Telecom Nation: Telecommunications, Computers, and Governments in Canada (review)

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Abstract

Recent years have seen significant growth in scholarship on the history of telecommunications and related technologies in Canada. Starting with Robert E. Babe’s Telecommunications in Canada and Michele Martin’s Hello Central?, and continuing more recently with Dwayne Winseck’s Reconvergence and Kevin G. Wilson’s Deregulating Telecommunications, we now have a body of work that addresses how and why this industry became so central to Canadian political economy, social life, and cultural identity. Now, drawing primarily on federal and provincial archives, Laurence Mussio’s Telecom Nation provides a welcome addition by concentrating on the response of Canada’s federal state system to the growth of telecommunications and the arrival of the computer from 1945 to 1975. Considering Canada’s vast spaces and small population concentrated along the U.S. border, it should come as no surprise that federal and even provincial governments would try to shape what Harold Innis called “space-binding” technologies to advance economic, political, and cultural objectives. Mussio’s book convincingly demonstrates that most such efforts were largely ineffectual and advances three explanations for this. Although Canada had extensive experience with telephone technology in the first half of the twentieth century, most government policymakers were ill-prepared for the expansion of the technology after World War II and especially unprepared to address the growing convergence of telecommunications and computer technology. It is one thing to acknowledge—as report after report repeated—that smaller, faster, cheaper, and more efficient communication technologies could initiate a social transformation by opening economic opportunity and by placing great stress on national sovereignty. It is quite another thing to figure out how to harness these technologies for the public good. In addition to documenting government’s understandable aversion to risk in the face of rapid technological change, Mussio points to the nearly insurmountable challenge of harmonizing several governments with a stake in telecommunications and computer technology. In 1945, the Canadian federal government was caught between Britain’s pressures to hold on to a declining global telecommunications system anchored in the cooperation of Commonwealth members like Canada and the United States government’s increasingly successful push to make these new technologies the infrastructure for an “American Century.” Moreover, unlike the United States, whose state and local governments generally deferred to the national government in these matters, the Canadian government faced B O O K R E V I E W S