Ontario, Quebec and Alberta announced school closures between March 12 and 15, and classes moved online. The Liberal government’s broadband plan was not built for that. Budget 2019 promised every Canadian household a basic high-speed connection by 2030 and spread its new fund across 13 years. Students who were sent home in March need Ottawa to move that money forward, and the government should commit to doing so before the next school year begins in September.
The closures and the standard
Ontario announced on March 12 that publicly funded schools would close after March Break. Quebec closed its schools, CEGEPs, universities and daycares the next day, and Alberta cancelled kindergarten to Grade 12 classes on March 15, Global News reported. Every one of those decisions assumed that a household could reach a classroom over the internet.
In 2016, the CRTC set a universal service objective of 50 megabits per second download, 10 upload and an unlimited data option. Ottawa’s own connectivity targets use the same 50/10 benchmark.
Most rural households did not have it. The CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report found that in 2018 the 50/10 unlimited service was available to 85.7 per cent of Canadian households, 97.7 per cent of urban households, 40.8 per cent of rural households and 31.3 per cent of households on First Nations reserves. On the regulator’s latest figures, a rural student was more likely than not to be sent home to a connection below the standard the CRTC itself had set.
What Budget 2019 promised
The Liberal government’s Budget 2019, tabled on March 19, set a target of 50/10 access for 95 per cent of homes and businesses by 2026 and 100 per cent by 2030. It proposed up to $1.7 billion over 13 years, starting in 2019-20, for a new Universal Broadband Fund. The budget described a $5 billion to $6 billion plan over 10 years once private, CRTC and Canada Infrastructure Bank money was counted.
The budget said the goal applied to Canadians “no matter where they are located in the country” and estimated that about 90 per cent would have 50/10 access once programs already planned were in place by 2021. Its fiscal table booked $717 million over six years for the item, so most of the $1.7 billion was scheduled for the later years of the 13.
With that timeline, there is a scenario where a child who started Grade 1 in September 2019 would be in Grade 11 before the 2030 target fell due. On the CRTC’s 2018 figures, the households still without the standard are disproportionately rural and on reserves, so the 10 per cent the 2021 estimate leaves out are likely to be as well. The earlier Connect to Innovate program, a $500 million fund from Budget 2016, had approved about 180 projects by the time of Budget 2019, which shows that the department can move money when a fund is sized and open.
What happened to Bell’s buildout
The private side of the plan shrank in August 2019. The CRTC set final, lower wholesale internet rates in an order on Aug. 15. On Aug. 19 Bell said the decision would cost it more than $100 million. It said it would reduce its planned rural Wireless Home Internet buildout by about 20 per cent, or about 200,000 households, which cut the plan from more than 1.2 million locations to about one million.
Bell’s critics rejected its explanation. John Lawford of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre called the decision “a political move designed to play on fears,” and Matt Stein of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium said, “It seems like they’re trying to put the blame on not being able to charge the excessively high prices that they had been,” the Canadian Press reported. Regardless of who's correct, about 200,000 rural households lost a planned service that the federal targets had counted on private carriers to build.
The objection from the budget’s defenders
Some may argue that the 2026 and 2030 targets are realistic, because building fibre and fixed wireless to remote households takes years of planning, permits and construction. The budget itself counted on the CRTC’s own five-year, $750 million Broadband Fund and the Infrastructure Bank’s plan to invest $1 billion over 10 years, so the federal fund was never meant to carry the load alone. Those facts explain why construction takes years, but they say nothing about why the federal money must be spread over 13 years given the new realities.
The pace of spending is a budget decision, which the government can revisit in its next fiscal plan. A fund that books $717 million in its first six years can be reprofiled to put more money into the projects ready to build now. The Bell cut shows that the private share of the plan cannot be assumed. Rural students sent home in March have no way to make up that gap themselves.
What Ottawa should do before September
The government should announce, before the 2020-21 school year begins in September, that the Universal Broadband Fund’s $1.7 billion will be front-loaded into its first three years, with priority for projects that bring 50/10 service to rural households and First Nations reserves. It should also publish how many of the roughly 200,000 households dropped from Bell’s buildout it intends to reach through the fund, so that school boards in those areas can plan for the fall.
