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Earlier in the week, the webcast of the Globalive ownership proceeding allowed us to hear from their lawyer, Hank Intven of McCarthy’s. Hank was a member of the Telecom Policy Review panel and hearing him in action reminded me that it has been more than three and a half years since the delivery of that report.

How time flies.

Since the the panel was struck, we have had a change in government and there have been a number of different Ministers of Industry. Most of the recommendations of the panel have sat on the shelf.

In the report, the panel addressed the subject of foreign ownership restrictions, saying:

Among OECD countries, Canada has maintained one of the most restrictive and inflexible set of rules limiting foreign investment in the telecommunications sector.

The Panel had recommended a multi-phased liberalization:

• In the first phase, the Telecommunications Act should be amended to give the federal Cabinet authority to waive the foreign ownership and control restrictions when it deems it to be in the public interest.
• During that phase, there would be a presumption that investments in a new start-up telecommunications investment or in a carrier with less than 10 percent of the market are in the public interest.
• The second phase would be undertaken after a review of broadcasting policy with liberalization in a manner that treats all carriers (including the cable industry) in a fair and competitively neutral manner.

This is the regime that the Telecom Policy Review Panel had hoped for. Had government acted on these recommendations, we wouldn’t be having the current Globalive paternity test.

However, like many of the other recommendations, such legislation has not even been introduced, let alone passed. As such, the CRTC is left to enforce Canada’s current laws, with its double negatives.

Can Globalive adequately demonstrate that it is not otherwise controlled by non-Canadians?

In the wake of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s speech at the Conference Board of Canada event yesterday, I am just getting around to posting some thoughts about some of the submissions to the Competition Policy Review Panel.

I was somewhat intrigued to see that the CRTC submitted a paper with 5 recommendations, starting off with one that sought to replace the Broadcast Act and Telecom Act, with a new converged Communications Act:

There should be a single Act governing broadcasting, telecommunications and radiocommunication.

The CRTC added 4 more recommendations: streamlining regulations while moving to ex-post regulation but first ensuring the Commission has powers to impose monetary penalties; move spectrum licensing for telecom away from Industry Canada [a recommendation I endorsed last month]; a merger review process with clear and distinct roles for the CRTC and Competition Bureau; maintaining foreign ownership restrictions for both content providers and carriers.

I found it to be particularly interesting that the Commission intervened in the consultation, rather than waiting to simply administer whatever rules are set forth by the government on the other side of the river.

A lively discussion could arise from at least one part of the submission:

The economics of Internet production do not favour local content. As localism is eroded, the maintenance of Canadian capacity in the form of Canadian-owned and –controlled companies will become more critical. A branch plant economy for cultural production and distribution is difficult to envisage. Multi-national enterprises would have little incentive to create uniquely national content.

There is a lot of material in this little paragraph. I wonder if this could be an exercise for my grad students this weekend. Hmmm.

We’ll see if these points attract debate later this year; the CRTC’s workplan calls for hearings in 2008 on the impacts of New Media on the Broadcasting and Telecommunications system.

Resilience is a popular policy buzzword, but those of us who have designed, built and operated truly resilient digital infrastructure know that we need more than just slogans. I last wrote about network resilience in November, pointing to the need for proactive planning and coordination across all branches of government.

A recent white paper by Georg Serentschy [pdf, 500KB] extends the description of the coordination problem. Networks, data centres, cloud platforms, subsea cables, satellites, and the software layers that bind them together form a single, interdependent system whose resilience determines economic stability, national security, and social continuity.

The global risk environment is intensifying. Climate‑driven disasters, cyberattacks, supply‑chain fragility, and geopolitical events are converging in ways that expose the weaknesses of siloed regulatory models. Canada has already experienced climate‑related outages, ransomware incidents, software failures, and supply‑chain constraints, yet its policy frameworks still treat telecom, cloud, and critical infrastructure as separate domains. The Serentschy paper argues for a systemic approach: resilience must be engineered across the entire lifecycle of digital infrastructure, from design and investment to operation and recovery.

Internationally, regulation is moving toward risk‑based, proportional frameworks such as NIS2 and CER directives in the EU, or sector specific frameworks in the US, such as NIST CSF. These models expand the definition of critical infrastructure, require structured risk assessments, and impose clear reporting and mitigation obligations. Canada currently has no equivalent, and the gap is becoming more visible as digital interdependencies deepen.

Geopolitics is reshaping connectivity at a pace Canada cannot ignore. The EU is pursuing digital sovereignty and industrial autonomy. Hyperscalers and LEO satellite operators have become geopolitical actors in their own right, influencing routing, redundancy, and chokepoints. For a country relying heavily on foreign cloud providers and satellite systems — especially in the North — this creates strategic dependencies that require deliberate policy choices.

The paper’s treatment of digital sovereignty is particularly relevant for Canada. Sovereignty is not autarky; it is controlled interdependence. It means reducing critical dependencies, maintaining regulatory autonomy, and building trusted partnerships while still benefiting from global collaboration. Canada has begun moving in this direction, but without a coherent national doctrine, decisions appear to be reactive and fragmented.

Serentschy stresses the need for measurement, a theme frequently discussed in a number of recent Ivey workshops. Resilience cannot be managed without metrics, yet Canada lacks standardized indicators for restoration times, route diversity, supplier concentration, or dependency on foreign cloud infrastructure. As Serentschy posits, “To be governable, resilience must be measurable.”

The white paper ultimately calls for a shift from resilience rhetoric to resilience engineering. For Canada, we need to understand what that means. Do we have the right regulatory, policy and inter-departmental government frameworks? Are we examining the need for public‑private collaboration? Should we be integrating climate adaptation into network planning? Is digital infrastructure to be treated as a unified ecosystem or a collection of sectors?

Is there an opportunity to learn from the EU and US before the next major outage or geopolitical shock forces action? Digital infrastructure is a strategic asset. To increase the resilience of Canada’s digital infrastructure, all branches of government will need to be involved.