i support the idea more on social engineering grounds.
if you look at a map of most of the world right now, you notice something pretty dramatic: urban areas lean towards inclusive/liberal parties and rural areas lean inwards and towards the right. ontario is no different. modernizing the rural areas could consequently be interpreted as a type of enlightened gerrymandering.
except that we need to eat, too.
i hypothesize that one of the biggest reasons that we have these divides is the insularity of rural communities. if you live on a farm that's an hour drive from any real civilization, you just don't come into contact with any kind of diversity. so, you're naturally suspicious of it - because you don't know it.
increasing internet access in rural areas is consequently a sort of window into the present for a lot of these communities, who otherwise have little access to modernity.
little access. it's not zero access. but one of the major windows into the world from these communities right now is the print media, which is dominated by the right-wing. in canada, we have the sun chain along with the national post. replacing the bottleneck on information in the print media with open internet access will broaden people's opinions.
it won't lead to seat changes overnight. it may even take a generation to have any meaningful effect. but, it may be the single most powerful thing that the left can do to break the lock that the right has on rural communities.
i've been pushing this for a while, and i'm happy to see the government pick it up.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/governments-spend-180m-on-high-speed-internet-in-ontario-1.3695222
something else that i'm in strong support of is the idea that internet lines should be interpreted as public infrastructure, like roads. so, i hope that the government hangs on to the lines, this time. we had publicly owned phone and cable lines in canada for a long time, but sold them off during the neo-liberal period. that was a big error.