Broadband Bruce: Fighting Canada’s Digital Divide

A reformed troublemaker rigs up high-speed internet in his community to help turn around the indigenous reserve.
Maskwacis is an impoverished Canadian community grappling with addiction, unemployment and suicide.

Like many other indigenous reserves, it’s a place cut off from the world. There are no landlines, patchy mobile service and no affordable ways to get online.

Bruce Buffalo is a local young man who grew up bouncing around foster homes and in and out of jail. Having turned his own life around, he wants to give the First Nations community something millions of other Canadians take for granted: the internet.

Convinced that connectivity will open up new job and education opportunities, Bruce sets about building Maskwacis its own high-speed internet network. But with no backing, piling debt and huge technical obstacles, will Bruce succeed in bringing Maskwacis into the digital age?