Internet Access: A Necessity, Not a Luxury

INTERNET ACCESS: A NECESSITY, NOT A LUXURY

CASSIAN SOLTYKEVYCH

If you’re looking for a place to work for a few hours, the first place you’d think to go is a coffee shop. They have good music, free wifi, and will sell you an excellent cup of hot milk with caffeine, in any of the thousands of combinations you could ask for. In the last few years I have seen a coffee shop pop up on every main street across the country, in addition to the myriad of major coffee chains of Starbucks, Second Cup, and Tim Hortons. Even most libraries I go to, be in Vancouver or Montreal, are packed full of people working away on the free wifi.

In the same last few years, traffic in cities across Canada, and frankly around the world, has gotten worse, and public transit investment has remained stagnant in most locations as well. And this is while those coffee shops and libraries are packed full of people working remotely. The number of people working remotely, even if just occasionally, is increasing every year. Even the severely outdated numbers from 2008 collected by Statistics Canada show that 1.7 million people work from home (Stats Can). Since 2008, internet use has skyrocketed, with nearly 90% of the Canadian population accessing the internet, and 86% of Canadians having a broadband internet connection at home (CIRA).

Meanwhile, the number of commuters in Canada increased by 30% in the last 20 years (from 1996-2016), while the number of transit passengers increased by 59.5% and the number of car commuters increased by 28.3% (City News). Transit and road infrastructure is usually expensive and plagued with delays (see: any big city in Canada). And sometimes the funding for transit or new road infrastructure is hard to come by (see: any small town in Canada).

What Canada needs is fast, reliable, and affordable internet, and a corporate culture that is more open to remote work. Not only are employees happier when they have an opportunity to work away from the office, but companies can save money by leasing less office space and by incorporating hot desks that allow employees to use any desk they want when they come into work. Why pay for space for 100 employees when most of the time employees could do their work from their homes, or from a beach in the Dominican?

Also, when I say that Canada needs fast, reliable, and affordable internet, I don’t mean just the big cities. I mean all of Canada: from Terrace, British Columbia to Hall Beach, Nunavut, to Deer Lake, Newfoundland. Many small towns in Canada are losing their populations to bigger cities, due to the lack of jobs, which in turn drives down the cost of housing in these small towns, while drastically increasing the costs in bigger cities. Small cities with reliable, fast, and affordable internet can make it work; just look at Olds, Alberta whose 8,500 residents can enjoy gigabit internet speeds at affordable prices (CBC).

Students in small or remote places have to move hundreds, or even thousands of miles away for their education. How many families who farm could use another set of hands during harvest? There’s no reason why the sons and daughters can’t watch lectures and submit assignments in the evening while driving the combine during the day.

Just over a year ago I travelled to Whitehorse in the Yukon, the biggest city in all of Canada’s territories at just over twenty five thousand people. When I dropped off my rental car a few hours before the counter was due to open, I found the same young gentleman who had helped me three days earlier already at work. I asked him why he was at work five hours early, and he replied that the internet at the airport was free, but at home he would hit his monthly data limit in a week or two, and the average cost was absurdly expensive. In Whitehorse, a similar package that costs $65 in Ottawa will cost $240 (NW Tel). And that’s before you hit any overage fees. Do you live in Hall Beach, Nunavut? Enjoy paying $500/month for 55GB of data with speeds that were usable in Edmonton in 2005.

I understand that it’s expensive to build internet infrastructure everywhere in Canada. But when you factor in time lost with congestion, flights and living costs to study in a distant city, and the financial burden on individuals living in small and remote communities, the return on investment will be better than any new off-ramp could ever provide.

Ukrainian Canadian Students' Union

Vol. 61, Is. 02