Rogers is still the only Canadian carrier with an official Starlink partnership, and its satellite service is open to anyone, even as Prime Minister Mark Carney lays out a clearer plan to share satellite capacity with Europe instead of depending on one private network.
Starlink-powered roaming from Rogers recently expanded to Japan, Australia and New Zealand, so the gap between Ottawa’s policy and what carriers sell is getting harder to ignore.
In a Politico (via Tesla North) interview recorded in Montreal on October 30 after the Canada-EU summit, Carney argued that more of the economy will ride on space links and that Canada and Europe should combine assets rather than wait on a single supplier.
“Increasingly what will happen is a variety of systems in our economies will run, will be connected to space, to satellites in some form,” Carney told Politico. He then pointed to joint work already underway: “So what’s one of the things that we and Europe are doing, which is cooperating, pooling our space assets, some of our space assets. Europe, as you know, has IRIS². We have some leadership in lower orbit satellite. Some other technologies can come together which creates some parallel systems, redundancy, independence, sovereignty, and then there is not that risk that you just described.”
Without naming Elon Musk or Starlink, Carney warned that leaning on “a satellite system that a billionaire, almost trillionaire, decides to turn off at one moment or not” is “not a good idea.” When the Politico interviewer suggested he was alluding to what Musk did with Starlink and Starshield in Ukraine, Carney admitted it with a one-word answer: “Yeah.”
Canadian wireless users will still be waiting a while, since Carney said Canada cannot replace the kind of satellite coverage Ukraine has relied on overnight, and he framed the fix as deliberate work that has to be accelerated. “Those are the types of things you can do if you’re deliberate about them and focus on them and accelerate. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” he said.
Ottawa has already said it will diversify away from Starlink, and taxpayer support for the Canadian alternative runs deep. Federal and Quebec governments finalized $2.54 billion in loans for Telesat’s Lightspeed network in 2024, and the company now has more than $5 billion in federal loans and contracts behind it while racing a December debt deadline on older satellite loans.
Those Lightspeed satellites, including the Arctic military satellites, are still booked on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, with Telesat securing 14 Falcon 9 launches, so the home-grown rival still needs SpaceX to reach orbit before global service around early 2028.
Rural and remote Canadians, meanwhile, already use Starlink for high-speed home internet where fibre and cable do not reach. Residential plans starting at $70 a month have lowered the barrier in many of those communities, and earlier reporting put Starlink at more than 500,000 Canadian users.
Until Lightspeed and Europe’s IRIS² are ready for everyday phone or home use, Rogers still leans on Starlink for out-of-coverage texts and travel roaming, while rural households that need a dish keep signing up for Starlink.
Would you keep a carrier plan that leans on Starlink for satellite coverage, or wait for a Canadian or European alternative?
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