Creating a nation from 30 million souls scattered over 10 million square kilometres has required both vision and ingenuity from our political leaders. The major public works projects that have united us have been costly and challenging to complete. As technology advances and our infrastructure grows more and more complex, these characteristics will persist.

The next great public works project is imminent. The federal government has announced a plan to link every citizen in Canada through high-speed broadband Internet services. What the government should concentrate on, however, isn't in the Internet's infrastructure, but rather its content.

There are a number of historical models to guide us. In the 1880s, the policy imperative was to unite our dispersed territories with a railroad. But 18th-century railway building was fraught with risk. No company would undertake such a huge project without inducements, and how lavish they were - the Canadian Pacific Railway Act provided for a cash subsidy to the railroad of $25-million and 25 million acres of land.

The railway was built, the policy objectives were fulfilled and CPR became the cornerstone of the Canadian economy for nearly a century. Subsequent infrastructure projects were delivered with alternative strategies. When we needed to build communication networks, telephone companies were given a protected market, free from competition. They built a worldclass telecommunications infrastructure in Canada and enjoyed blue-chip prosperity as a result.

Like land grants and cash gifts, however, monopolies are fraught with problems. We've spent the past decade dismantling them, and the impact of doing so has proved to be salutary. Because of the introduction of competition, not only do Canadians benefit from innovative communications services today, they do so at costs that are also among the lowest in the world.

So, if experience has taught us that extravagant gift giving, whether it be land or markets, is a sub-optimal strategy for leading major public works initiatives, what's the alternative? When it comes to a broadband network that links every citizen in Canada, we must reverse the old "build it and they will come" whimsy. If government supports the vast array of content-intensive applications emerging in every discipline, then Canadians will have a compelling reason to demand broadband Internet services. The strategy can then be reframed as "create compelling content and they will come - someone will build it."

Compelling content includes the applications that will improve every aspect of life, such as the Biodiversity Network Initiative that seeks to build an electronic knowledge base of all life forms important to Canadians. This initiative will have a huge impact on how and where environmentalists, resource managers and innovators in human health do their jobs, and how we manage our environment and harvest its resources.

Another example is Canada's Schoolnet, which provides the opportunity to access and create on-line educational material for students and teachers, or Digital Collections and other initiatives by Heritage Canada to ensure a larger repository of on-line Canadian cultural material.

All of these are government projects or are under government sponsorship. This is exactly what we need from government - ingenious ways of making Canada's huge repository of knowledge available to all.

What we require most from government now is not the determination to get into the network business. The private sector is much better suited to do this. Instead, we need the vision to see Canada as a truly wired nation from coast to coast. And, most of all, we need the creativity to design the content that will make that dream a reality. Do this and the network builders will compete furiously to get us all connected.

Gaylen Duncan is president and chief executive officer of the
Information Technology Association of Canada.