For the first three quarters of the twentieth century communications technology was structured by government policy to serve the public interest in low-cost, universal access to the telephone through regional monopolies that were privately owned (Bell) or state owned (Sasktel) and were regulated provincially and federally (CRTC). This policy model was based on the premise that the wired telephone created conditions for a natural monopoly. It also coincided with the evolution throughout the capitalist world of a mixed-economy approach to public policy in which the sovereign states managed their economies by providing a regulatory framework for their private sectors.

By the early 1980s this system came under enormous pressures for change:

• new technologies using computers and satellites broke the notion of communications as a natural monopoly within states.
• corporations operating across boundaries challenged the premise that policy systems should be controlled by sovereign states.
• the Supreme Court of Canada handed jurisdiction over telecommunications to the federal government.
• political thinking in advanced economies veered towards the right following the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who preached the new gospel of getting government off the backs of business.
• the development of global governance in such institutions as the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement created directives requiring national governments to deregulate communications sectors and open them to foreign competition.

As a result of these pressures, the CRTC directed a policy revolution over the last three decades that radically deregulated the telecommunications industry leading to the breakup of the phone monopolies and the creation of a competitive market place in which many companies, both domestic and foreign, operate.

The public policy debate is now focused on the problems raised by technological 'convergence' which allows the marriage of telecommunications with broadcasting (and narrowcasting). This new complication has added to the already complex issues involved in telecommunications policy. It also connects to the further complexities of managing broadcasting and so goes to the heart of policies affecting Canadians' national identity.

For a more complete exposition of this analysis, see chapter 10 in Stephen Clarkson's recent book, Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State (Toronto and Washington: University of Toronto and Woodrow Wilson Presses, 2002, 535 pages).

Professor Stephen Clarkson has had a career spanning a number of fields. His chief interest has been to understand the impact of the United States on Canada's ability to manage its own society.

Following graduate studies at Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and the Sorbonne in Paris (where he did his doctorate), Professor Clarkson has been teaching political economy at the University of Toronto. There, his first research focus involved the relations between the Soviet Union, as a super power, and its large but weaker neighbour, India.

Stephen Clarkson became involved, as a citizen, in issues of Canadian politics (running for mayor of Toronto in 1969) and, as a scholar, developed an interest in the relationship of the other super power, the United States, with its large but weaker neighbour, Canada. In the summer of 1981, during a severe crisis between Pierre Trudeau's Ottawa and Ronald Reagan's Washington, the Canadian Institute for Economic Policy commissioned him to do a study of the situation. The report was published as Canada and the Reagan Challenge.

After Pierre Trudeau's retirement from active politics in 1984, he spent a decade co-authoring with his wife, Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, a two-volume biography of Canada's most charismatic prime minister, which won the Governor-General's award for non-fiction.

With Trudeau finally secured between covers, Stephen Clarkson spent a year in Italy studying the European Union's alternative to NAFTA as a model for continental governance.

Back in North America, he has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, where he worked on a large book published last September -- Uncle Sam and Us -- that assesses the impact of globalization and neoconservatism on the Canadian state.

Professor Clarkson writes periodically in the Globe and Mail and comments occasionally on current issues when asked by the CBC or journalists from the other media.