Last Wednesday, the Government of Quebec announced with great pride that it would inject an additional $ 94 million for Part III of the Éclair program aimed at connecting all households in Quebec to high speed Internet. The network will therefore be offered everywhere, without however being accessible to everyone. Indeed, these subsidies will fill the technical gaps of the connection, but will have no impact on its financial brakes. With the addition of this sum, Quebeckers will have spent more than $ 9 billion in five years to build a network infrastructure that does not belong to them and that requires them to accept excessively high connection costs.
Since the beginning of 2002, Quebec has already been accumulating programs aimed at connecting homes and public institutions to the Internet. Québec branché, Québec broadband, Villages branchés, Rural communities branched, Operation high speed, Éclair are the names of some of these programs whose objective is to increase network availability. Although it has invested considerable sums in it for years, the government nevertheless leaves full ownership of the Internet connection infrastructure to the telecommunications companies, which then monetize its access by raking in large profits. Thus, Videotron, Telus, Bell and several others benefit from subsidies to increase the wireline network in the regions without any constraint as to the prices that these companies can then charge to subscribers.
In Canada, the average monthly price for a residential high-speed Internet subscription was $ 80.31 in 2018, according to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), and it is expected to climb over the next year. . And that excludes the costs for mobile internet access. Canada is the most expensive country in the world to access the Internet, just behind the United States. According to the CRTC, the essential nature of this service leads citizens to subscribe to it anyway, sometimes to the detriment of other essential goods such as clothing and food.
Access to the Internet is now considered a vector of social and economic equality, as well as a prerequisite for democratic participation. This reality was all the more solidified during the pandemic, where working or going to school became acts dependent on connection. As a result, calls for making the Internet a public service have multiplied lately. This summer, leading communications researchers published a manifesto supporting such a proposal. Others call for drawing inspiration from existing examples, such as that of Saskatchewan, in order to put downward pressure on the distribution market or even to offer a fully public network at a fair price.
In view of the high cost of Internet services in Quebec as well as the importance of the sums spent by the State for the construction of the network, Quebec should claim the share of ownership of the connection infrastructures that it deserves. The government could thus take a strong gesture by not only participating in making the Internet physically available, but also financially accessible.