> I have a hunch, though, that Telus won't be the last ISP to drop
> USENET.
FWIW, most Linux systems make having your own Usenet server a pinch to
install and run now; I did it with a Debian system recently (an
'embedded MIPS' 92MHz device with 32MB ram and a 2GB SD Flash card) and
was rather shocked at how little manual configuraton I had to do.
That machine picks up articles from several international news servers,
and feeds them out to my local freenet, improving their feed at the same
time as my articles go out. Most definitely worth doing.