Trump’s tariff threats are a wake-up call. Instead of fearing U.S. trade moves, Canada must tackle its internal monopolies to boost competition and growth.
From airlines to banks, fixing Canada’s competition problem starts with smarter domestic reforms.
We should have tried harder to save bombardiers commercial jet program, time for a reboot. A new regional carrier plane with locally made parts would be great.
Every time a government talks about splitting up the big 3 telecom giants they go: tsssssss…yeaaaaahhhh…not a bad idea, just a shame about the ¾ of our employees that’ll be made redundant. Just wouldn’t be able to keep em on I’m afraid.
There’s a lot of things that have been privatised that really shouldn’t have been. I’m from Vancouver, our bus and train company was privatised, now they have a private police force legally allowed to pursue fare evaders across city lines and carry tazers, mace and batons. And busses on the line still have stickers proudly proclaiming they won best transit system of the year…and they did, years and years before they privatised.
Cell service is insane, I’ve moved to the UK. Over here I can get unlimited call text and 5G data for around £25/mnth. Coverage isn’t always great, but it’s easily in line with coverage in Vancouver when I still lived there. And I get “free” roaming for an extra 75p on every bill. The only two places I don’t get roaming without paying extra for a package is Canada and Japan. At least in Japan cell service is reasonably priced.
In Montréal, public transportation is public, but they still have their own police with the santé equipment.
But yeah, we’re being ripped off on mobile plans. Not to mention how they require to remove features from mobile devices like esims. For ages we couldn’t get those our smart phones when it was already in use everywhere else.
Yeah. It’s a natural monopoly and should be nationalized into Crown corporations. This would allow the natural monopoly to be kept as minimal as possible and prevent it being used to leverage into other markets.
If BC Tel owned all the cellphone towers and fibre lines, we wouldn’t have all these bullshit shenanigans with locking 3rd-party providers out of the market - they’d ALL be third-party providers.
It’s a natural monopoly and should be nationalized into Crown corporations.
So it can be destroyed like Canada post? Power, energy and telcos should be government owned and operated like the military. They are essential and their primary purpose should be to provide a service NOT turn a profit.
I think we’re on the same page. The idea that Crown corporations need to turn a profit is pretty ridiculous. It’s a management framework. They should at least operate on a cost recovery basis within reason though. But the emphasis is to provide the service.
Yeah. For a government organization, turning a profit is stolen wages. Though a mandate to run zero profit can create a perverse incentive to ‘spend money on lose it next year’. I’m not sure how to deal with that on a policy level but I’d like to see ideas on it.
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We should have tried harder to save bombardiers commercial jet program, time for a reboot. A new regional carrier plane with locally made parts would be great.
LoL yeah. Tariffs or no, this should have been addressed ages ago.
Every time a government talks about splitting up the big 3 telecom giants they go: tsssssss…yeaaaaahhhh…not a bad idea, just a shame about the ¾ of our employees that’ll be made redundant. Just wouldn’t be able to keep em on I’m afraid.
And the government always backs off…
Telecom infrastructure should be public. Same with electricity. It’s become too important of a service to be private.
There’s a lot of things that have been privatised that really shouldn’t have been. I’m from Vancouver, our bus and train company was privatised, now they have a private police force legally allowed to pursue fare evaders across city lines and carry tazers, mace and batons. And busses on the line still have stickers proudly proclaiming they won best transit system of the year…and they did, years and years before they privatised.
Cell service is insane, I’ve moved to the UK. Over here I can get unlimited call text and 5G data for around £25/mnth. Coverage isn’t always great, but it’s easily in line with coverage in Vancouver when I still lived there. And I get “free” roaming for an extra 75p on every bill. The only two places I don’t get roaming without paying extra for a package is Canada and Japan. At least in Japan cell service is reasonably priced.
In Montréal, public transportation is public, but they still have their own police with the santé equipment.
But yeah, we’re being ripped off on mobile plans. Not to mention how they require to remove features from mobile devices like esims. For ages we couldn’t get those our smart phones when it was already in use everywhere else.
Yeah. It’s a natural monopoly and should be nationalized into Crown corporations. This would allow the natural monopoly to be kept as minimal as possible and prevent it being used to leverage into other markets.
If BC Tel owned all the cellphone towers and fibre lines, we wouldn’t have all these bullshit shenanigans with locking 3rd-party providers out of the market - they’d ALL be third-party providers.
So it can be destroyed like Canada post? Power, energy and telcos should be government owned and operated like the military. They are essential and their primary purpose should be to provide a service NOT turn a profit.
I think we’re on the same page. The idea that Crown corporations need to turn a profit is pretty ridiculous. It’s a management framework. They should at least operate on a cost recovery basis within reason though. But the emphasis is to provide the service.
Nice! Breaking even should be the highest goal for a Crown corp, turning a profit means you are delivering less of a service than you could.
Yeah. For a government organization, turning a profit is stolen wages. Though a mandate to run zero profit can create a perverse incentive to ‘spend money on lose it next year’. I’m not sure how to deal with that on a policy level but I’d like to see ideas on it.
Not to mention that the infrastructure would be spread even further, like electric lines, connecting remote places.