's broadband infrastructure. To be successful in the long term, we'll need a "made in Canada" strategy that captures the imagination, vision and ingenuity of people from across Canada.
We're all stakeholders
To be successful, our government needs to engage citizens in this process rather than listen to lobbyists behind closed doors while Parliament is prorogued. We need to craft a vision and plan for our digital economy. This is our future. So we're all stakeholders and we all need to be invited into the process.
In last week's speech from the throne and release of the budget, the government had an opportunity to address digital issues. All that was made clear, however, was that government is committed to opening Canada's telecommunications and satellite industries to foreign ownership. Giving up on our capacity to meet this challenge and instead relying primarily on foreign investment schemes is not the answer. Such an approach would, at best, miss the lessons learned from the countries that are leading in broadband speed, access and cost.
Addressing Canada's "digital divides" -- those based on geography (rural, remote, inner-city), ability (cognitive, physical), class, age, gender, and ethnicity -- is particularly difficult to close given the composition of the Canadian cell phone market. The market is highly concentrated with more than 95 per cent belonging to Rogers Communications Inc., Bell Canada Inc. and Telus Corp. These companies operate in the most profitable wireless market in the developed world, with a profit margin of 45.9 per cent, or 12.8 per cent higher than average. Despite this extraordinary level of profitability, Canada is falling behind on usage, ranking last for cell phone users per capita -- in part because these users pay the third-highest rates among developed countries.
New policy in the public interest concerning wireless access to the Internet is perhaps the most promising opportunity to close our digital divides and spur innovation. Yet the CRTC's new media hearing in 2009 marked another occasion when the commission could have, but refused to, deal with the problem. While the CRTC's ruling on new media essentially delayed and side-stepped many of the key issues raised at the hearing, its inaction also set the stage for a high-profile debate over Canada's national digital strategy.
Strategy hangs in the balance
With pressure building, in June 2009 Industry Minister Tony Clement hosted a digital economy conference to discuss the possibility of a national digital strategy. In 2010 and beyond, the policy-making process concerning Canada's digital strategy promises to be a crucial and highly contested space, where the decisions that are made will have a deep and long-lasting impact on Canadian media and communications. A recent Harvard study makes the situation yet more salient, concluding: "Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband, as it was early in the decade, but current benchmarks suggest that this is no longer a realistic picture of its comparative performance on several relevant measures."
Canadians face high prices, poor service and highly constricted choice. This is a reality that most Canadians are aware of: more than half of respondents (53 per cent) in a 2009 Angus Reid public opinion poll reported that they believe Canada is one of the most expensive countries in which to use a cell phone. If this public opinion can be harnessed to an intervention in the government's digital strategy policy, Canada's wireless market could take a 180 degree turn.
We are at a communications crossroads in Canada. Better media means better policies, and that requires engaging ALL Canadians in the discussion. The formation of Canada's digital strategy policy provides a historic opportunity for us to once again become a leader in cultural production and communications access, speed and innovation, and to close digital divides that prevent people from expressing themselves and connecting to each other. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Takuan
09-03-2010
smart slaves are dangerous
better to import innovation and thereby keep control
alive
09-03-2010
Mulroney etc.
We have had a succession of prime ministers who give away our advantages.
Harper too has made it obvious that he feels the USA is so much better than Canada.
Maybe we could export him, and keep our real talent at home?
zalm
10-03-2010
I don't get it
How can a nebulous "made in Canada" strategy bring about better pricing? Giving us up to foreign ownership is a red herring - none of the majors in the world bid on the bandwidth available in the new spectrum offering, even with the federal proviso that none of the existing national majors could bid on it in any way. If that isn't a gift to the global majors, I don't know what is.
So, where was the bid from Deutsche Telekom (T-mobile)? Or Bharti or Hutchison? Or TelSim? CM or PCCW? Orange? At&T or Verizon? KDDi (Au), DoMoCo or J-phone? Or any of fifty other wireless providers in the world each with more customers than any of the "big three" in Canada?
There's no hope of attracting anyone to bid on our profitable market as long as it takes $10-15 billion to set up a nation-wide network for only 5 million people who don't have cellphones that could reasonably be expected to.
The only practicable solution is abandon sovereignty and to partner with US markets in the areas served by major population centres to the south of us - AT&T in Seattle, Verizon and others back east in the Golden Horseshoe - and try to make the economies work that way to encourage competition.
The way we've gone about it is criminal fraud. The CRTC couldn't do much about it - it was bound by its strictures, but at least one dissenting opinion could have been broadcast before it shut up and drank the Koolaid for real.
Don't hold your breath for either lower prices or better service - none will be forthcoming. There's no reason to. Wind/Egyptian Tel will be charging the same prices as the majors within a year - you mark my words.
Dan the socialist
10-03-2010
I still have not forgiven
I still have not forgiven the Conservatives for abandoning the Avro Arrow...
RickW
10-03-2010
The Con/Lib consortium.....
....is determined to make Canada a warehouse -- and the reason is fairly uncomplicated. The Con/Libs and their business support collect the cream off the top of our resource exports, and thus have no need at all supporting innovation.
Fiat lux
10-03-2010
No Canadian company could
No Canadian company could offer the same lucrative directorships to ex-politicians as can some of the multinational corporate mafia.
How many Canadian directorships does Mulroney have and how many multinationals?
In other words, the "invisible hand of self interest" at work.
Ed Deak.
RickW
10-03-2010
Ed!
Are you saying that our politicians are lying when they go on about the sacrifices they make taking up public office?
Tbarnston
11-03-2010
Ensuring Rankin Inlet his a big pipe internet connection...
...should not be the nation's priority.Canada's advantage globally has been our social programs, and we have seen that advantage whittled away by Bush-lite policies of Martin and Harper. We need to restore our leadership role in that area by resurrecting a national housing strategy and implementing universal daycare.
Canada could be a leader in a lot of things if the government developed a cohesive strategy (housing anyone?). I don't think the government should really be investing heavily in internet infrastructure. This is a case where the free market should be allowed to work. Let Google build out high speed networks in Van, Montreal, and T.O. Our progressive social policy will ensure that the high skilled IT sector will locate and grow in those progressive cities as a result.
Canada's major cities, which is where important global business will locate, are close enough to the USA that major internet infrastructure will be close enough for us to tie in to.
seth
11-03-2010
nuclear sellout
What can Canadians expect from a man that hates his country?
“Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.” Steven Harper
News for Harpo, Canada just won the most gold medals won by any country at a winter Olympics using PUBLIC money. Canada's real second raters are our Neocon politicians with their reviled and discredited Chicago school privatization ideas that gave us the recession.
From the Avro Arrow through Nortel and now AECL, Neocon's like Harper are working hard to keep our "second-rate" status by excluding Canada from one of the biggest economic booms in history - the nuclear renaissance by dumping our tens of billions invested in AECL.
His neocon sidekick Gordon "Canwest" Campbell out in BC in a similar boneheaded move sold off BCRail to an old school chum for pocket change at the start of the biggest resource boom in history costing the taxpayer tens of billions in lost revenues. He has effectively privatized BC HYdro by directing 80% of its revenues to purchases of worthless intermittent from stock broker cronies - $75B/Gw 30 times the cost AECL nukes.
AECL could be a huge part of a worldwide investment in 10000 mass produced nuclear reactors paid for by ending fossil fuel use, would eliminate most air pollution saving millions of lives annually, end the global warming/ peak oil problem within a ten year time frame, provide a huge job producing boost to the Canadian economy, require only a small part of our industrial capacity, and pay for itself in less than three years.
Canada's very efficient power companies could bulk order and rim the border with AECL reactors, creating hundreds of thousands of hi tech jobs, making the Canada the world leader in booming nuclear tech and making $trillions selling power to the regulatory crippled US.
The federal Liberal Party supports AECL and needs to be elected for just that one reason.
The Dude
12-03-2010
Why?
Because the Economic Action Plan ran out of money, CTV has it all, you think all those ads in primetime Olympic spots came cheap!
"Canadians face high prices, poor service and highly constricted choice."
Canadian politics in a sentence!
zalm
13-03-2010
radioactive tarball
Seth, if you think this population is ready and able to maintain 10,000 nuke plants, you've obviously never tried operating a power plant with any workforce. The stakes are nigh, and unfortunately, there's always one dogfucker in every crew, as the litany of power boiler explosions every year proves. Too bad that when that dogfucker ruins it for everyone at a nuke plant, the stakes are higher.
You're dreaming, and I don't like their colour.
zalm
13-03-2010
OK, ok...
Mebbe the "stakes are nigh", but they're high too...