Ontario has 14 persons per square mile. The population density of ALL of Western Europe is 181, ten times greater, Netherlands is 521. Ontario is quite a bit closer to other "less dense" provinces than most countries used for comparison.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t...
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
I'm not posting enough references here, but this whole conversation has been so limited in facts and proportion.
The point is the government wants carriers to provide service everywhere, which includes places like Nunavut, 0.019 persons per square mile.
There are local initiatives, and some are really fantastic, but it's difficult to bootstrap those everywhere.
Go to https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm and search for Nunavut and see who comes up.
These prices need to come down, more competition and local initiatives need to happen, and more innovation for systems like mesh networks. It is particularly upsetting when ways can't be found to share infrastructure. But if providing access to every Canadian is the goal (rather than for every person in a city at a cost less than a bag of groceries) there is probably some logic to the existing system.
Some people will say "just pay for Starlink everywhere," but it's really not ok for a country's access to be owned by another country (as long as Musk is still on earth), wired ultimately has advantages, and there are probably benefits to supporting wired infrastructure, and competition and choice are important.
