Thank you for the question.
The operations of the universal broadband fund, the primary program through which the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development pursues the government's connectivity goals.... It should be noted at the outset that this is one program. There are a number of other elements. The CRTC has its own programming related to building out infrastructure capacity, as do our colleagues at Indigenous Services Canada.
The UBF is premised on a fairly significant continuous mapping of the overall connectivity rate in Canada, including the number of households that have access to what we consider to be high-speed Internet—or 50/10, as we define it in the standard, in terms of upload and download speeds. We are routinely assessing this. When we do an intake of new projects with each province, we are able to assess the overall current baseline rate. As the project moves along, the degree to which it will allow us to get to households that, right now, are potentially not within our standard for high-speed Internet....
Our current assessment continues to be that we are on track and that our investments are continuing to provide that very meaningful and important connectivity to a whole host of communities. It will come through a diversity of approaches. In a number of these places, we need to be very sensitive to the notion of what's going to work in terms of connectivity. That's why we take a regional, place-based approach to ensuring that we have the projects in place so all Canadian households can have access to high-speed Internet by 2030.
