Late Wednesday night, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced that the federal cabinet, firmly under Mark Carney’s leadership, would not overturn the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s latest foray into forced market distortion. The CRTC’s ruling compels major telecom companies to open their fibre networks to rivals at regulator-set rates, outside their home territories. Bell, Telus, and SaskTel must now lease access to one another’s infrastructure, not as the result of mutual commercial agreements, but under a top-down order from Ottawa.
On paper, this sounds like “competition.” In reality, it is anything but. True competition comes from firms risking capital, building better products, and earning customers through innovation and service quality, not from Ottawa decreeing that the fruits of those investments must be shared with rivals at politically engineered prices. This is state-mandated cannibalism masquerading as consumer protection.
The government’s defenders insist the policy will “increase affordability” and “expand choice.” The more honest description is that it will reduce the economic incentive for any company to invest billions into network expansion or technological upgrades. Why would a company pour capital into building the fastest, most reliable infrastructure when the government forces it to rent that very infrastructure to its competitors, often at rates set with more regard for politics than for cost recovery? 
The death spiral of investment
Building a national fibre network is among the most capital-intensive undertakings in the modern economy. It involves massive upfront costs, long payback periods, and significant technological risk. The return on that investment, both for shareholders and for the country, comes from the ability to differentiate service, secure customers, and reinvest profits into the next wave of improvements.
By eliminating exclusivity over the infrastructure companies build, the CRTC’s decision effectively nationalizes private risk. Firms still shoulder the billions in upfront cost, the headaches of engineering, and the financial risk of expansion. But they are now forced to socialize the benefits with competitors who did not take those risks.
Telus’s early embrace of the ruling, while politically convenient for Ottawa, is an anomaly. Rogers, Bell, Cogeco, and Eastlink have all warned of reduced capital spending, with Eastlink bluntly stating it will suspend upgrades and shut down service in some communities. This is not speculative. It is the predictable consequence of cutting the link between investment and reward.
Canada already lags behind peer nations in broadband speeds, rural connectivity, and next-generation deployment. Slashing incentives to invest will only widen the gap. In the global race for digital infrastructure, this policy ensures Canada will limp behind while other countries surge ahead.
International weakness by design
In the 21st century, a country’s digital backbone is as strategically important as its energy grid or its transportation corridors. Our allies and competitors alike understand that broadband is the foundation for everything from commerce and education to national security. The United States, Japan, South Korea, and much of Western Europe are racing to build ever-faster, more resilient networks, often through competitive private investment supported, but not supplanted, by smart policy.
Canada’s new approach sends the opposite signal. Instead of fostering conditions where infrastructure builders compete to out-innovate each other, Ottawa has chosen to referee a slow-motion race to the bottom. Foreign investors looking at Canada will see a market where regulators can rewrite the rules overnight, where property rights over infrastructure are conditional, and where political interference overrides economic logic.
In the global competition for capital, this matters. Canada’s investment climate is already battered by unpredictable regulatory decisions in energy, mining, and manufacturing. Now, with telecom policy openly hostile to return on investment, global capital is more likely to flow elsewhere. In an era when private equity, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds are eager to finance digital infrastructure projects, Ottawa has hung a sign over the country that reads: “Not Worth the Risk.”
The myth of affordability
The CRTC’s defenders claim that consumers will see lower prices. In the very short term, they may. But it is a dangerous illusion. Prices in telecom are not dictated in a vacuum; they are tied to the cost of maintaining and upgrading the network. Lower prices achieved by kneecapping investment only last until the infrastructure starts to decay, speeds stagnate, and service quality falls.
Once the system is in decline, the options are grim: either the government pours in taxpayer subsidies to compensate for the lack of private investment, or Canadians endure subpar connectivity while other nations race ahead. Neither outcome is the mark of a competitive, modern economy.
We have seen this play out in other regulated industries where “affordability” became the sole policy driver. When the regulatory state prioritizes short-term consumer relief over long-term investment, the result is predictable: underinvestment, deteriorating service, and eventual consolidation as only the largest firms can survive in such a hostile climate.
A strategic self-own
What makes this policy particularly galling is that it is not being imposed in a vacuum. Canada’s telecom market is already heavily regulated, with mandated access policies for smaller ISPs and extensive government oversight over mergers, spectrum auctions, and retail pricing. The CRTC’s latest decision doesn’t simply tinker at the edges, it fundamentally changes the investment equation for the largest builders of our digital infrastructure.
The Carney government’s endorsement of this approach is a strategic blunder that weakens Canada’s position in both the domestic and international arenas. Domestically, it tells our own companies that growth and innovation will not be rewarded. Internationally, it tells potential investors that Canada’s regulatory environment is unpredictable, politicized, and tilted against those willing to commit capital.
The rhetoric of “opening markets” and “encouraging competition” is hollow when the actual policy is a command-and-control scheme that punishes the very behaviour, investment, risk-taking, innovation, that true competition requires.
The road to a two-tier internet
If allowed to stand, this policy risks creating a two-tier internet in Canada: one tier for urban centres where the economics of shared infrastructure might still support some level of competition, and another for smaller communities and rural areas, which will be left behind as investment dries up.
Eastlink’s warning that certain communities will be deemed unprofitable and shut down should be taken seriously. In a regime where returns are diluted by government-mandated sharing, companies will naturally gravitate toward markets with the highest population density and lowest operational risk. That means rural and remote Canadians, already underserved, will bear the brunt of Ottawa’s policy folly.
This is the exact opposite of what the government claims to be doing. Rather than “expanding choice” for all Canadians, it risks narrowing it for many, while eroding service quality for everyone.
Repeal or regret
Canada has a choice: it can foster an environment where companies compete by building better, faster, more resilient networks, or it can legislate a short-term illusion of competition while dismantling the economic incentives that make progress possible.
The CRTC’s decision, backed by the Carney government, plants us firmly on the second path. Unless reversed, it will slow innovation, reduce investment, scare off foreign capital, and condemn Canadian internet infrastructure to mediocrity.
The government can still change course. It can recognize that robust, sustainable competition is born of property rights, predictable regulation, and incentives to invest—not of forced sharing schemes that turn builders into landlords for their rivals.
If Ottawa refuses, Canadians should not be surprised when the next global rankings of internet quality, speed, and investment show us sliding further down the list. We will have done it to ourselves.
