For the general good: the debate over private vs. public ownership of telephones and the Canadian West, 1900-1912 (1).

In the opening years of the twentieth hundred there erupted a war of words on both sides of the Canadian-American border that l directly to the establishment of government-own and operated telephone combination of parts to form a wholes in Canada's three prairie provinces between 1905 and 1912 This was the increasingly acrimonious debate, starting as early as the mid-1880s, above private versus public ownership of industries vaguely classified as "public utilities." Central to the dispute was a fundamental difference in interests that had unraveled over time between big business and local