The emergence and remarkable technological diffusion of electric power, telephony, and mass transit across the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban landscape had created massive monopolies. Civic populists and municipalities demanded that these monopolies be responsible to the community. What materialized from the ensuing conflict between these opposing forces was a spectrum of regulation, from the independent regulatory commission to outright public ownership. Regulation not only attempted to achieve a balance between producer and consumer, it also determined the pace and speed of technological development in Canada.¹

For the Bell Telephone Company, this arrangement meant something very specific: it had...

Canadian telecommunications policy not only supervised Canadian connections at home; it also operated in an international context. The Second World War and its aftermath recast a number of familiar landmarks in both Canada’s international relations and in the country’s national affairs. Internationally, Canada’s position in the world had been redefined in relation to Commonwealth and continent, while at home the combination of depression and wartime emergency had sired a more powerful bureaucracy interested in establishing a new economic and technological order. The Canadian state’s management of international telecommunications interests reflected these developments.

Canada’s response to the dramatic restructuring of international...

The introduction and diffusion of new technologies involves a process of adaptation to local contexts. Technology shapes, and is shaped. This chapter will explore aspects of the diffusion of computer technology in Canada. Computers are linked by wires, connected to large databases and utilize telecommunications links to communicate with each other. More and more, they became an integral part of the communications infrastructure. The nature of the computer revolution in Canada, at least in its early phases, can be summarized by its rapidity of diffusion, its essentially imported nature, and the fact that a few United States corporations dominated the...

In his study of the dynamics of technological change, Thomas Hughes uses the notion of “salients” and “reverse salients” to explain technological transformation. He defines a salient and its reverse as a “pronounced projection or bulge in an advancing front; a reverse salient, an oxymoronic concept, refers to a part of a front that lags behind.”¹ As the last chapter demonstrated, the federal government’s ambivalence over the issue of technological leadership minimized its role in the development of a key technological industry. In the Canada of the 1960s, state responses to changes in telecommunications were the reverse salient in the...

In 1967 the beleaguered Board of Transport Commissioners was dissolved and a new agency, the Canadian Transport Commission (ctc), was established to preside over the regulation of transport and communications. The repackaging made little difference in telecommunications. In the eight years of the Transport Commission between 1967 and 1975 federal regulation of telecommunications was increasingly unable to deal with its institutional crisis. The commission’s mandate coincided with a period of shift and dissonance in the relationship between the state and civil society in Canada. The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of participatory impulses and ideologies, and political demands...

In an important sense, these two declarations convey both challenge and response. For the authors ofInstant World, the key lay in adjusting Canadian telecommunications policy to changing technological reality. The state would have to channel economy and society into new realms of sophistication while restraining the possible side-effects of technological acceleration. Pierre Trudeau’s response was both elegant and comforting: the state’s very awareness of the dazzling possibilities of technological transformation would lead inevitably to action. No longer content to be “blind, inert pawns of fate,” the federal state would emerge from the shadows to assert its role in shaping...

Nobody could have accused Marshall McLuhan and Eric Kierans of coming from the same intellectual or political backgrounds, or of sharing common views on most matters. Kierans was the businessman-cum-politician, McLuhan the aphoristic prophet of the electronic age. These two strong communications celebrities came from different worlds, and so it was all the more remarkable that they would come to similar conclusions about state intervention into technological matters. The difference between McLuhan and Kierans came in their appraisal of the ability of the state to effect change. Kierans believed that a more rational administration sensitive to public feeling could harness...