OTTAWA — Now that Ontario is definitely cancelling its contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink to deliver internet service in parts of the province, it’s looking for an alternative. That might not be easy to find.

Starlink, a division of SpaceX, was going to provide satellite internet service to 15,000 of Ontario’s most remote households and businesses, starting this June. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he’d cancel that $100-million contract when U.S. President Donald Trump was about to impose sweeping tariffs on Canada in February, then backed off when Trump put the tariffs off for a month.

Last Tuesday, as tariffs kicked in, Ford said the Starlink deal was dead.

“We won’t award contracts to people who enable and encourage economic attacks on our province and our country,” Ford said.

Musk is a flamboyant avatar of Trumpism, waving a literal chainsaw around as his Department of Government Efficiency has led the firings of hundreds of thousands of government workers, cancelled contracts and stopped payments.

But who can take over from the satellite company he runs? And how American is too American, for a deal like this?

Ontario had shortlisted two providers in early 2024 before settling on Starlink’s bid in November. The other finalist, Xplore, has a long history as an internet provider in rural Canada, using a patchwork of wired, land-based wireless and satellite systems.

The company boasts about its all-Canadian roots and workforce, with offices in places like Woodstock, N.B. and Brandon, Man. Xplore is ”Built by Canadians, for Canadians,” its website says.

But scratch the surface and it’s more complicated. Xplore’s controlling shareholder is Stonepeak, a New York investment firm specializing in infrastructure companies and property. Stonepeak bought Xplore in 2020, and Stonepeak partner Fran Shammo, a former executive of Verizon, is Xplore’s executive chair.

(Stonepeak’s chief executive, Michael Dorrell, owns an estate a short walk from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. U.S. election records show he contributed heavily to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign; he also donated to Republicans, including Marco Rubio, who’s now Trump’s secretary of state.)

Xplore’s satellite internet service, the equivalent of Starlink’s, is also essentially American. 

Unlike Starlink, which beams internet connections through a network of thousands of satellites in low orbits, Xplore serves its satellite customers through one really big satellite called Jupiter 3. It belongs to Hughes Network Systems. Hughes is headquartered in Maryland, but is a subsidiary of Colorado-based EchoStar.

Xplore spokesperson Autumn Ladouceur wrote in an email the company had nothing to say about whether it could take over from Starlink or how “Canadian” it really is.

So the immediate alternative to an American company that delivers internet service through many American satellites is a Canadian company controlled by Americans that delivers internet service through a single American satellite.

Despite Xplore’s having been qualified as a bidder by Ontario’s infrastructure agency, Ford’s spokesperson told The Logic that Xplore couldn’t do what the province wanted anyway.

“SpaceX was the only firm that had the infrastructure and capability to provide service in this area on our timelines,” Grace Lee wrote in an email. She didn’t address questions about whether Starlink would have stayed acceptable if not for Elon Musk.

One all-Canadian alternative is Telesat. It has older internet satellites already in orbit. It’s also planning, with considerable government financing, to launch a Starlink-style service called Lightspeed using Canadian-built satellites.

The first of those aren’t due to be launched until mid-2026, however.

Another drawback is that Telesat’s target customers are big—corporations and governments, mainly, seeking to connect major installations like mines or military sites in far-flung places. To the extent Lightspeed might serve households, it would be by connecting internet providers’ servers in remote areas to the rest of the world. Those small providers would deal with their individual customers.

Telesat CEO Dan Goldberg (an American-trained lawyer, for your scorecard, though he’s headed Telesat since 2006 and lives in Ottawa) told The Logic that Telesat is definitely not making a push for the Starlink business. It’s counting on Musk’s SpaceX rockets to launch the Lightspeed satellites.

But if Ontario came and asked for help, Goldberg said, Telesat could find partners and put a service together.

The province doesn’t have a firm plan yet, wrote Lee, but “we are engaging other telecom firms.”