Editorial — Promises, promises on rural Internet access

SUNDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — There’s at least a little irony in the fact that high speed Internet is coming to the rural areas at the pace of dial-up.

Last month, Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo MP Cathy McLeod announced the launch of Connecting Canadians, “a new Government of Canada program that will bring high-speed Internet to 280,000 Canadian households that currently do not have Internet or have slower access.”

The government, she said, will invest up to $305 million to extend access to broadband Internet at 5 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Canadian households, mainly in rural communities.

“For all Canadians, especially those living in rural and remote areas, having access to high-speed Internet helps create new jobs as well as new innovative products and businesses,” said McLeod.

“As more and more Canadians work and engage online, ensuring those in rural and remote areas have high-speed Internet access will enable them to fully take advantage of the digital economy.”

It’s actually more urgent than that. Access to high-speed Internet is pretty much a necessity of life, for business, personal safety, access to information, connection to the outside world.

Yet the Conservatives’ current budget commitment is to bring high-speed Internet to only 280,000 more households. Between 2009 and 2012, the Broadband Canada program connected 220,000 to 1.5 Mbps service.

The provincial government isn’t doing any better. In April, it announced $2 million in provincial funding to subsidize satellite service where wired or wireless broadband wasn’t currently available. That program, called the B.C. Broadband Satellite Initiative, put up half the cost of installing an Xplornet dish to a maximum of $250.

A provincial pledge in 2012 to subsidize a new high-speed wireless Internet service in the North Thompson amounted to nothing.

Political promises on high-speed Internet go back to the days of Jean Chretien, who promised that every Canadian home would have it by 2004. Every home.

The Conservatives? Well, a headline in March 2012 said this: “High-speed Internet for rural towns coming, MP McLeod promises.”

And the promises just keep coming. Ten years after Chretien’s deadline, providing high-speed Internet in rural Canada is such an uncoordinated patchwork of passing programs, independent providers and announcements that the concept of every Canadian having access to it remains just a dream.