Update March 3, 2025 at 12:38 p.m. EST: Ontario Premier Doug Ford confirmed during a press conference that the province was “ripping up” its deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink in response to U.S. tariffs.
Doug Ford has announced that Ontario is ready to drop the Starlink deal. The premier is also asking stores to help promote Canadian-made goods and remove American products from the LCBO.
On Feb. 3, 2025, Doug Ford announced that Ontario would break out of its $100 million Starlink deal to help combat the U.S. economic pressure. Then, by 5 p.m. that night, Trump announced he would pause the tariffs for 30 days.
In a Toronto Star report, the experts and politicians who have been following the matter expect the Trump tariffs to come without much warning and will likely take little into account from the meetings between Canadian and American politicians from the past month.
The Ontario/Starlink deal was announced in November 2024, and the provincial government bought roughly 15,000 satellite dishes from Starlink to connect 15,000 remote Canadians to the internet. Canadian rural internet service provider Xplore also submitted a proposal to provide the internet, so if the Starlink deal falls through, there are other options for connecting people.
A recent study from Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest app, suggested that a Canada-wide ban on Starlink could impact as many as 2 million Canadians, mostly concentrated in rural areas where other internet options might not measure up to what Starlink offers.
Source: Toronto Star
Image source: Shutterstock
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