Re: $75M from Wi-Fi sale to be used for public housing, Toronto Star, Jun 14, 2008 http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/443356
Andrew Clement
The Toronto Star’s story about the sale of Toronto Hydro Telecom (THT), by taking its cue from Mayor Miller’s spin about community housing, misses several key points. While remedying the deplorable state of Toronto’s public housing is worthy of support, the unseemly haste to divvy up the spoils obscures the missed golden opportunity that holding on to THT would represent. Part of the problem can rightly be laid at the feet of the former Tory government that both down-loaded housing to the City without adequate financing and hobbled it from properly taking advantage of its telecom asset — i.e. more on-going damage the Harris government is still wreaking on Ontario’s public institutions.
However, that’s water under the bridge. What is now the greater shame is that the potential value of THT to serve a wide range of Torontonian’s communications needs is so un-recognized. Sad as it is to witness the City selling assets to keep financially afloat, much like watching a poor but shortsighted family burning the furniture to keep the house warm, the tragedy is compounded when the asset’s great potential is overlooked through ignorance. The title of the Star article reflects and contributes to this misunderstanding of what is at stake. While THT’s Wi-Fi service was its most publicly visible face, this was just the tip of a much bigger and more promising ice-berg. Rare among municipal utilities, THT was a real innovator in building a fibre-optic network that could serve as the high-capacity backbone for a wide variety of telecommunications services to businesses, households and the City itself. THT is a rapidly expanding and profitable business that was already beginning to offer a real alternative to Bell and Rogers as an internet provider in terms of price and capability. If integrated into city operations it could bring dramatic improvements to a range of city services.
So Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong is dead wrong when he says that “Telecom is not part of the city’s core business.” As digital communication increasingly becomes a vital ingredient in many everyday activities – in commerce, recreation, education, culture, civic affairs, etc., it needs to be seen as just as vital a part of the infrastructure that makes for a vibrant city as our streets, sidewalks, public places, electrical distribution networks, water supply, sewage treatment, street light, schools, libraries and so on. Digital networks are the 21st century’s contribution to the fabric of public life and yet here we are throwing away the opportunity to make the best of it when it is already so close at hand.
The final insult is that this important decision about the disposition of a vital asset owned by the people of Toronto and about which so much is stake has been made behind closed doors, without the opportunity to understand and debate the issues. It may well be that Torontonians would rather put the money into housing than hold on to something that is less well-understood, but that should be a choice they make. Let’s hope it is not too late to give this sale the public examination we deserve. If Toronto is going to sever its telecom arm, better to do this openly and knowingly, rather than in the shadows.
Andrew Clement is a Professor of Information Studies at the University of Toronto.