Opinion | If Canada wants to move away from Elon Musk, this is how it should do it - Toronto Star

It's time for pension funds to step up, writes Vass Bednar. 

Elon Muks’s Starlink is the sixth most popular internet provider in Canada. Moving away from it will require action from some of Canada’s richest investors, writes Vass Bednar. 

Vass Bednar is the managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute and co-author of "The Big Fix."

Earlier this month, from the podium, Minister Melanie Joly asserted that “we have to address the digital sovereignty piece … and we need to also be able to reduce our dependency on hyperscalers.” That emphasis on independence was echoed by Prime Minister Carney in a recent interview with the New York Times. Referring to Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, Carney noted that, “Starlink, we will diversify away from, no question.” This explicit digital sovereignty posture is new, and notable. 

It is a serious problem when access to critical infrastructure ultimately rests on the goodwill of one person. In March 2025, Elon Musk boasted that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off” and when Poland’s foreign minister pointed out that Warsaw pays about $40 million a year for Ukraine’s terminals, Musk told him: “be quiet, small man.” He later promised that he would never cut Ukraine off. But a sovereign country should never have to take one person — be it Musk, or Trump — at their word. 

Musk has also made his view of Canada plain: when more than 250,000 people signed a petition to strip him of his citizenship, he posted “Canada isn’t a real country.” 

According to a 2025 report from the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project at Carleton University, Starlink is the sixth-largest internet provider in Canada. Quebec just stopped subsidizing Starlink in March of this year. 

The alternatives are taking shape. Telesat, headquartered in Ottawa, is building out the Lightspeed constellation of nearly 200 low-orbit satellites. This service is backed by a $2.14 billion federal loan, and it’s targeting commercial launch in 2027. Last December, Ottawa signed a partnership with Telesat and MDA Space for Arctic military satellite communications. And Eutelsat, the French-British operator that already supports troops in Latvia has pitched a roughly $250-million plan for secure Arctic military broadband. 

There’s a timing gap to these new investments, though. Today, Starlink remains the only realistic high-speed internet option for many remote users, and the sovereign alternatives are still one to ten years from full service. There’s also the question of whether Starlink’s subsidiary is a “Canadian” company. The firm operates in Canada through a Canadian entity and holds the federal authorizations that it needs, but the company is ultimately controlled by SpaceX in the U.S. Investments into firms structured this way can count as “Canadian” since we don’t bother to disaggregate wholly owned foreign subsidiaries that operate here. 

Digital sovereignty is about owning or controlling layers of infrastructure, not just funding another vendor. The Canada Investment Summit Prospectus takes a particular position on this: Ottawa is offering investors a minority stake in Telesat or in Lightspeed itself, with dedicated national capacity and ground infrastructure reserved for sovereign investors.

The federal government’s ambition for sovereign digital infrastructure goes beyond satellites, too. 

Carney is pitching the idea that Canada’s pension funds can pay to operate the four major airports that we already have, and the proceeds will help finance the sovereign broadband backbone, Carney promised (and other new infrastructure that we need to be more sovereign and secure). That asks our largest pools of patient capital to buy the safe, revenue-generating assets Canadians already paid for, while the riskier and more strategic work of building something new is left to whatever the sale brings in. 

Maybe that gets things a bit backwards. What if we cut out a step? If our pension funds are so hungry for long-horizon infrastructure, the infrastructure Canada lacks is pretty obvious: fibre that doesn’t route through the United States and satellite capacity we completely control. Instead of assetizing what we already have, perhaps we could just put that money to work to build more of what we need, faster. 

Case in point: Toronto’s Kepler Communications is running a laser-linked satellite network and currently leads a European Space Agency project. It’s exactly the kind of company that patient Canadian capital should be backing. 

It’s time for us to be a little less patient with the pension funds. They should do more to build up Canada’s sovereignty.

Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request.

There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again.

You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply.

Vass Bednar is the managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute and co-author of “The Big Fix.”

Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details