Quebec became a leader in Canada when it signed a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink three years ahead of Ontario to connect households in remote regions to high-speed internet, and it is now working with the federal government to unhook the country from the billionaire’s satellite system and develop Canadian “connectivity sovereignty,” says the member of the National Assembly in charge of connectivity projects for Premier François Legault’s government.
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“We’re thinking about having a Canadian satellite solution for fixed internet, broadband and also mobility to be able to have an option,” Gilles Bélanger, the Quebec finance minister’s parliamentary assistant in charge of high-speed internet and special connectivity projects, said in an interview with The Gazette.
“We’re in the process of looking at a sovereign option. Canada has the competence — we can build satellites, we have aerospace, skills, engineers. What we don’t have are reliable satellite launchers.”
Quebec itself has the expertise to build satellites and to develop data storage, Bélanger added.
He named MDA Space, which has a satellite production facility in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, and Ottawa-based satellite operator Telesat as examples developing Canada’s future.
Bélanger, who is the Coalition Avenir Québec MNA for Orford, said Legault’s declaration this week that he wasn’t prepared to cancel the province’s Starlink deal to retaliate against U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened 25 per cent tariff was reasonable because it would provoke costly legal action when the province has already accomplished what it needed to with the arrangement.
Musk’s low-orbit satellites were the solution for the 10,000 or so households in remote regions where fibre optic couldn’t be offered, Bélanger said. Ground-level fibre optic technology is preferable, he added. That’s why Quebec has invested nearly $1 billion in expanding the fibre optic network in the province in the past three years, he said.
But fibre optic is extremely costly in remote areas with low density, Bélanger said. It costs about $20,000 per kilometre, he added.
“So if you’re in an area with a home five kilometres from the closest village, it costs $100,000 to connect that house. … That’s why we decided to take the Starlink option. That doesn’t mean this supplier will be the supplier for the next 10 years. But for now, Starlink is the option. (Musk) has an unbelievable number of low-orbit satellites. They supply broadband internet connection with very low latency (delay). You do have other options for internet, but they’re higher (up) and the capacity is not there.”
The three-year deal with Starlink, which expires in June, has cost the Quebec government $130 million, Bélanger said.
It hasn’t all been spent, he added, and the government must now decide whether to get any leftover repaid or use it to continue subsidizing internet service in the regions, where it’s more costly.
Meanwhile, the Legault government hasn’t decided whether to award a new contract to install Starlink high-speed satellite internet access in courthouses in remote regions, Bélanger said. The call for tenders closed on Monday.
Ontario signed a $100-million contract with Starlink in November to hook up 15,000 homes and businesses in remote and northern communities to high-speed internet. But in response to Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced on Monday that his province would cancel the deal.
Musk, who owns Starlink through his tech company SpaceX, financially supported Trump’s campaign for president last fall and was recently tapped by the president to head the new Department of Government Efficiency.
Ontario’s retaliatory measures are paused now that Trump has decided to delay the tariffs on Canada for 30 days.
“That’s why it was so easy for Mr. Ford to say ‘I’m stopping the contract,’” Bélanger said of the Starlink deal. “Of course. They didn’t start the deployment. He made no payment.”
Bélanger said competition to Starlink is coming. And the key for Quebec and Canada is to reduce the vulnerability of telecommunications, he said, by having what he calls “redundancy” — overlapping fibre optic and satellite technology to ensure service can continue if one or the other is compromised, such as by the effects of climate change.
But mobility is another area for Canada to develop, and Musk is on the cusp of direct-to-cell mobility infrastructure, Bélanger said.
“Very soon, Mr. Musk will have the satellite for direct-to-cell communication.”
One of the risks of a monopoly is the exposure of sensitive data, Bélanger said.
“Musk was probably a visionary,” he said. “There was (financial) risk. But it was visionary to own the supply chain of space.”
It’s a similar issue with GAFAM — the acronym for the stocks of U.S. technology companies Google (Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (Meta), Amazon and Microsoft — Bélanger said.
“They control a good part of the world’s connectivity with transoceanic fibre optic from Europe to America,” he said. They stock all the data in data centres in Virginia, he added.
But on the positive side, Quebec and Canada have green energy, which will be strategic.
It “may not be a priority for the next four years (under Trump’s presidency),” Bélanger said, “but it will become a priority. … Right now, three per cent of the world energy goes to the web. But it may go up to 10 per cent of the world’s energy just because of artificial intelligence. So are you still going to use petroleum and carbon to transform to electric energy? The country that will have the most green energy and clean water will probably have the top resources for the next decades.”