What You Say Is What You Get: Policy Discourse and the Regulation of Canada’s First Domestic Communications Satellite System

Abstract

This article examines the Canadian satellite-policy debates that occurred in 1969 prior to the passage of the Telesat Canada Act. This Act created a new corporation that would own and operate Canada’s first domestic satellite system. Various interest groups vied for control over satellites, using strategic rhetoric to influence how the system would be handled within policy circles. This rhetoric helped to simplify complex issues, limit options, and encourage consensus among policy actors that had very different ideas about the same technology. Key decisions included regulating satellites like microwave networks and labeling the new corporation a carrier’s carrier, natural monopoly, and public utility. In addition, the new corporation was to complement existing telecom networks and would not compete with them for business. The choices made about Canadian satellites thus were bound up with the ways in which this technology was conceived of and discussed, with far-reaching results for Canada’s industrial and communications policy.