For 20 years, the Pew Research Center has been assessing internet use internationally. In its report released last month, Pew found that Canada continues to be a leader in the proportion of its population online, just as it was in 2002.

Of course, adoption rates have grown dramatically worldwide in the intervening years. In 2002, Canada led all 8 of the studied countries with 68% of the population saying they “ever go online to access the Internet or World Wide Web or to send and receive email”. At that time, the median was just 47% reporting using the internet across eight countries: Canada, South Korea, the U.S., Germany, the UK, France, Japan and Poland. In the most recent survey, a median of 93% among these countries report using the internet.

The most recent study examined 18 advanced economies and Canada ranked fourth with 95% of the population reporting using the internet or owning a smartphone, behind South Korea (99%) and just behind the Netherlands and Sweden with 96%.

I’m especially interested in looking at factors inhibiting adoption among the remaining handful who aren’t already connected.

Pew found that “Internet use varies based on age, education and income. Nearly 100% of young adults report using the internet in every country except Israel (93%).” I’ll note somewhat parenthetically that a contributing factor in Israel’s outlier status is explained by restrictions on internet access set by some religious leaders because of online safety concerns.

How do concerns about online safety, a factor associated with digital literacy, impact internet adoption among the 5% of Canadians who have not yet gone online? As the issue percolates on the policy agendas for a number of western nations, we need to examine how governments can address legitimate concerns without limiting our fundamental freedoms of expression.

And there is the issue of basic digital literacy, helping those who simply lack basic skills to get online. I recently became aware of Appleseeds, a non-profit in Israel that “helps people step into the digital world”. Among its areas of activity is the Digital Lifestyle initiative that “develops programs for members from various communities who are taking their first steps into the world of technology.”

Appleseeds develops programs for Israel’s most marginalized who are taking their first steps into the digital world. We provide these services through a network of Technology Knowledge Centers located throughout the country, in cooperation with municipalities and other partners in the public and private sectors.

For too long, government broadband programs in Canada have focused solely on building access. There are carrier-funded programs in place that deal with ensuring affordable connectivity is available. Unfortunately, too little work is being done to develop skills in going online, or helping develop an understanding of the value of getting connected

It is why the issue of studying (and addressing) the factors inhibiting broadband adoption is at the top of my telecom policy agenda for 2023.

From its inception, I have been a supporter of the Bell Let’s Talk initiative. As I wrote more than a dozen years ago, “I liked seeing such an important player in my business – telecommunications – take an active interest in my family’s main line of work – mental health.”

The Bell Lets Talk strategy is built on 4 key pillars: Anti-Stigma; Care & Access; Research; and, Workplace Leadership.

• Anti-Stigma
  One of the biggest hurdles for anyone struggling with mental illness is overcoming the stigma attached to it. Talking is an important first step towards lasting change. The annual Bell Let’s Talk Day and awareness campaign has become the world’s largest conversation about mental health, encouraging Canadians and people around the world to talk and take action to help reduce stigma and promote awareness and understanding so everyone can get the help they need.

  In 2012 Bell established the world’s first Anti-Stigma Research Chair at Queen’s University to continue to advance anti-stigma research, scholarship, and outreach programs.

• Care & Access
  Bell funds organizations large and small throughout Canada, including grassroots agencies, hospitals and post-secondary institutions, to provide Canadians with mental health supports and services.

  Through the Bell Let’s Talk Funds, partnerships and major gifts, Bell has supported organizations in every province and territory in Canada, enabling them to improve access to mental health supports and services in communities nationwide.

• Research
  Research holds the greatest promise to better understand treatments and solutions. Bell is investing in best-in-class research programs with the potential to have a transformative impact on the mental health and well-being of Canadians.

  Bell Let’s Talk has funded research projects across the country, including $3 million to fund the world’s first university chair in mental health and anti-stigma research at Queen’s University, $1 million to fund Canada’s first biobank of biological, social and psychological data at l’Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal, and $2 million announced in 2021 to establish the Bell Let’s Talk-Brain Canada Mental Health Research Program with Brain Canada.

• Workplace Leadership
  One in three workplace disability claims in Canada are related to mental illnesses. Bell is committed to leading by example in our own workplace by adopting the voluntary National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace and is encouraging greater corporate engagement across Canada.

  Bell’s initiatives to improve mental health awareness, training and benefits have reduced short-term disability claims related to mental health by over 30%, and reduced relapse and recurrence by more than 50%.

The theme for Bell Let’s Talk Day 2023 (January 25) is Let’s change this.

This year’s campaign is intended to put a focus on some of the key challenges faced by Canadians. Bell has announced an additional $10 million towards its goal of $155 million for Canadian mental health programs, replacing the 5 cents per interaction made in previous years on Bell Let’s Talk Day.

Thirteen years ago, Bell Let’s Talk set out to tackle the stigma around mental illness. Since then, Bell Let’s Talk Day became the world’s largest conversation about mental health, increasing awareness and helping bring about real change. Since 2011, there have been nearly 1.5 billion messages on various channels.

On January 25, I will still be supporting the use of #BellLetsTalk on social media and promoting the initiative.

I hope you will as well.

A new year. A fresh start. What should be the telecom priorities for the year ahead?

Driving internet availability and adoption need to be at the top of any list. The government has said that Canada’s future depends on connectivity. The CRTC set an objective in 2016 for 90% of Canadian homes to have access to a 50/10 unlimited broadband plan by 2021. The Commission reports that 91.7% had such access and Canada is on target to achieve universal access by 2031.

Still, there is a big difference between having universal access to broadband, and attaining universal adoption of that service.

It is one thing to have access to a service, but something quite different to get people to sign on. Think of it as that old “lead a horse to water” kind of thing. How do we get them to drink?

I have written before that “Connections are easy; Adoption isn’t.” Connectivity is a relatively simple engineering problem. Throw enough money at a construction problem and there can be a solution.

Driving universal adoption is a lot more complex. For most people, it is difficult to imagine why anyone wouldn’t get online if their home has access to broadband. That is why there has usually been an assumption that price must be the factor. As I have written before, “Too many people superficially think that increasing adoption is simply a matter of lower prices, but research has shown there are far more factors involved.” In “The broadband divide’s little secret”, I wrote “after introducing Connected for Success, Internet for Good, Connecting Families and other targeted programs, we have learned that getting people online isn’t just a matter of price.”

Hopefully, 2023 will begin to bring better research into understanding those factors inhibiting broadband adoption among different groups in order to develop appropriate responses. It is fertile ground for academic research.

A lot more work needs to be done to address hate and illegal content on the internet, a topic that came to the fore last summer when the public learned about the government funding a notorious purveyor of hate to develop an anti-racism program for Canadian broadcasters. (You can’t make these things up.) For more than 15 years, I have been writing about this issue. The government is exploring new legislation but I am not yet convinced that this is the appropriate approach. Add this to the 2023 agenda.

Online hate ties to an overall theme of online safety. These factors can impact adoption among people who have been wary to get connected. Can we develop techniques to improve privacy and online safety and security to improve confidence for all?

Those are a few of the items that top my 2023 agenda.

What would you add?

Which of my blog posts attracted the most attention in 2022?

Looking at the analytics, these 5 articles had the most individual page views:

1. “Feeding at the funding trough” [August 25, 2022]
2. “Funding hate” [July 26, 2021]
3. “Government funded hate speech” [August 15, 2022]
4. “Purveying hate on the public dime” [April 20, 2022]
5. “Canada ranks 9th for quality, availability & cost of internet” [May 30, 2022]

Honourable mentions go to:

• “My summer vacation” [August 30, 2022]
• “Truthiness and Canada’s telecom industry” [March 1, 2022]

Clearly, there has been much interest from a new group of readers driving four of the top five articles.

Which of my posts resonated most with you?

Thank you for following me here on this blog and on Twitter, and thank you for engaging online and by phone over the past year.

Unfortunately, Twitter has decided to discontinue its support of Revue, the engine that has powered my weekly newsletter, with its digest of the previous week’s blog posts. I will let you know if I decide to migrate to another platform.

I hope the coming holiday period provides an opportunity to connect with your family and friends. Let me reiterate my very best wishes for health, happiness and peace in the year ahead.

Another year is about to go into the history books.

Long time readers know that I have used lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game for my year-end wrap for more than a decade. Last year’s post was entitled “Then the child moved ten times round the seasons”, so this year I’ll finish that stanza:

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, ‘When you’re older’ must appease him
And promises of ‘someday’ make his dreams

I was never one who was appeased by such statements, even when I was younger. I didn’t have the patience to put up with “when you’re older” back then, and especially not now that I am well into that state of “older”. I commented last year that my age may be contributing to an increased level of impatience with the sometimes glacial paces of activity in certain areas of our government.

As Canadians witnessed this year in our passport offices, and at our airports, there has been a lack of leadership driving operational excellence from too many branches of our public service. It’s as though executives in the government bureaucracy are satisfied with mediocrity. How else do we explain the hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses handed out last year in departments with such failures in service delivery?

How else do we explain the 5-week delay in getting a public statement from anyone in government associated with the Laith Marouf affair? Where is the accountability, not just for the injudiciousness of awarding an anti-racism contract to a purveyor of such hateful speech, but also for the failures to respond in a timely manner by multiple departments, including the Prime Minister’s Office? I have trouble imagining any reasonable excuse for the uncomfortably long silence, other than political operatives wishing it would all blow over.

Last week, I wrote “We can do better”, observing that actions (and inactions) by our political leadership are contributing to a normalization of antisemitism within mainstream society.

As I described in my blog post in early November, these episodes could have left me profoundly disappointed. Still, each of these failures can be viewed as representing an opportunity for improvement. In the Toronto Star yesterday, Michael Levitt quoted the late Max Eisen saying, “In the face of racism, you must not be a bystander but an upstander and speak out against hate”. He continued, suggesting there can be no better New Year’s resolution for all of us.

In the coming year, I am also convinced that we can be doing more to understand and address the factors that are impacting digital adoption, as I discussed last week.

As we approach 2023, I will keep driving ahead because I know we can do better on files like these. We have to do better.

The promises of ‘someday’ make my dreams.

Every so often, I think back to the denouement in Jeff Daniels’ monologue at the opening of The Newsroom:

We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed.

Being well informed is an important prerequisite for responsible leaders.

Helping you stay informed is one of the reasons I added more than 120 blog posts to “Telecom Trends” over the course of 2022, on average continuing to write more than 2 posts per week, a pace 50% higher than pre-pandemic levels. There are more than 3160 posts in the archives (fully searchable).

Through this blog, it is my objective to be a source of quality information on Canadian telecom policy, with occasional gastronomical diversions. In each case, I am trying to share elements of my expertise accumulated over decades. One look at my profile and you’ll realize that you can’t get a physique like mine overnight.

I look forward to continuing to engage with you in the New Year.

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, safe and peaceful holiday season.