OPINION: Connecting the last 2% — a test of Canada’s sovereignty

Canada is getting closer to universal high-speed internet access, and that progress deserves recognition. But it would be a mistake to confuse progress with completion. The hardest part of the job still lies ahead: connecting the communities that remain unserved or underserved, many of them in the North. At CIRA, this is not a new issue for us. Our work has been tied to building a better internet for Canadians since we first began managing the .CA registry in 2000. That long view is one reason we know Canada cannot be satisfied with connecting 98 per cent of the country—and we cannot treat the last 2 per cent of underserved households as an afterthought. It is where broadband policy stops being straightforward and starts revealing what the country is actually prepared to prioritize. Broadband is basic infrastructure for education, health care, public services, emergency response and economic opportunity. In remote and northern communities, those are not marginal benefits. They are part of the practical conditions and critical to participate in everyday life. When connectivity is weak or unreliable, the effects are immediate and cumulative. Students have fewer options, patients face more barriers to receiving the help they need, public services are harder to reach and local businesses operate at a disadvantage. The consequences are easy to describe in the abstract, but much harder to accept in practice. Nunavut Arctic College had to distribute mobile internet sticks to students and faculty just so they could get online. Typical speeds were around 5/1 Mbps, 10 times lower than the Universal Service Objective, and the institution was unable to connect to Canada’s national research and education network until making online academic work extremely difficult. Only when low-Earth orbit technology became viable did it become realistic to connect to Canada’s national research and education network. That is not a story about convenience. It is a story about whether people can realistically access education and public institutions from where they live. If universal service is to mean anything, it has to include the places where the barriers are highest, not just the places where deployment is easiest. That case alone should be enough to keep the North front and centre in broadband policy. But it is no longer the only case. Canada is operating in a far more difficult geopolitical and economic environment today. The Arctic is no longer a peripheral policy file. Critical minerals, shipping routes, resource development and northern security are moving closer to the centre of the national interest and that should change how we think about connectivity in the North. While broadband is usually treated as social and economic infrastructure in southern Canada, in the North it is also strategic infrastructure, supporting not only daily life and local economic activity, but Canada’s claim on Arctic sovereignty. After all, what is sovereignty in practical terms? It’s our ability to govern our territory, protect our interests, support our communities and operate critical systems as we see fit, independently, when circumstances demand it. A country that cannot reliably connect its North cannot fully claim that it is prepared to secure, govern and develop it. This is why the final 2 per cent cannot be written off as the expensive tail end of an otherwise successful file. Yes, these are the highest-cost communities to serve. Yes, governments are entitled to ask hard questions about value for money. But if the only measure that matters is short-term cost efficiency, the answer will always favour easier builds in more accessible places. That may improve national averages. It will not solve the real problem. The real problem is that a weak, fragile or strategically dependent connection is not the same as resilient infrastructure. A network that is technically available but unreliable under strain, difficult to repair, or too dependent on systems and routing outside Canadian control creates vulnerability in exactly the region where Canada now says it must strengthen its presence and capacity. Low-Earth orbit services will be part of the solution in some of the hardest-to-reach places, but the standard should be higher than nominal coverage. Canada must ask whether northern connectivity is reliable, affordable and resilient, and whether it reduces strategic dependence where public safety, national security and economic security are at stake. The real question is not whether Canada can afford to connect the North. It is whether we can afford the strategic dependence that comes from failing to do so. Canada’s sovereignty will not be secured by rhetoric alone. It will be secured by the practical ability to act independently when required, so that we can effectively govern our territory, protect our economic interests, support our communities and manage critical systems without undue reliance on others. In the North, connectivity is a vital part of that capacity. Treating it as an afterthought would not just be a policy mistake, it would undermine a core a national responsibility. Byron Holland is the president and chief executive of CIRA (the Canadian Internet Registration Authority), the national not-for-profit best known for managing the .CA domain and developing new cybersecurity, DNS, and registry products and services. The positions and opinions expressed by The Wire Report columnists and contributors are solely reflective of the author’s perspective and do not necessarily reflect The Wire Report’s views or values.

OPINION: Connecting the last 2% — a test of Canada’s sovereignty

Opinion |
By Byron Holland
|March 23, 2026

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OPINION: Connecting the last 2% — a test of Canada’s sovereignty

Opinion | By Byron Holland |March 23, 2026

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Opinion |
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|March 23, 2026