Yeah, I see no problem putting #SpaceKaren in charge of our telecommunications.

Oh. Wait. He turns off Starlink to entire countries when he feels like it, and tells entire countries to fuck off when they ask for reasonable limits on accounts of bad actors. There's also a very odd connection to Russia... a lot of this exceedingly bizarre behaviour started after having met with Putin a couple years back.

Relying on this increasinly unreliable idiot for anything is a bad idea.

"$2.14 billion for a local company?! why don't we just have a foreign billionaire do it for $2.09 billion and then another $1 billion when he fucks it up?"

Nothing is more conservative than selling off Canadian interests to foreign companies.

Sure on the surface going with Elon's plan may be less costly. But like a deal with the devil, you realize the cost is more than money.

The cost is Elon deciding when his system will actually work for customers

The cost is Elon flouting laws and courts as it suits him

The cost is Elon considering himself above all laws internationally

He is going to put himself over Canadians every single time if we allow ourselves to rely on him. Sure you can have a contract that says keep the price fixed or whatever, but Elon will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to enforce anything.

LEO internet is not sustainable and should be banned.

If you want satellite internet geosync is way better. The only downside is latency but it's not worth destroying the planet and ruining astronomy globally over.

I mean, moving beyond the loan part, (not a grant, meaning that we will get the money back), is this not what the Canadian population wants? The govt investing money to provide alternative options to the big 3 for internet?

Call me jaded, but I imagine they'll get bought up in 5-10 by Robellus, but it's a step in the right direction.

Beyond that, do we really want our critical infrastructure tied to a company with such a shoddy and unpredictable "face man"?

Did no one in the replies happen to notice that this is a loan

Of course the conservatives want that unreliable tempered man in charge of our communications where new customers got unexpectedly charged a $100 fee.

PP wants to hand Canada over to Musk and the deranged US far right.

Unfortunately this is where Musk figured out how to corner the market ahead of time. It was the same thing when cellular tech came into the mainstream. Lots of less developed countries with poor or no hardwired telcom infra found that skipping ahead to next-gen tech (cell towers) was super cheap and quick to build, so lots of corners of the earth found themselves connected in the 90's that had never been prior to that decade.

Starlink and low-orbit sats for internet coverage are a similar leap ahead in cost and speed to deploy. Elon and his goons saw it coming long before anyone else did, and the fact they also have Space X was a pretty key part of their speed to deploy.

I'm no Elon stan, I hate the fucking guy. But it is what it is. He got there first and people in northern canada can already access Starlink for under 200/mo. I am no math guy but I suspect that even if the fed gov paid every cent of everyone's subscription to Starlink it wouldn't amount to 2 billion dollars. 🤷

EDIT just did some napkin math. With the help of wiki found that the population of northern canada is less than 120k people. So cost of taxpayers footing the bill for everyone up there to be on Starlink would be 24 million/yr. Or... for that same 2 billion, 83 years of Starlink subscriptions for each and every person up there. That would be if each single person had their own dish.