Governments look to leverage federal investments and private sector funding to address broadband issues across Canada

Reliable access to high-speed internet in Canada has been a major concern for many years, particularly in rural and northern regions and remote Indigenous communities.

In the 2022 Lexpert Special Edition on Infrastructure, Torys partner Josh Van Deurzen commented that governments were working on this problem pre-pandemic.

“At that time, we were already in a world where it was not, I would say, controversial [to say] that broadband was considered to be an essential service,” he said.

“Then the pandemic came along, and it just exacerbated it. It really shone a light on how important broadband infrastructure really is.”

While governments focused on the issue before COVID-19, Josh said that all levels of governments are now hyper-focused on it.

Many provinces have already announced their own broadband initiatives with support from the federal government in hopes that these expenditures will attract investments from the private sector.

“The government doesn’t have enough money that it can allocate to these programs to solve this problem on its own,” Josh said.

“So what you see in these programs is leveraging the government funds with private-sector funds to make these projects happen.”

In subsidizing and providing loans for infrastructure projects, governments have to strike a sensitive balance between bridging this digital-infrastructure gap and interfering with private-sector competition.

“At the same time, the government also doesn’t want to use their funds to build broadband infrastructure where there already is broadband infrastructure,” Josh said.

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