Canada is a massive, spread-out country, and providing coverage is uniquely difficult.
You want the real reason for this?
The second, the nanosecond any politician let any foreign competition into the complacent, cushy Canadian market, Rogers and Bell would unleash a propaganda campaign about the theft of good Canadian jobs. (Just like the dairy industry does.)
That's such a worn out trope that doesn't match the reality that most of the population lives on the southern border near a handful of cities. Serving the US population is demonstrably harder and yet manages to be cheaper despite our own widespread price fixing.
All Canada would probably have to do is invite T-Mobile to come in and wreck the telecom cartel (including making sure T-Mobile had proper access to spectrum to compete). The cartel will, of course, obviously fight any attempts to change the status quo.
In reality most dairy farms are large industrial operations, though.
This is great for the dairy industry, they love to advertise that most farms are small, family-owned operations, which is technically true, while selling you factory farm milk.
(If it's not intuitive, imagine a world with 10 farms with 50 cows each, and one farm with 3000 cows.
I suspect that herd size looks more like a power law distribution than a normal distribution, but a quick google search didn't turn up good data.)
My understanding is it's very hard to get quota.
If the government really cared about protecting consumers, they would not care about the country of origin. They would have import controls that ensure imported foreign milk follows the Canadian standards you mentioned. Instead, they simply slap an incredibly high average duty of 218.5% on any dairy product coming from abroad, no matter its characteristics, effectively blocking any import of dairy.
There is high-quality milk made in the U.S. too. But Canada prefers to protect Canadian oligopolies and keep competitors out. And this way, consumers keep paying higher prices for the same product. Why not let consumers decide what they want to purchase?
So sadly for us to keep this standard we probably have to keep a similar system to the one we have right now.
Fine, then don’t allow importation of milk with those additives.
What exactly is the market reason for keeping out, say, organic US dairy?
(Oh, right, Quebec lobbyists.)
Canadians are being fleeced.
I think it boils down to good legislation and luck on how our 3 mobile operators compete.