Canada’s New Starlink Competitor

There is a man in California who for a few years was the internet for the Canadian Arctic. Indigenous communities, uh, remote military installations. The 6th largest internet provider in Canada was not Bell, it wasn't Rogers, it was a man who has since bought a social media platform, set it on fire, and is now trying to do that to the American democracy. Then he went full wacko and now Canada's out. Prime Minister Carney addressed the Australian Parliament last weekend. In a line that deserved a lot more attention than it got, revealed that Canada's spending a few billion dollars to build our own constellation of satellites. Almost 200 of them. It exists because one man's temper tantrums have now knocked out internet access in multiple countries, and finally someone in Ottawa did the math. And if there's one thing that Edward Snowden showed us, it's that the US spies on everything that crosses their border, privacy laws be damned. But there's one incredibly dumb problem. To get our satellites into space, there's really only one player. Not the Canada Space Agency, not NASA. Elon Musk. Canada will use SpaceX. Yes, we are launching Canada's sovereign alternative to Elon Musk's Satellites on Elon Musk's rockets. And if that isn't proof that the Americans handed the keys to the wrong people, I do not know what is. Ontario did its part. Premier Ford cancelled the province's $100 million Starlink contract last year in a burst of flag-waving fury. But let's be honest about how we got here. Canada has known for decades that the Arctic is both our most defining feature and our most glaring strategic liability. We wrote reports about it. We struck committees to study the reports. We scheduled Follow-up committees. Somewhere in a filing cabinet in a building in Ottawa, there is a report from 1987 that basically predicted all of this next to a report from 1994 that agreed with it. Then one guy did a Nazi salute and suddenly Canada found the file. The Lightspeed network, when it arrives, will primarily serve governments and militaries and big enterprise clients. The family in northern Alberta who finally got decent internet through Starlink isn't going to see a telesat bill anytime soon. That gap still exists and is filling by someone other than a man who names his children after keyboard characters. But the sovereign capability, the ability to say, "We built this, we own this, nobody can switch it off because it belongs to us," that's coming, and we should have done it sooner. Sometimes it takes a man-child who bought a social network to post memes about himself to remind you that infrastructure should not be a subscription service.