My brother Scott writes about the telephone monopoly in our home province of Saskatchewan:

The crown corporation formulated to give its customers the best service possible clearly wasn’t and now has been thrown into the world of competition.

Monopolies are based on the idea that a few people can manage a market better than multiple competing companies (at least when they’re not outright graft). The problem is that history and theory have shown that this is not the case almost all of the time. Markets are far too complex to be managed (that is, understood) by a few brains. The Wisdom of Crowds talks about this extensively. Distributed Knowledge + Self Interest usually gives better results.

Saskatchewan has been a socialist type of place for a very long time; any industry of significance (agriculture, mining, energy, telecom, insurance, medical, education) is run by a government-controlled entity (crown corporation). Alberta, the neighboring province and my current home, has a more liberal inclination, especially in the past decade or two. Alberta has had much higher prosperity than its prairie sibling for a very long time. I don’t think that you can attribute that exclusively to oil (of which Saskatchewan also has plenty); a lot of it is owed to the entrepreneurial environment that Alberta has, and which (by and large) Saskatchewan doesn’t.