Canada’s Digital Divide: The Inequalities of Plugging In
Back in 1997, the Canadian government pledged that it would garner the necessary technology to make Canada the world’s most connected nation. More than 20 years later, Canada sits in 10th place, with the U.S., the U.K. and France leading the pack.
In global terms, a top 10 standing isn’t bad at all. Supportive data from Statistics Canada released that same year showed an impressive level of connectivity with 91 percent of Canadians regularly using the Internet, an impressive jump from 83 percent reported in 2012.
But a sobering footnote in the study is symptomatic of the Digital Divide: a gap separating Internet users from those who lack that access. In this case, the divide affects roughly one out of every 16 Canadians who lacked internet home access because of service and equipment costs or lack of available service in their areas.
The COVID-19 outbreak and government lockdown early in 2020 underscored the necessity of Internet access as a major avenue to keep abreast of current events and receive advice on how to survive the pandemic. But roughly a fifth of 3.2 million Canadians who live below the $30,000 annual household income poverty line find that Internet access is economically out of reach.
Compound that figure with the lack of Internet access in Canada’s northern communities where the majority of residents are First Nations and Inuit citizens and the Digital Divide is not only an economic gulf, but one that takes on geographic and ethnic dimensions as well.
But a national crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that the gulf is in dire need of more expedient bridging. School closures meant students had to undergo the distance-learning route, which left low-income earners at a disadvantage. Even those with a bare-boned Internet package were struggling with studies because they didn’t have the bandwidth to keep up with lesson taught online.
Such situations have prompted advocates for equal Internet access to petition the government to adopt strategies to make the Internet infrastructure more equitable. One community group called Open Media, a lobby organization that’s fighting for a more accessible connectivity system, has made several recommendations to the federal government.
Those include requiring Internet service providers to provide basic service packages, ensuring a minimum acceptable standard of basic Internet speeds, investing in long-lasting fibre technologies and fast-tracking the timeline to get all Canadian households online by 2025.
And while Canada might technically be one of the most connected nations in the world, that’s no comfort to millions of Canadians who remain unplugged.