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Canada’s anti-Musk pivot hits Starlink’s second-biggest market

Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Tuesday responded to U.S. President Donald 
Trump’s tariffs by ripping up the Canadian province’s contract with Elon 
Musk’s Starlink. “It’s done; it’s gone,” Ford said of the deal.

Consumers who have quickly grown to rely on the SpaceX satellite network 
may not be willing to follow suit.

Starlink flies more than 7,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) serving 
some 5 million subscribers, and Canada is the company’s largest market 
outside of the U.S.

Serving swaths of remote locations that traditional internet services don’t 
reach, the popular service poses a dilemma for patriotic Canadians who want 
to boycott American goods over widespread anger against Trump and his 
closest adviser, Musk.

Take Louise Dumayne, a Yukon-based writer who posted a rallying call to 
shun U.S. companies on her Facebook page. Everything that is, except 
Starlink.

Dumayne — who lives close to the Klondike gold rush town of Dawson City, 
about 445 kilometers (277 miles) by car from the Arctic Circle — said 
reliable internet service from Starlink has boosted her husband’s income by 
as much as 40 per cent. “I feel conflicted,” she said on a video call (via 
Starlink) from her wooden cabin, where a caribou hide hangs on the wall.

Starlink is “really robust” and works despite temperatures lower than minus 
40C (minus 40F), she said.

After the U.S. imposed 25 per cent tariffs on most Canadian and Mexican 
imports on March 4, and with Trump threatening tariffs on more countries, 
consumers around the world may be facing similar conflicts.
(Idem Est Advisory & Research)

Ford isn’t the only Canadian politician targeting SpaceX. British 
Columbia’s Premier David Eby in early February said his province was no 
longer considering a deal with Starlink that had been in the works. R.J. 
Simpson, the premier of the Northwest Territories, on Tuesday said his 
government is looking at alternatives, too.

Businessman Gord Fry has first-hand experience of the backlash. The owner 
of Muskoka Starlink, a company that installs equipment in an area two hours 
from Toronto by car, Fry has received online and in-person abuse due to the 
name on his van.

He’s turned off public comments for Facebook ads “to stop the political 
rants,” said Fry. “The only thing that’s holding Starlink back regarding 
further and faster advancements through Canada is a negative public opinion 
that’s being caused by Elon Musk shooting his mouth off, and certainly 
Trump.”

Still, for all the anger, Starlink has a quasi-monopoly on reliable and 
affordable LEO internet. That leaves few options for people who want to 
distance themselves from Musk.

“What is the alternative? There’s not much alternative,” said Quebec’s 
minister of cybersecurity and digital technology Gilles Bélanger.
Arctic lifeline

Home to many remote communities that crave decent and affordable internet, 
Canada in many ways is a perfect fit for the SpaceX-owned network. Starlink 
had about 533,000 users in the country as of January, according to the firm 
Idem Est Advisory & Research.

Musk himself has connections to Canada. His mother was born in Saskatchewan 
and he attended Queen’s University in Ontario before transferring to the 
University of Pennsylvania.

Yet after more than 350,000 Canadians signed a petition to revoke the 
SpaceX chief executive officer’s citizenship, he posted “Canada is not a 
real country” on his social media platform X, before later deleting the 
comment. Trump, meanwhile, has enraged Canadians by saying he plans to use 
“economic force” to make Canada a “51st state.”

While Musk’s electric car company Tesla Inc. looks vulnerable to blowback, 
with sales slumping in Europe, Australia and China, Starlink’s dominant 
position is helping to protect his space network from political backlash.

Nunavut, an Arctic territory about 20 per cent larger than Alaska, has no 
roads connecting its 25 communities and no fiber-optic lines to link them 
to the internet. That lack of connectivity has been an impediment to 
development in Canada’s North even as economic and military interest grows 
due to climate change making the region more accessible by sea.

Starlink saw significant and rapid adoption in Nunavut, according to data 
from internet speed testing website owner Ookla LLC. A “Starlink Nunavut” 
Facebook group has more than 7,000 members, which would represent about a 
fifth of the vast territory’s population, although not all of the group 
members necessarily live there.

“It looks like every other house has a Starlink when you go for a walk,” 
said Andrew Arreak, a resident of Mittimatalik, known in English as Pond 
Inlet, a predominantly Inuit community almost eight hours by air from 
Ottawa.

Neighbours take Starlink antennae with them on camping and hunting trips 
out in the tundra, and it makes them much safer, he said. Before, they used 
radio with limited range.

Madeleine Redfern, former mayor of the territory’s capital Iqaluit, 
seconded Arreak’s endorsement. For years she paid NorthwesTel Inc. $1,000 
(US$695) a month to keep her home office connected, but suffered from data 
caps, excess use charges and poor service.

Since switching to Starlink, she pays closer to $130 and is now able to do 
things like stream videos. “People who don’t have it are desperate to get 
it,” she said of Musk’s network.

Starlink’s website shows Iqaluit as “sold out.”

Tony Fortunato, an engineer installing Starlink terminals for Nunavut’s 
housing agency, said talk of boycotts isn’t persuading locals. “They’re 
like: ‘It doesn’t affect me. We have no choice. Like what are we gonna do? 
Have nothing?’”

Canada’s government has announced projects to improve Nunavut’s broadband, 
including nearly $27 million for SSi Micro Ltd. to increase satellite 
capacity for the territory’s 25 communities and more than $270 million to 
create a fiber link to Iqaluit and three others.
Canadian option

Those holding out for a Canadian Starlink rival will have to wait.

A spokesperson for NorthwesTel said the company mainly provides fiber optic 
internet in the Yukon, where it’s headquartered, and the Northwest 
Territories. To offer satellite broadband it also partners with OneWeb, a 
LEO constellation owned by France’s Eutelsat Communications SACA, and with 
Canada’s Telesat Corp.

Ottawa-based Telesat today uses geostationary satellites at elevations many 
times higher than Musk’s, meaning a slower round trip for communications.

Telesat is building a US$4.6 billion LEO fleet of 198 satellites called 
Lightspeed with Ontario manufacturer MDA Space Ltd that could better 
compete with Starlink, but the constellation is years behind schedule, with 
service scheduled to begin in 2027.

Although Telesat’s model is wholesale, CEO Dan Goldberg told Bloomberg by 
email that “a direct-to-consumer offering could be supported over time,” in 
the vein of Starlink.

Another provider, Xplore Inc., last September announced the first 
connections in a plan to create fiber links for more than 35,000 Ontario 
homes and businesses, part of a plan to make more than 400,000 connections 
nationwide by 2027.

Former Iqaluit mayor Redfern is chief operating officer for CanArctic Inuit 
Networks Inc., which hopes to connect a subsea fiber line between Nunavut’s 
capital and a town in Newfoundland and Labrador.

SpaceX and Xplore didn’t reply to requests for comment.
Quebec and Ontario

Before the trade war, Canada’s politicians were promising to fork over 
large sums of money to get rural constituents connected to Starlink.

Ontario announced a $100 million partnership last November to offer 
Starlink to 15,000 homes and businesses in rural and northern areas, a deal 
that Ford canceled on Tuesday. “We won’t award contracts to people who 
enable and encourage economic attacks on our province and our country,” the 
Ontario premier said at a press conference.

Quebec, which has pledged to make high-speed internet available to all its 
residents, has a deal worth $138 million that has paid for Starlink 
equipment and discounts for about 10,000 people. The program expires in 
June, and a decision on whether to renew some subsidies should come in May, 
said Bélanger.

“Maybe $138 million is not big enough” for Musk to care about a backlash, 
he said. “Canada will need to think about a solution, a Canadian solution.”

For now, Yukon-based writer Dumayne worries that Canadian users of Starlink 
could even become pawns in the trade war if U.S.-Canada relations 
deteriorate further.

“What if Elon Musk decides on a tit-for-tat with Starlink and decides that 
he’s going to double the price?” she said. “We’d have to pay it, at this 
point.”

With assistance from Mathieu Dion.

Thomas Seal and Danielle Bochove, Bloomberg News


https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/company-news/2025/03/06/canadas-anti-
musk-pivot-hits-starlinks-second-biggest-market/