I don't think it's right to call it "wholesale" when it's not priced far enough below retail to matter.
Given that our governments have been unwilling to make the necessary infrastructure public, I don't think that it should have ever been legal to both own the infrastructure and sell retail services.
At this late stage of my life, I think the future in non-union employment might be in some kind of collaborative enterprise. There is a local company made up of a plumber, an electrician, a couple of equipment operators, a bookkeeper, and an accountant. They were all independent businesses that decided to formalize their existing business relationships under the umbrella of a shared company name. They still take independent bookings, but all under the new company name. The bookkeeper already offered answering services, so that fits nicely.
If I were younger or interested in coming out of retirement, I'd try to throw in with them for networking, computer security, and automation.
I'm retired now. My experiences during 50 years of employment across a couple of dozen employers in several different fields is that employers, as a group, are heartless.
There are exceptions:
One of my first jobs was with an employer who taught me what he thought I needed to know, encouraged me to find my own ways to get the job done and didn't reduce my pay or throw extra work at me when it turned out that I found ways to get the work done with less time and effort than he expected. This employer also hired a couple of young vandals to clean up the damage they caused, then kept them on as full time employees.
One of my last jobs was with an ambulance manufacturing company (Crestline Coach). The founders were making enough money to do things like fund the restoration of emergency vehicles with personal money and they shared the wealth with their employees. Every employee got the same financial reports as the owners. If an employee wanted to further their education, the owners helped with tuition and work schedules. At least twice that I know of, the owners helped employees start their own businesses. I don't know what the place is like now, because the founders retired and the new owners drove me (and others) out.
Others have mentioned "Canadaland" and their various podcasts.
I like "Sandy and Nora Talk Politics", "Open to Debate with David Moscrop", and "The Secret Life of Canada" (now a CBC production, but that doesn't seem to have changed the podcast).
"Hacked" is not specifically Canadian content but is made in Canada. Covers the wonderful world of who got hacked and how.
"Conspirituality" and "This Week In Virology" are what I would call "Canada adjacent" in that there are Canadian co-hosts and Canada gets some direct coverage in what are essentially international stories with an American focus. The former looks at the intersection of the wellness community and right wing ideologies. The latter, as you might guess, is about "viruses, the kind that make you sick" (their tagline) and frequently gets very technical, especially when they are reviewing a paper.
CBC pushes quite a lot of their radio and some TV programming out as podcasts. My favourites are "Quirks and Quarks" and "Ideas".
Then there are some limited series: "Recall: How to Start a Revolution" about the FLQ crisis and "Kuper Island" about Residential Schools.
For a good time, you can't go wrong with "Because News", a comedy panel-quiz show on mostly Canadian news. Some guests (especially Eric Peterson, Jean Yoon, and Martha Chavez) occasionally depart into rants or personal stories that have a lot of serious meat.
I guess we're in agreement in many areas. CBC does as bad as everyone at actually covering rural regions and representing us to the wider world.
And hearing "This American Life" on CBC was very disappointing. My first thought was that there are plenty of Canadian stories being told in local outlets and podcasts that are more deserving of wider distribution. There are more CBC programs being picked up elsewhere, so maybe there are larger cross-distribution deals in play, but the US already looms large; they don't need help getting the word out.
Most of us have heard the expression "money is the root of all evil." That's close, but not quite right. It's selfishness to the point of greed. "I want it and you can't have it." That's what is destroying the world. Spending money to gain power over others or to get rid of them is just par for the course.
Unless we find a way to solve the problem of greed, whether for resources, money, or power, we will never solve anything.
I don't know about the "marked... for legal reasons" part, but there are officially surveyed road allowances all over the place that have no actual roads or have "roads" that are impassable except with the right vehicle in the right conditions.
I live in rural Saskatchewan and my work as a school bus driver and my interactions with the municipality mean that I can point out lots of bad mapping. The official bus route mapping that comes from head office always has to be amended because it seems that they do not have the data to distinguish between all-season maintained gravel, seasonally maintained dirt, unmaintained path, and road allowances that a farmer is permitted to seed or a rancher is permitted to fence off. Google and others just lump them all together when displaying or routing.
It's not the uniqueness of the coverage, but the reach. Out here in rural Saskatchewan, our choice is between CBC radio and one other station that has extremely limited news.
CBC not only has better news, but lots of deep dives, analysis, documentaries, and cultural programming. In that sense, it is unique, at least on radio.
Yes, expensive satellite internet or TV is available, and we have it in our house, but many don't. Newspapers have never really worked that well out here because picking up a stack of papers once a week when going for mail and groceries doesn't really work. Any sensible reading schedule means always being a week behind whatever comes in via CBC radio.
On top of that, we can listen to the radio while working in the fields or shop or around the house. That makes it easy to stay on top of things without sitting in front of a screen or with a newspaper for a couple of hours a day, when we should be spending time with our families.
As I said, our household can afford satellite internet, but we still get most of our news via CBC radio, because that is the only source of extensive coverage we can get without sitting around. We'd much rather use that sitting time for a good book or education (we have satellite internet specifically for all the online courses that are available).
If CBC television disappeared, I would barely notice, but CBC radio is how we stay connected to the world. If there is to be serious discussion of killing CBC, it should be TV only that gets killed and the money saved should then be put towards getting something in addition to CBC radio out to the rural and remote regions. One great option would be for CBC radio to broadcast Canadaland and other externally produced programming. CBC already doesn't produce everything they broadcast, so syndicating additional alternative programming covering other viewpoints would be a spectacular use of the system.
I think it's more about reporting to your community. If CBC goes how are you going to stay abreast of events outside your community?
To be fair, though, we just went to DST and never went back. At my longitude, solar noon is about 1:25 "pm". The people of SK aren't early risers, we just set our clocks so late that it looks that way.
There are people around me who think we should do DST, thinking we'll use our current time as the base, thus being double-DST. Madness.
If someone wants to get up earlier, I'm fine with that. But don't do it by trying to trick yourself by resetting the clocks.
The difference is that those in the public interest always argue this debate from the perspective of actually taking care of people
Those that argue for private health care argue for it as a money making business.
This is what pisses me off most about attacks on public services. Saskatchewan killed STC, the provincial highway public transit/freight system. It was costing 17 million more to run than what they were bringing in. If we assume only 250,000 taxpayers (individual and business), that's a lousy $68 apiece. I'm one of the proverbial fixed income seniors and I can come up with that much.
It's stupid, short-sighted, and heartless.
Subscribed! Thanks.