Not everyone in Canada is e-connected. Shocking but true. In our Google universe, it is still possible to find people in Canada who are computer illiterate and suffering as a result. Worse, people are suffering because for some reason, Canada – proud member of the G7, elite club of the world’s most industrialized countries - can’t provide all Canadians with the means to access the digital universe. According to a 2008 Statscan survey, only 65% of residents living in small towns or rural areas accessed the Internet, compared to the 76% of urban residents that did so. What the survey figures don’t explain is that rural folks aren’t necessarily disinterested in Internet access, rather the telecommunications industry in Canada provides nothing but obstacles to those rural Canadians who wish to get plugged in.
This rant comes as a result of Internet service providers in “la Belle Province” and their complete failure to consider that while 80% of Quebecers live in cities, there is still 20% who do not. My mom happens to be a member of the second group of Quebecers. She lives in a small rural community and her current dial-up Internet connection is so slow that she reads, knits and tidies the house while she waits for a single page to load. Rip Van Winkle could sleep a lifetime before an attachment successfully downloads. This situation has real repercussions. As the historian Gerald Friesen explained in Citizens and Nation, “the way in which a society communicates shapes popular assumptions about how the world works.” The fact that rural Canadians are missing out on efficient communications technology means that there is a significant segment of the Canadian population that is out of the loop. This disconnect is a big problem.
After years of suffering with an archaic, hamster-driven computer setup, our family decided to take action and contacted several service providers in the area to see what our options were. It turns out they consist of bad, worse, none, and none. First, we called Bell and were told that high speed internet is not an option. I guess there aren’t enough people in Compton County for Bell to change the phone lines or whatever it takes to provide high speed. Then a neighbour mentioned using cable companies for Internet. Sweet. Or not. It seems the cable companies are no longer answering their phones. We could have e-mailed them…but it would have taken days for our dial-up connection to identify their web page and create a clickable link. Then we were told that we could buy faster technology for our modem, only to learn two days later (after it downloaded!) that it doesn’t work on Macs. The customer service agent I dealt with then informed me that it was our fault because most people do not have Macs so when buying software technology, we should be providing the companies with the makes of our computers. Somehow my “you are the one selling things” tirade didn’t resonate. (Never mind that Apple owns a third of the personal computer market according to a recent New York Times article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/technology/22apple.html).
The worst part is that all of my interactions with these companies had to take place over the phone because our Internet connection is so slow that we couldn’t even browse the web to look for good deals. Attempting to talk to four different companies about the services they offered took 4.7 hours. I will never get those hours back and I am deeply resentful. But what really gets my goat (forgive me – I have been on the farm without Internet distractions for days now) is that this is an issue that is difficult to mobilize politically. People in urban areas can get high-speed Internet, if they have money. But even if they can’t afford it, at least they have the option. People in rural areas have other more pressing concerns to worry about. Weather and crop conditions come to mind. The sad thing is, awareness about issues that matter to rural people, might be greater if the rest of the country was more aware. I bet you if the melting ice floes and dying polar bears had been on YouTube when global warming first became a reality, urban Canadians would be engaged in a much more significant way. Knowledge is power people!
We talk about the death of the farm but I don’t think people appreciate that the farms wouldn’t be dying if people in fast-paced cities could actually connect with what is going on in the hinterland. Rural Canada is dying because we are shutting it out. And that is a shame. If it isn’t possible to provide every Canadian with the possibility of accessing efficient Internet services in the twenty-first century, then modern Canada is just a sham and this century, just like the last one, will definitely not belong to us.
And now that I have ranted, I am going to go back to the country where I won’t be blogging or communicating because I will be banging my head against a big wall (and not the firewall variety) until some Internet service provider thinks there might be profit in my plight.
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