@Nuno , Meh is right... Re: Meh...
The author of the article is being a tad paranoid.
Look, apply Occam's Razor to this and you may start to see things in a better light.
In the internet, not all routes are created equal. Some have greater bandwidth (capacity) than others and even if they are longer, they are preferred routes. It just so happens that most of those routes flow through the US and not Canada. (If you were a telco, do you want to piggyback on existing long haul routes, or do you want to spend BILLIONS to run fiber across rugged terrain?
Lets also not forget the whole thing of peering agreements and contracts which also drive the traffic flow...
So regardless of the NSA/CIA/Alphabet/etc ... your internet traffic in Canada will most likely flow thru the US.
Having said that... if you were the NSA, where do you think you would be able to capture most of the traffic? Doing something clandestine in Canada, or something clandestine in the US. (Its against the law for the NSA to knowingly spy on US Citizens... a subtle fact that gets abused by a lot of people...)
If I were the NSA, I'd monitor the choke points on the major internet highways first.
When you put this in perspective, you lose the tinfoil hat and the idea that the telcos are in cahoots with the NSA. (Which they are not.)
That doesn't mean that the NSA isn't slurping data, or Google if you're on their network... it just means its not an evil conspiracy. (Unless you're talking about Google.)
And if its not the US, then its the Chinese, Russians, pretty much every spy agency in the world is doing this at some level.